Looking Back To India

LOOKING BACK ON
INDIA
LOOKING BACK ON INDIA
HUBERT EVANS
FRANK CASS
First published 1988 in Great Britain by
FRANK CASS & CO. LTD
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Copyright © 1988 Hubert Evans
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Evans, Hubert
Looking back on India.
1. India. Social life ca. 1900–1947–
Biographies
I. Title
954.03′5′0924
ISBN 0-203-98798-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-7146-3336-4 (Print Edition)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Evans, Hubert, 1892–
Looking back on India.
Indudes index.
1. Evans, Hubert, 1892– .2. India—Politics
and government—1919–1947. 3. Colonial administrators
India—Biography. 4. Colonial administrators—Great
Britain—Biography. I. Title.
DS481.E94A3 1988 954.03′092′4 [B] 88–2822
ISBN 0-7146-3336-4 (Print Edition)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro -
duced in any form or by any Means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior per
mission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1. INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA 1

2. UP-THE-COUNTRY 25
1. Reporting for Duty 25
2. Camp Dudhi 29
3· VILLAGES AND VILLAGERS 47
1. Learn before you Teach 47
2. A Model Community 52
3. The Rural Roundabout 55
4. He made Both Ends Meet 58
5. The Muslim Variant 61
4. THE PRETERNATURAL 63
5. CASTE 77
6· TO BE A HINDU 91
1. Swami Advaitanand 92
2. Creed 98
3. Point Counter Point 100
4. New Testament 103
7. THE INDO-MUSLIMS 107
1. Islam in India 107
2. In the Beginning 109
3. With the Passage of Time 111
4. The Aligarh Man 117
v
5. 1940 119
8. THE MAGISTRATE 121
1. Zila Sahib 121
2. King Emperor versus Mohan 134
3. A Backward Glance 139
9. ABOUT PRINCES 141
1. Their Chamber 141
2. Three on the Front Page 143
3. A Seventeen-Gun Prince 145
4. Two more Portraits from Memory 148
5. The Prince who was Pontiff 153
10· DELHI 161
1. The Eternal City 161
2. Delhi Reconnoitred 167
3. To the Province that was a District 169
4. Apropos of Viceroys and Vicereines 172
5. Home of the Viceroys 177
6. My Delhi 180
11· WHEN WAR CAME 185
1. September 1939 188
2. Minding my own business 192
3. Taking Time Off 199
4. Taking more Time Off 205
5. Another Viceroy’s House 213
12· GANDHI—HIS LOT IS AMONG THE SAINTS 217
1. Bapu 217
2. An Indubitable Saint 224
3. The Call of the Arena 227
4. ‘Do or Die’ 231
vi
5. Doing or Dying in Delhi 233

13· TWO YEARS TO GO 239
1. ‘Look here, upon this picture, and on this’ 239
2. At the House in Agra 249
3. The Threshold of Independence 259
Epilogue 265
Glossary 271
Index 275
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
facing page
‘Shireen’ 34
‘Shireen’ 35
Listening to villagers 35
Going into camp 36
Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru 74
My mother in India on tour with the Willingdons 74
The Magh Mela 84
The All-India Cattle Show 84
Maulvi Wali Muhammad Khan 251
Jim Corbett 250
The house at Agra 251
Mahatma Gandhi (portrait by Oswald Birley 218
from Radhakrishnan, ed., Mahatma Gandhi:
Essays and Reflections on his Life and Work
(George Allen & Unwin, 1939))
Mira Behn and Mahatma Gandhi (from 218
Madeleine Slade, The Spirit’s Pilgrimage
(Longman, 1960))
TO MAUREEN
PREFACE
This book of reflections and reminiscences would not have been

written but for some importunate pressure. My view was that with
the passing of long years the only proper person from now on to
describe the way we did things in India would be the young
historian able to sift the archives and extract their yield. If a small
handful of us who once played a role in the drama were still
around —what of it? ‘Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage.’
My wife, however, brushed this aside: my argument was treated
as a subterfuge. Archives, I was reminded, are powerless to convey
the setting in which our rule was acted out. And it was the setting
which from start to finish dictated the direction of that rule and
determined its character.
I had one card left. I contended that the novels, films, television
programmes of the moment are teaching a modern generation
everything there is to know about ‘the Raj’. Her reply was: ‘You
don’t really mean that.’
And then, clinching the case, comes a letter addressed to me by
the India Office Library and Records Department which
emphasizes the value of memoirs in the very terms, almost word
for word, my wife had used.
I gave in.
H.E.
x
1
INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA
When the liner which took me to India for the first time, S.S.
Ranpura of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation
Company, three weeks out of London, made a landfall at Bombay
and disembarked her passengers at Ballard Pier, it surprised
nobody on the crowded quayside that with hardly an exception we
were English. For Englishmen had been seen hereabouts a good
three hundred years. They had even been lording it over the whole
continent for a matter of one hundred and eighty. Understandably,
therefore, the illusion of the permanence of our presence and
authority persisted. And yet in barely another twenty years, we—
for I can revert to ‘we’ in this sentence instead of ‘they’—would
have packed up and gone.
Eighty per cent of my fellow passengers had been ‘Sahibs’
returning from leave and, it was quite obvious, glad to be getting
back. Not simply was there the hilarity of the closer groups at
table or in the huge canvas bag slung aft and filled with sea-water
in which to splash, but a marked sociability all round. Within the
caste, that is. And was caste out of place in the world beginning at
the foot of the gangway? Wherever I had dragged my deck-chair
into the sun or out of it, during the long blue afternoons, I could
count on conversation. Where was I going? ‘United Provinces’ I
would answer, and then wait as a greenhorn should. ‘Fraid I don’t
know anyone there at the moment, actually,’ the Sahib or the
Memsahib might tell me apologetically. Or else, and more often, it
would be: ‘Why, then you’ll meet so-and-so,’ and to cheer me up
with the prospect, ‘I know you’ll like him. Grand person. Actually
he and I used to…’
I have recorded these banal, if amiable, remarks for the sake of
their implication. Which is that we were few, we British in India.
Not that this aspect of our rule caused us anxiety, not in the
I.C.S. —the Indian Civil Service—anyhow. Why should it have? We
considered ourselves as being, so to speak, a few foreign
gardeners engaged in training an indigenous plant. We were
2 LOOKING BACK ON INDIA
enough for the job. But of course if your mind ran on battalions, as,
say, Stalin’s did, our position was not simply astonishing, it was
absurd. Stalin is on record as saying to Ribbentrop on the night
they signed their fateful pact: ‘How ridiculous it is that a few
hundred Englishmen should dominate India, a continent as big as
Europe!’ For myself, I would stand this argument on its head. I
would contend that we accomplished what we did in India
precisely because we were so few. Let me clarify. Our rule rested
on force, as all rule must. But force applied by the very few to the
very many is force lightly applied. Ours, with some deplorable
lapses, was; and that is why our authority had across the
centuries won the assent, and enjoyed the loyalty, of those very
many. That is why, even as I was walking from the ship’s side to
the Customs shed, a naughty child was being scolded in some
Cawnpore home: ‘Do that again, you little imp, and I’ll tell the
White Topee!’ And why in one or another of four hundred Districts
up and down the country a lonely Englishman was hearing
himself addressed as ‘Cherisher of the Poor’.
How had it all happened? How had the British Raj come into
being? How could it be that ‘a few hundred Englishmen’ were
doing what they pleased with ‘a continent as big as Europe’?
The story began when the first Elizabeth gave the charter to a
corporate body of London merchants to trade in the name and
style of the East India Company. There was nothing peculiar in
that; other European nations, the Portuguese and the Dutch, were
in the field already, and the French would follow suit. The year
was 1600, and the India which admitted these adventurous
Londoners was that of Akbar the Great Mughal. Presently they
tumbled to the discovery that if their commerce were to flourish—
commerce in pepper, indigo, opium, salt petre, silk, muslin and
much else—they must curry favour with the Indians in the
neighbourhood of the factories and forts they had established at,
or alongside, or behind, Bombay and Madras. But imagine the
astonishment of the trader who has been prudent enough to
ingratiate himself with the warring parties round about when the
latter begin to turn to him in their wrangles as an umpire. As the
remaining decades of the century go by, he gets more and more
involved in regional affairs— and by the same token makes more
and more money for his masters. For himself too—and why not?
After all, his chances of ending up as a nabob are considerably
more slender than his chances of an early grave in Indian earth.
‘Shake the Pagoda Tree’ was the motto. Some did this to such
effect that they were able to buy their way into history: like Elihu
Yale who founded a university; like Thomas Pitt who founded a
INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA 3
family that would give us two Prime Ministers. And so the thing
continues until one fine day behold the Company acquiring
territory, using Indian soldiers for the protection of this, picking
its Indian allies, playing the Indian political game as to the
manner born. The English government at home, able to milk the
now affluent Company very nicely, is all for such activities.
Meanwhile the Mughal Empire, which in the reign of Akbar the
Great had been far richer than Queen Elizabeth’s realm, was
showing signs of exhaustion. It now collapsed. Its majestic edifice
subsided into scattered heaps of worthless rubble. In Macaulay’s
pigmented prose the spectacle confronting the men from England
was of ‘nominal sovereigns sunk in indolence and debauchery…
chewing bang, fondling concubines and listening to buffoons.’ The
Company, to be thought of by this time as one among the several
country powers jockeying for position, saw its advantage in the
confusion and promptly exploited it. France, our sole remaining
European rival, was still to be reckoned with, for thanks to the
energies of Dupleix she had established her hold on the Deccan or
‘South’. But in several collisions with us in the middle years of
this (eighteenth) century, she was either outmanoeuvred or
outfought. In 1770 the French formally dissolved their Compagnie
des Indes; it had been, Voltaire said, as maladroit in commerce as
in war. Be that as it may, for our own Company the coast was
clear— and not only the coast either. We had grown out of our
seaboard ambitions; we aspired now to the supremacy of India
herself. In 1757 one of the ‘Writers’ or clerks turned soldier, Clive
by name, secured Bengal by his victory at Plassey. It was a
‘Bengal’ stretching in those days right up to Allahabad. So now we
possessed the narrow territories focussed on Bombay and
Madras; the elongated coastal strip well to the north of the second
of these, known as the Sircars; and, dwarfing all, this sprawling
Bengal where our power would for a long future have its hub. The
contest would go on between the English and certain native
princes, but the issue would not be in doubt.
The administration which it fell to the Company, when
eventually mistress of the situation, to take over was Muslim, going
back to the thirteenth century. But obviously the first Muslim
conquerors themselves could not have imposed an entirely foreign
system on their Indian subjects. A metaphor is tempting here. The
administration was a palimpsest: the lower text was Indian, the
upper Muslim. It was based on the theory of royal remuneration:
in exchange for protection, the peasants paid a share of their
produce to the king. In practice such a system nursed the seeds
of oppression; nevertheless it is a wry reflection that under the
enlightened Akbar, the King’s share was less than the percentage
of gross income an ageing pensioner in my own condition is
nowadays required to surrender! Between the King and the
Peasant, of course, there had to be intermediaries and one of
these, a key-man, bore a designation which literally translated is
‘Collector’. His function was defined by his title. He was there to
collect—to do that and sit back.
The Company proceeded to clothe itself in the discarded apparel
of this Mughal colossus; but it did not assume the latter’s
mentality. Its servants, as already noticed, had learned that
commerce could not prosper without a degree of order and justice,
and they had put the lesson to excellent account. Wait some years
and they would operate the Mughal machinery according to the
rule of law. The Collector would busy himself quite as much with
the rights as with the obligations of the peasant, establishing each
man’s title to his acres, committing everything to paper for
subsequent guidance, and so forth. And since wherever there is
law there are lawbreakers, the Collector will have to deal with
those as well. This meant investing him with magisterial powers.
His designation from then on—and I think it was about a century
before I received the designation myself—will be ‘Collector and
Magistrate’ or, if preferred, the other way round: ‘Magistrate and
Collector’. Either way he was head of his territory and monarch,
or very nearly, of all he surveyed.
The Company has ceased to be a trading association: in future
it will be exercising administrative authority.
While these developments were taking place, the boundaries of
Empire were being steadily advanced. The process, spaced over a
period of exactly one hundred years from Clive’s victories,
culminated in the major annexations, at close intervals in the
midnineteenth century, of Sind, the Punjab and Oudh. It is
wrong, intellectually as well as morally wrong, to measure the
thoughts and actions of men in the past by a rod not invented
until af ter they were dead. We must therefore make an effort to
detach ourselves from the assumptions of our own day in order to
understand those of an age when Empire was not something to
apologize for. Nor were those giants of our imperial past so
wanting in humanity as, lifted out of context, they are apt to
appear. Napier’s laconic message Peccavi reporting that he had
Sind may be apocryphal, nobody quite knows. What is authentic
is his more communicative gloss that the annexation was ‘a very
advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality’. Weacted in the
spirit of St Augustine who, looking out from his City of God and
asking whether it was fitting for good men to rejoice in the
expansion of Empire, answered that to extend rulership is to bad

men felicity but to good men a necessity.
One formal step, logical and overdue, it remained to take. In
1858 the Crown superseded the Company, and our Collector, once
upon a time a merchant and nabob-to-be, but latterly a Civil
Servant of the Honourable East India Company writing H.E.I.C.S.
after his name, was absorbed into the service of his Queen and
entitled henceforward to the three initials ‘I.C.S.’ —the ‘C’
standing no longer for ‘Company’ but for ‘Civil’. It is hard to
believe it today, but the few hundred of my narrative had coined
for themselves a new term ‘civil servant’, that would be borrowed
and used thereafter wherever their mother tongue had currency.
It may be easier now to appreciate that we were a sort of contact
cadre. In very many of the Districts—of which there were
ultimately four hundred between the Himalayas and Cape
Comorin, between Karachi and Chittagong—we might well be the
only Englishman our Indian charges had any prospect of meeting
face to face in the whole of their lives; often enough, moreover, the
only one they would even set eyes on. And as a corollary to this,
the Englishman in many a District would see no other white face
except his own in the mirror. Few of us who had this experience,
and it was twice to be mine, did not learn to value it. The system
took a cloistered English youth straight from a bookish education,
twelve or thirteen years of it, consecrated to the cultures of Rome
and Greece; discouraged him from marriage; and set him down in
Bara Banki or Sitapur. It was in such places, remote from the
great cities and centred on a miniature headquarters town, that
his earlier years of service were likely to be spent. It was in such
places reached by no railway, lacking electricity, laced by no
telephone wires, and where water to wash and to drink was
brought in a goatskin from the well at the bottom of the garden,
that ‘the District’ would so come to command his energies and fill
his thoughts that the prospect of leaving it on transfer or
promotion even, dismayed him. Its people, scamps (of which there
were usually very many) included, he came to consider as
belonging to him. He would not willingly say goodbye to them, and
when at last he had to, it would seldom be without a tugging at
the heart strings.
Looking back I have little doubt that this happiness sprang from
what I am terming the ‘contact’. Extended in open order in the
ratio of one to every million or two Indians we readily developed a
belief in the dignity and importance of what we were doing. If by
the age of thirty you are accustomed to the exercise of authority
which nobody below you or above you—for this was the case—
questions, inevitably you will tend to think and act like a despot.
But the point I am making here is that if you are alone in your
glory (alone, that is, of your race) amidst the million or two you
rule over, two things are bound to happen. The first is that you
will be drawn insensibly towards the people you are among and
become attached to them. The people of your District are better
than the people of any other District, are better farmers, have a
better sense of humour, are better company, are better looking.
And all for no other reason than that they are yours and not
anybody else’s. One saw it a dozen times—the man who wouldn’t
hear a word against his Jats or his Pathans or his Rajputs or
whoever they were in his particular area. How could it be
otherwise? Each morning they would be there, squatting in groups
in front of your house or around your tent as near as the sentry
would allow them to get, ready to waylay you as you came out;
and every time you visited a village there they would be again,
magically warned of your approach, waiting to run alongside your
trotting horse for the last half mile. One of their number, thanks
to his status or venerable years, would be hanging on to your
leathers as you rode. So long as you lived, their pleading voices
would not be stilled: ‘If you do not help us, who will help us? If you
do not listen, who will?’
And the second thing is that from earliest weeks you will learn
to delegate; will have to resist the temptation, once you’ve given
your order, to associate yourself in the slightest degree with its
execution; will have to put implicit trust in the loyalty of your
subordinates. There is no explaining the British Raj without
postulating this factor of loyalty, and I am not sure that the
historians have yet had time to stand back from the canvas and
view things in the correct perspective. This is not a work of
research and there will be no illustrative charts, no statistical
tables in it. Such figures as occur are rough and from memory.
But consider for a minute. We had an Indian Army, meaning an
Army of Indian troops, Englishofficered, of some 200,000
supported by British units doing their Indian stint totalling, say,
50,000; this for the security of a continent which would obliterate
all Europe on the map. Look up, out of curiosity, the strength of
the standing army considered appropriate to Belgium, let us say,
or to one of the Scandinavian countries between the wars. And
since this paragraph is about loyalty, it is the place to add that we
had no recruiting difficulty during the Second War in increasing
this modest peacetime force tenfold; so that it became at two
million far and away the largest volunteer army of which history
has record. Troops would be quartered either in large strategically
sited concentrations such as Quetta or in a variety of smallish

cantonments adjacent to certain cities of importance, and it
followed that in the immense majority of the four hundred
Districts of which we have been speaking not a single Sepoy, let
alone a Tommy, would be visible. The nearest regiment might be a
hundred miles off, or more. The only military uniform I remember
to have seen in either of the two remoter Districts I held, was that
of the odd soldier returning to his village on leave. The same
economy of numbers applied in the case of the Police. The force
was around 180,000 for the whole of British India, which
contained, besides the great cities of which everyone has heard,
half a million villages each potentially the scene of an affray or
some other, and more heinous, crime. In my first District I had
about 800 policemen or one to every two thousand of my people—
and in law-abiding Britain, as I write, we complain that one
policeman to every 500 inhabitants is not enough. Of the official
class composing the bureaucracy in every tier of its structure I am
not prepared to cite the figure—was it half a million at the turn of
the century swelling to a couple of million by the time we left? It
does not matter. What I am prepared to affirm is that a degree of
devotion was commonly exhibited by our Indian assistants
from the highest to the humblest which never ceased to astonish
and not seldom moved the Englishman who leaned on them. The
British Raj assumed the loyalty of all who ate its salt—and held
together because it received it.
Yes, it stood to reason that you had to delegate. And this after
all was precisely the way you were yourself being treated. No
Viceroy, no Governor, breathed down your neck when you were
doing your best to quell a riot, no Secretary ever came poking his
nose into your job. I am not going to describe the Secretariat, and
only need record that in a Province as large as the United Kingdom
there would be ten or twelve of us in it; not more. At the Centre,
which was Delhi, perhaps around fifty. These brother officers
would be comparable to Whitehall civil servants in terms of their
tasks but not comparable numerically (as has just been indicated)
nor in their propensity to delegate. Their habits of thought and
action derived from ‘the District’ and not from London, for each of
them was a quondam Collector and might, moreover, resume his
role. It was a saving grace. Meantime they led an urban and much
more social private life, and on ceremonial occasions might be
seen resplendent in a blue coatee decorated with plenty of gold
lace, white silk knee breeches, cotton stockings and buckled
shoes. An earnest, probably priggish, young Collector, booted and
spurred, on his horse at dawn when the dew was on the fields, felt
a certain condescension whenever he thought of them. But this

was a passing mood, and he did concede that they left hirn to his
own devices. One day, too, he would perhaps be switched to the
Secretariat himself, live in a house without good stabling for his
three ponies, have to go out of an evening not to marvel how the
setting sun turns the yellow rape to gold but to assist at some
glittering reception dressed as for the Congress of Vienna. Pending
which— his own devices. All we were required to do according to
the book was submit a Fortnightly Report, and the joy of it was
that we were sole arbiters of what went into this. There was a
premium on eccentricity as a result. Of two illustrations that come
to my mind, and there is no room for more, the first belongs
arguably to legend since I cannot myself authenticate it. The hero,
obliged to perform a journey in the course of duty, presented his bill
for travel expenses in the normal way, but an incautious clerk
questioned the distances quoted and returned the claim for
corroboration. This, in the sequel, arrived in the shape of
milestones piled high on a string of bullock carts drawn up
outside the Accountant General’s office. In my second example I
knew the man, I knew the place. A centralized health department
grown too big for its boots asked him to fill in a pond where, it was
foreseen, mosquitoes were likely to breed. He protested that, the
country round about being flat, in order to fill in one hollow
another must be dug. But this objection was brushed aside and
an inspector of the department who visited the locality some
months later sneaked that the offending pond was still there.
‘Wrong,’ was the rejoinder, ‘a new pond created by filling in the
old.’ The moral in both these cases was the same: you don’t harry
the Collector.
No wonder the benevolent despot of nearly thirty, far away now
from the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, was tempted to feel that
some special providence had guided his steps to India. Misgiving,
undeniably, there had been that day when he came down the
main staircase at Burlington Gardens after the Competition, but it
was momentary and had not recurred. The compensation for loss,
no point in pretending otherwise, had been rich. Compensation for
exile, for material discomfort, for the occasional bout of malaria. He
had not seen his mother these three years; he was ten thousand
miles from all the things that had made his world; the idea of
marrying he had been obliged to push beyond the limits of
thought. But he was being looked after with unbelievable solicitude
by a dozen turbaned servants, had a syce for each of his ponies,
had orderlies in scarlet gowns to fetch and carry for him.
Everybody salaamed or saluted when he passed; a neighbouring
Raja had lent him an elephant for the whole winter; and when the
other day he had dined in the mess at the nearest military station
the Commanding Officer (just promoted admittedly but greying at
the temples) kept on addressing him as ‘sir’.
On the shelf opposite me where I write, rests, long undisturbed,
a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. Leaning back these last
fifteen minutes and trying to decide what detail, so to speak, of
the wide canvas I ought to isolate next, I find myself staring at it
idly. Seventy years ago that book made fashionable reading in
England and America: Tagore had won the Nobel Prize, was a
literary lion of the age, his admirers were to be reckoned in their
millions. My own mother was among them, and as I reach for the
little volume and open it at the fly-leaf I read, with eyes growing a
bit misty: ‘For Edith from Lilian, 1914.’
I can pick up my pen—and the thread. I shall attend to
the presence in Indian society all that while ago of an élite whose
members I consider to have been the real Anglo-Indians. The
‘Sahibs’, conventionally labelled so, were not the real
AngloIndians. These people were. It is high time to recognize this
fact; and high time, incidentally, for me to introduce them. Not all
were celebrities like Radhakrishnan, Zafrullah Khan, Sapru,
Sarojini Naidu, Jinnah, Nehru—if I may list half-a-dozen I am
lucky enough to be able to recall personally—but all had this in
common, that they were socially advantaged and intellectually
enriched by our English culture, yet cornered politically. The more
they took to us, the more they wanted to be rid of us.
In the beginning we had hesitated for fifty years, unable to make
up our minds which of two lines to take in India: whether to
encourage the cream of her sons to adopt our English speech and
ways, or whether to foster a revival of India’s own civilization. Of
this last we were dimly aware and already Burke in the eighteenth
century was reminding Parliament that we had on our hands a
people cultivated by all the arts of polished life while we were yet
in the woods. So we started off by being, as someone put it, ‘wet
nurse to Vishnu and churchwarden to Juggernaut’. The Company
would work on Sundays, close on Indian holidays, and let its
soldiers parade in honour of goodness knows how many pagan
deities. By the date of the Fall of the Bastille we had founded an
Islamic Madrasa at Calcutta, were preparing to found the Sanskrit
College at Benares. Then, all of a sudden, a change of direction. I
do not myself accept the verdict of the books which inform us that
Indian culture was just then at a pitiably low ebb—their authors
ought to read the Urdu poets of that golden age, contemplate the
architecture of not a few buildings at Lucknow, Jaipur, Jodhpur—
or even leaf through an album of the paintings of the Rajput

school. The explanation surely was different. The fact was that at
the juncture we are here visualizing, when the Mughal masonry
had crumbled into India’s dust, the whole country was at best
gasping for breath, at worst in turmoil or engaged in bloody
conflict. In such a state of affairs it became easier to argue the
case for westernization than for orientalism, and Nineteenth-
Century England preferred to listen to Macaulay’s sneering
rhetoric than to recall Burke’s more sympathetic sentences. Hear
Macaulay asking whether
we shall countenance at the public expense medical

doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier,
astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English
boarding-school, history abounding with Kings thirty feet
high and reigns 30,000 years long, and geography made up
of seas of treacle and seas of butter.
The phase of tender regard was over.

Picture then the grandfathers of the talented celebrities whose
names have been instanced a page or two above, prompted no
doubt by material considerations, urging their sons to apply
themselves diligently to the acquisition of what was offered them
by the Wise men from the West. In our own country a notable
teacher of the classics like Dean Gaisford could end a Christmas
sermon to the undergraduates of Oxford with the inspiring words:
‘Nor can I do better, in conclusion, than impress upon you the
study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar
herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable
emolument.’ Put ‘English’ for ‘Greek’ and that, we may be sure, is
precisely how the Indian parent of good standing in society would
counsel and exhort his promising offspring at the same period.
How does our despot view all this? I have already insisted on a
pronounced streak of benevolence in his character, have shown
him doing the most undespotic things imaginable such as
substituting law for whim and delegating his authority right and
left. Those of us of the I.C.S. who survive take pride today in the
fact— well documented luckily, for otherwise who would credit it?
—that it was not the British politician or the Parliament or the
Public of the time, but our predecessors in the Company who
perceived what was implicit in the deliberate resolve of the rulers
to build an Indian élite in their own image. ‘The most desirable
death’, wrote one of them—and several others whom I shall not
stop to quote were to echo him—
the most desirable death for us to die should be the

improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would
render it impossible for a foreign nation to retain the
government.
The man who wrote that was born in 1779. Oh, there would be
some backsliding now and again, some diehards here and there,
and in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857 a sizable group of
Christians who, more mindful of the Old Testament than of
the New, maintained that India had earned the wrath of God. But
by and large, the day’s work done and the temperature dropping a
trifle, ‘Civilians’ were apt to be kindlier men, less stiff and formal
than the governing set at home—or those representatives of it who
simply came out for a brief spell. ‘We have to answer the helm,’
proclaimed the most dazzling of these Satraps, ‘and it is an
imperial helm, down all the tides of Time.’ As might be guessed
that was Curzon, Lord Curzon, who at the Coronation Durbar in
1903 overruled a proposal for the singing of ‘Onward Christian
Soldiers’ on the occasion, not on the ground that our soldiers in
India in their huge majority were either Hindu or Muslim—for this
side to it did not apparently bother him—but because the hymn
bids us reflect that ‘Crowns and Thrones may perish, Kingdoms
rise and wane.’
To go by my own experience of living among her people both in
India’s districts and in her capital city, familiarity breeds respect.
I cannot believe that the response of my predecessors was
different. They recognized, as we did in our generation, at least in
pensive mood, that they were trustees who when the wards grew
up must quit with becoming grace. Had the Indians been ‘lesser
breeds’, hundreds of millions of benighted savages—why then, of
course we could say: ‘make them swallow the medicine, whether
they like it or whether they don’t.’ If on the contrary that is
manifestly not the case, if one person in ten in that vast continent
has profited by some degree of schooling, and if a million or so are
using our language with uncanny facility and sharing our ideals,
the time is fast approaching when they will have the right to
decide for themselves what suits them and what does not. And
until it arrives we can rejoice for our part that about a battalion of
our wards have so reacted to our stimulus as to be beating us at
our own game; sending us, let us say, a Spalding Professor for
Oxford; or a member of the judicial committee of the Privy
Council; or a girl not out of her teens who can write stanza after
stanza as flawless as this:
Still barred thy doors! The far east glows

The morning wind blows fresh and free.
Should not the hour that wakes the rose
Awaken also thee?
In the earlier 1920s my mother and I were staying at a house

where G.P.Gooch, the historian, editor of the Contemporary Review
and an outspoken Liberal in politics, happened to be the other
guest. Hearing that I was bound for India, Dr Gooch pinpointed
for my benefit the issues raised by Indian nationalism. He had a
habit of removing his pumps, those light-weight patent leather
shoes with bows that went at the time with evening clothes, and
warming his right and left foot alternately in front of the fire as he
talked. I see him now, this nearly omniscient man, one hand on
the mantelpiece to steady himself and the other jabbing a slipper
at me as he progressed from the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 to
the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of ten years later. The
constitutional problem and the efforts to unravel it will not be
discussed in this book, and I only recapture that particular
weekend for the sake of the one word ‘nationalism’.
Who then were the Nationalists? In the sense of wanting one’s
nation to attain independence all literate Indians, which meant
around ten per cent of the population, or 35 million, were
nationalist in the 1920s. In the sense, however, of rejecting British
direction as inadmissible a single day longer, very few were
nationalist. It has to be borne in mind that large numbers ranging
from the highly educated to the scantily schooled, Hindus or
Muslims, rich or poor, found nothing in their religions that
forbade the acceptance of an authority which was not of their
choosing; positively the reverse. So these tended to echo the
injunction of St Peter’s Epistle: ‘Fear God and honour the King.’
This was the easier seeing that George V by all accounts—and
that included Gandhi’s own—was a thorough gentleman. This
infinitely graded middle class, therefore, which kept the wheels of
commerce and industry and—let this never be forgotten—of the
administration itself turning, did not hate the Union Jack. On the
contrary, that foreign flag enabled it to shelve some rather
disquieting thoughts. As to the illiterate, wholly untutored
villagers, perhaps 300 million souls who composed the remainder
of India’s children—these had no conception of nationhood
whatsoever. Their group loyalties were all. Under such
unfavourable conditions how could a National Movement worthy
of the name be launched? That it got under way and maintained,
albeit fitfully, its momentum was due to a handful of

revolutionaries drawn from the cream of sophisticated society, of
whom Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the paragon, working in
collaboration with, and often enough using, a holy man of quaint
and frequently exasperating attitudes who can only be likened to a
medieval saint. It is typical of the whole complex situation that
the very organization, viz: the Indian National Congress, the
Freedom Party par excellence, which the two stormy petrels
Gandhi and Nehru, each ruffling the waters in his own contrasting
fashion, were to direct throughout the closing twenty-five years of
our Rule, had been founded by a member of the Indian Civil
Service itself, to enable Indians to give expression to the new (new,
that is, in the 1880s) spirit of nationalism! Typical too, and logical
in the light of what I have explained earlier in this Introduction,
that we were tempted neither to suppress the Congress nor to
muster other interests in opposition to it. Typical, lastly, that for all
the inspiration and flair at the summit, the Party never managed
to enrol more than 5 million members. Out of 350 million this was
not impressive for a Party aspiring to speak for the entire nation.
And when, as too frequently proved the case, a local committee
harboured one or two scallywags of the town whom the local
worthies would not be seen dead with, the benevolent young
despot of my story could scarcely be expected to hold it much in
awe. Remote from its leaders of any calibre, he tended to view the
congress with contemptuous indifference.
Alas, it had become quite apparent by around 1928 that this
cherished Nationalism was a prey to a congenital sickness that
would baffle every one of its apostles no matter how skilled, how
conscientious, how persevering. When in that year an All-Party
team of these sat down in a praiseworthy attempt to draft a
Constitution for the India of tomorrow, they did not get very far.
Not much further indeed than the consolatory passage in which
they affirmed their certitude that as soon as India was free to face
her problems unhampered by British interference, Hindus and
Muslims would automatically act in concert. This, they
announced, ‘is bound to happen’. Among the things I learned in
India was never to rub my eyes. For those of us who, as the time
ran out, were compelled to expend more and more of our available
energy in preventing the hot heads of either community from
having at each other, it was impossible to be optimistic. None of
us could see India building her future on a foundation of unity.
The critics of our Raj had long imputed to us the crafty policy of
Divide and Rule; they did so from now on more monotonously,
more vociferously. Yet I do not believe that in the Districts there
were really very many to endorse that reproach. Most of the callers
who filed into my waiting room on Visitors day (which meant three
mornings a week) were more inclined to ponder the amendment in
the wording of the maxim which the blunt old politician,
Muhammed Ali, had suggested: We divide and You rule. For a
good hundred years the adherents of the two warring creeds had
acquiesced in the overlordship of foreigners who, so far as could
be discovered, had little in the way of religious zeal themselves
and might be relied on to be impartial. However, it actually was
beginning to look as if the strangers did not intend to stay, and
when this dawned upon the India of the bazaars, the India of the
electoral rolls, Hindus and Muslims started to stake their separate
claims.
The problem of government always and everywhere is how to
‘communicate’ . It is not enough that the regime should be
competent and humane. Some pages back I described the Collector
as belonging to a Contact Corps, and I think that is not a false
label; but by my generation there were growing signs that the old
‘touch’ which had for so long guaranteed our success—our Iqbal
as the Indians had termed it—was rapidly being lost. Between the
Collector, therefore, and those committed to his care was the
current passing as in bygone days?
In this kind of book, no study, no résumé even, of the principal
components of society would be appropriate. I am only concerned
to bring out that in certain of them, and these the most
influential, westernization had, by the time I set foot in India,
advanced to a stage where it was visibly sapping the foundations
on which we had built our prestige. It seems to me my best plan will
be to instance, to begin with, some areas of human approach in
which I felt at ease, and then to cross an imaginary frontier into
the area in which I felt—as an official primarily, but sometimes
also as a private person—acutely embarrassed. To start with, the
peasant. In his presence there was no occasion for restraint.
Western habits of mind had not affected him and it would never
have occurred to him, had he not been tutored by the politicians,
to resent our Raj on the ground that it was foreign. I have
introduced him already, with more than a hint at the behaviour of
the villager vis-à-vis his Collector, as also at the latter’s emotional
response to this man who habitually addressed him as his ‘Mother
and Father’ or as ‘Cherisher of the Poor’. He will come again into
my pages.
I pass, then, without more ado to the clerical personnel in
whose company so much of my indoor routine was performed,
taking as my model the Office Superintendent. He knew his way
backwards through the bulkiest file and I see him in his brown
pillbox cap bending over one now, flicking it open with deft and
doublejointed fingers at the wanted page, swivelling the folder
towards me and reading the villainous handwriting—English,
Urdu or Hindi, it was all the same to him—yes, reading it upside
down! He was grave, not gi ven to palling up with the junior clerks
seated row upon row in front of him in the central hall of the
Cutcherry like so many pupils in a schoolroom and scratching
away with their nibs under his frowning gaze. He was distant,
expected me to be the same, believed as a good government
official should, as a good Hindu should, in distance. At noon a
pair of his domestic servants would make their appearance
bearing an elaborate luncheon from his home, cooked there by his
wife. In the late afternoon his tonga would be waiting outside, a
syce at the horse’s head idly swatting a fly now and then. And as
this notable of the quarter drove from work, the traffic would halt
in the narrow thoroughfare, pedestrians stand aside. I knew five
of him and can still rattle off their names—three apiece. Each of
the five was loyal to the salt he had eaten, each of the five was
doing what God had called him to do.
Next let me summon up the members of the legal profession,
thick and perhaps too thick on the Indian ground, for with them
also the Collector kept close company. I am not thinking of the
great advocates, of the Sapru or the Jinnah, I am thinking of the
small-town pleader with a law degree and a decent criminal or
civil practice who played tennis and bridge with his confrères at
the Indian Club, drank a little whisky on occasion and referred to
himself as cosmopolitan, meaning by this that he did not mind
eating in a railway refreshment room on one of his rare journeys
to the provincial capital. In the court room he had all the
courtesies of his calling, and I only recollect one serious passage
of arms, one in the course of long years, one in how many
thousands of hours! Out of court I found him amiable, relaxed in
conversation, and—this may surprise—seldom engaged politically;
rather bored indeed with the harangues from the distant
platforms as reported in the press. There was no local newspaper,
remember. All India Radio was in the womb of time, and ‘Boggley
Wollah’ was in the wilds. I think of a man who was always eager to
crack a joke with me, who was apt to bring half a platoon of tiny
grandchildren to my house dressed in their prettiest clothes on
the morning of some festival, and who never omitted to send me a
basket of mangoes in season, or the annual Christmas card.
And what of the landed gentry? The Collector mixed freely with
the landowners, had to and liked doing so. As I remember them,
they were extroverts and rather indolent for the most part. They
prided themselves on being gentlemen, and divided a leisured
existence between their estates and their houses in the big city.
They were good shots and some were horsemen; and many with
these tastes would invite me to share their recreations. Even when
the product of an expensive upbringing, they were philistines
uninterested in literature and the arts, whether Indian or
Western; but they were men whose society was a tonic, bearing in
mind that a tonic is to be taken in moderation, and at proper
intervals. They did not, I need scarcely add, care a damn for the
gibes of the Congress leaders who branded them as our creatures,
which is more or less what they were.
I must exchange these countrified surroundings for an urban
setting, if I am to meet the industrialist. Here is a man thin on the
ground, but whose contribution is immense. Socially he was
creating a new order in India, viz: a proletariat; economically he
was hoisting a lethargic India out of the Middle Ages. Where
numbers are restricted a type scarcely emerges, and the two
magnates I shall call up are contrasting characters with a
vengeance. One of them, outside the Mills where big crowds had
been lapsing into rowdyism for the past few days, is rather too
heatedly recommending a bit of healthy ‘bloodletting’ as the
proper treatment, even using the Hindustani word (khunrezi) to
make it perfectly plain to me what he meant. He had no faith in
Gandhi’s prescription for human behaviour. No more did the other
of my two capitalists, seemingly. For although numbered among
the Mahatma’s fervent admirers, he applies to me for a gun licence
— this mark of the Government’s confidence was not granted lightly
— and adds, as was usual, his justificatory arguments. He
explains that the weapon would be entrusted to a stout fellow at his
house, Birla House, in New Delhi for the safety of the saint who is
in the habit of staying under his roof. In the first of my two
examples the meddlesome unacceptable pressure was attempted
by a proGovernment man; in the second, the request, courteous
and justified—how justified the tragic sequel some years later was
to demonstrate—came f rom a member of the Congress Party. Yet
with both these men a dialogue was possible, and I think this was
so because both were persons of initiative and high achievement,
were given to the exercise of practical reason in all they did, and wer
e unresentful, if each in his manner, of my authority over them.
In certain of the large cities—some fifteen, if I am right, in the
whole of India—the university student was to be met. Was to be
met? I think so. This may come as another surprise, for it might
be supposed that the British Raj would resemble an ogre, nothing
less, in the eyes of the insecure and therefore somewhat bobbery

youth who typified India’s student community. Lest my
competence to discuss him at all be doubted, let me state my
credentials. In as many as three out of those fifteen cities my lot
was to be cast, so that over a long stretch of years I had almost
each week something, trivial it could be but something, to do with
a student. I was Chairman of the governing body of a college; and
admitted I once had the unenviable experience of trying and
convicting an Agra undergraduate implicated in the manufacture
of bombs, I am compensated by the memory of repeated requests
from junior common rooms to address their members. Two
invitations from the officebearers of the Allahabad University
Students Union have stayed in my mind. Apparently I was
persona grata even in the city which, as the home of the Nehru
family, was in those days the power-house generating the energy
of the Congress Party. Unsettled in general, and hence easily
swayed, those students were, but of smouldering resentment I
could never detect any sign in their ranks. A scene as distant as a
winter’s night in the early 1930s comes back to me, laid in the
streets of that same city of Allahabad. The students are out in
nominal support of the norent campaign which the Congress had
just started among the villagers. The demonstration was peaceful,
but so massive as to require shepherding. Succumbing to the
temptation to defy authority, the van of the procession turned
aside from the prescribed route at a convenient crossroad. The
magistrate’s headache in handling these nimble but far from
muscular youths was how to insist on obedience without letting
his big-boned policemen, who detested them for the airs they gave
themselves, go for them with too much gusto. I went forward to
remonstrate with the front line. For some teasing rejoinder from
the leaders I was quite ready. I was even prepared, being no longer
a beginner, for a stream of chewed betel to be ejected from
somebody’s mouth, into my face or on to my clothing. But I was
taken aback by the command, imperious and spirited, that was
shouted at me from the second row: ‘Give place, Sir! Give place,
Sir! This is the King’s Highway.’
These boys were not from privileged homes, were not the
country’s intelligentsia of tomorrow, least of all were they imitation
Europeans who had lost their roots in Indian society. Usually they
had not escaped from parental control which was heavy in Hindu
and Muslim households alike. Fathers, uncles, elder brothers
were fond of introducing them to me on visiting days for no
specified purpose but on the principle of forward thinking, or
timely preparation, peshbandi it was called, which is dear to the
Indian. One never could tell, a post might fall vacant somewhere
before long, and then there would be a second approach; this to
obtain a letter of recommendation in favour of a young man well
known to the signatory for a considerable time, of exceptionally
polite address, earnest in his studies and of loyal antecedents. By
and large the students had one aspiration—government service;
this seemed to them worth it, however low the salary, and it would
often be pitiably low. And I believe it was the fear that they might
be ‘plucked’—the English word was constantly on their lips—and
thus out of the running for it, that rendered them what I have said
they were a page above: insecure, and so apt to be aggressive.
By and large, I am saying, all of these put up with what I stood
for —and hence put up with me.
I shall not pretend, it would be absurd to pretend, that I could
come face to face with each of them on even terms: that would
have been beyond my mandate—nor would it have been desired by
them on their side. I am claiming that a dialogue went on between
us. A dialogue presupposes two persons who are allowed to talk
and two, the same two, who will listen. It does not postulate
equality or expect unanimity. I dare say G.D.Birla did not consider
me his equal. I dare say Data Din who had never been further
than twenty miles from his village did not do so either, being a
brahmin. But as to authority, was there a viable alternative? Very
likely I may have been the lesser of two evils in their reasoning,
some kind of solution.
I have now reached the demarcation line on my imaginary map,
and am confronting Indians for whom the British Raj had lost its
savour and turned sour. They seemed uniformly to be of the
privileged class, people who did not have to think where the next
meal was coming from. However, they did not react uniformly.
Some decided there was nothing for it but to spew out the nasty
taste, and became revolutionaries. Others, the overwhelming
majority, felt—and it should have moved us whenever we thought
about it— that there was something un-English in conspiracy and
bombthrowing and even in the defiance of constitutionally
established authority. Psychologically the former experienced
Release; the latter endured that state of unrelieved tension which
torments the élite of a subject people.
Now our humane despot was, so to speak, functus officio in
respect of the revolutionaries; washed his hands of them, and was
saved embarrassment. Nor were they for their part any less at
ease than he was. They had found escape in the fray; breaking the
law acted like a tonic, whetting the physical as well as the mental
appetite. I can remember how positively jocular and hearty two
members of the Congress Working Committee were on their

arrest, how willing to sit down to a free and easy dinner, ‘English
style, please, tonight’ before taking the road to the Central Jail. A
third political détenu, when I visited him in his roomy A class
barrack, assured me he genuinely looked forward to a ‘little time off
and the chance to read some of the Vedic hymns. ‘You see, I’ve
never yet been able to get down to it’
It is not, then, to these, not to Nehru or Sarojini Devi or
Jayaprakash Narayan or Asaf Ali that I have to think back at this
point, but to the law-abiding majority who lacked the stimulus of
the arena. Whereas the revolutionary would work himself into a
frenzy on the platform but relax in private, his less fiery brother or
cousin, calm and dignified as he went about his strictly lawful
occasions, would without warning allow his feelings to well over in
some tête-à-tête. A voice would become strident, a glance would
flash with indignation. ‘You tell us the things to value—and you
withhold them from us.’ Every Collector would hear this sentence
spoken, or some variant of it, a hundred times. And
uncomfortably near the truth it was, as he had to admit himself.
But aloud he said nothing. Indeed no sentence ever ended in a
fuller stop.
I had arrived one evening at Dehra Dun in the Terai, or foot
hills, of the Himalayas on a fortnight’s holiday, the first in my
service. I was staying at the Club in an upstairs room of the
annexe and from my window presently made out the lights of
Mussoorie, the health resort 7,000 feet above sea. Never having
been to a hill station, I wondered idly how it would feel up there in
the cool air: Dehra Dun, although an improvement on the plains,
was breathless. Next morning came a chance to find out. A Muslim
politician, prominent in those days, and—since this also is relevant
—out spokenly loyal to the British connexion, had rented a house
in Mussoorie for the summer. He was not there himself, he was in
Lahore; but his wife and daughters were there. My informant who
was supplying these details suggested I might like to call. I doubt
whether I can convey how horrified the average Muslim household
would have been half-a-century ago at the very idea of such a thing.
But this particular family had considered it a socio-religious duty
to proclaim that it was not average. Every upper-class Muslim in
the Punjab, almost every upper-class Muslim in the whole of India,
was aware that Muhammad Shafi had taken the plunge and
broken with the custom of purdah. There were, no doubt, some
others like a, b, c and d—but were they really respectable? Others
like e, f, g and h—but were they really Muslim? I called.
The two daughters of the house to whom I was introduced had

stepped, to judge by their elegance and dress, straight out of a
Mughal court; the Emperor Jahangir’s perhaps, for one of them at
least was a Nur Jahan in the perfection of her looks. In Mussoorie
there were walks to be taken to gain the most spectacular views in
the world: valleys below lit up with sunlight; mountains opposite
muffled in their scarves of cloud; peaks beyond these snow-
hatted, reaching for the sky. A rendez-vous the following afternoon
was fixed for the purpose—and then they would tell me, the girls
said: all about London for they were just back from there. On my
side, a bit priggishly, I hoped they would tell me not about London
but about Purdah: Why were so many of the best educated
Muslims in India still defending it tooth and nail? Did their
childhood friends, reared in orthodox surroundings, look sideways
at them, or down on them, or up to them? Did they themselves feel
they might be hissed in the streets? And so on. Hardly anybody, I
thought, could have had such a chance as this. In the event, my
walk with those two young women for companions taught me a
different lesson altogether, one that, twelve months out from
home, I had yet to learn. The story of their London ‘season’, a
house in The Boltons, invitation after invitation from hostesses
with important names— all this was, to my relief, quickly told. Of
the answers to my prepared questionnaire, however, I was cheated
by an unforeseen turn in the talk. In England these two girls,
impressionable at their age, had moved in what was known in
those days as Society, had enjoyed everything to the full. And then
had disembarked at Bombay to realize that their own country was
not theirs but in the rigid grip of a few Barbarians not one of
whom, on the evidence, was imbued with the principles
enunciated by Burke and Gladstone. During three weeks aboard
ship they had sat in most agreeable company at table three times
a day—only to lose that contact on the quayside when everybody
rushed off to the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. And I myself, yes,
where was I living in Dehra Dun but in a sanctuary barred to
Indians unless they were bearers or coolies or sweepers? In my
role of humane despot I ought to have replied pat to these
charges. I could have delivered a sermon to the effect that we were
inflexible in our resolve to pack our bags one day, were already
making one concession after another which proved it. Parliaments
had been created; local boards, both municipal and district,
released from control; and the indianization of the Services was
proceeding apace. ‘Are these’, I could have wound up my little
speech by asking rhetorically, ‘are these illiberal things that we
are doing?’ But somehow the comfortable words would not come,
and I left them unsaid. How could I bring myself to say, ‘Mumtaz,
Raziya, have patience. Wait—what?—well, not so very, very long
now, and we will cease to humiliate you.’
Rajnath Kunzru was a brahmin, and I should think in his early
fifties when we first met. He wore Indian costume, which in his
case meant black tunic fastened up the front and closed at the
collar, a spotless shirt protruding at the wrists in a bishop’s frills,
and tightly fitting white trousers. His Kashmiri descent showed in
his aryan profile and fair complexion; and everything about him
was eloquent of what he was; a man of the utmost refinement.
Clearly he was of those who had absorbed what was best in our
culture without departing one iota from the prescriptions of
conventional Hinduism. In particular he appeared to have added
Wordsworth and Bryce to the pantheon of his forefathers and was
fond of quoting from these, tugging the while at the lock of hair he
was old-fashioned enough to retain on the top of his shaven
crown. He carried his head tilted backwards as though much
pulling at that top-knot had lifted his chin upwards in
compensation, giving him a distinctly contentious air. He had come
this time for some piece of information, and stayed on talking.
Talking with all the emphasis of one who has a clear idea of what
is going on around him, and deplores it. He punctuated his
remarks with sighs, as if despairing of the likelihood that good
sense would govern people’s behaviour. When at length he rose to
go, I promised to obtain what he wanted and saw him to the door.
The Office briefed me within the day, and I thought it politest to
incorporate the answer to his question in a personal note which I
wrote the same evening. ‘Dear Pandit Rajnath Kunzru,’ I began,
‘herewith I am sending you…’ I folded the sheet and slipped it into
an envelope which I left blank for I did not know the address, and
everyone had gone. But before turning out the light I went back to
my desk and in a bold fist put ‘Rajnath Kunzru’ on the envelope
and laid it on top of the contents of my ‘Out’ tray. My orderly
cleared this as usual first thing in the morning.
A couple of weeks later, enclosed in an imposingly embossed,
very white, very stiff, cover from the seat of Government, comes in
original a letter reporting the lengths to which an Englishman
holding an official appointment of responsibility could go to snub
and insult an Indian gentleman. The affront had not been
delivered in the privacy of an interview, it had been advertised in a
manner arguing deliberation. By omitting the honorific prefix
‘Pandit’ not in the message within—oh! no, but on the envelope
which every Tom, Dick and Harry could see, I had ensured that
my contempt for the addressee should become public property. It
was a long document, hundreds of words beautifully penned—and

I doubt if anyone apart from its author and myself ever read it
from end to end. In different ink at the left-hand bottom corner
over a scrawled signature was the perfunctory n.a; two initials
standing for ‘Necessary action’ or—if a Collector preferred it that
way ‘no action’.
Rajnath Kunzru had qualities which in a juster dispensation
would have brought him to the front of political life. As things
were, what else was there for him to do except sit on the managing
committees of a few charitable organizations, except be a
busybody, except be prickly? Of course he was not a type but a
caricature of a type, this chagrined Liberal: sighing away and
fidgeting with his top-knot, and fretting. But there was a little of
him in every member of the intelligentsia. In the British presence
such people excused themselves all effort; in our presence, since
we shouldered whatever blame was going, they lost the habit, and
the faculty of self-criticism. This plight in which they found
themselves was inherent in the Raj, and many of us came to see it
as among the arguments why we should quit.
A description is always made clearer by a contrast, so now is the
moment to introduce the Maharaja. He would of course have been
ushered in long before this if I had heeded protocol, or even if I
had kept to the historical priorities. Some pages back, in my
résumé of the evolution of our Empire I illustrated the policy of
annexation by relating the hackneyed little story of the man who
had Sind. But I did not so much as hint at a parallel policy which
was being pursued simultaneously. This was to conclude treaties
with a multitude, a veritable hotchpotch, of existing states. We
termed them ‘states’ for want of a better word, and the larger ones
merited the designation; but most of them were smaller than our
shires, smaller than my own first District. But whether they were
territorial units of the consequence of Hyderabad, Baroda,
Gwalior, Indore and Mysore, or tiny islands of autonomy, they had
this in common that they clung to their identity. This, too, in
common that, beset in those days by marauding neighbours, they
were at their wits’ end to know how to preserve it. In their need of
military protection they turned to the sole power in the land which
could guarantee this: viz, the Company. And the Company in
extending it to them quite properly demanded the unqualified
control of their external relations in exchange. There would have
been chaos otherwise. Even as it was, anarchy walked unchecked
over great tracts of Central India until the submerged pattern of
local chieftainships could be recognized and restored. The
outcome of this two-fold process—and the combined operation
covered a whole century counting from Clive’s victory at Plassey in

1757—was that three-fifths of India, including practically the
entire coastal belt and all the other strategic areas, became British
soil, whereas the remaining two-fifths, although closely folded in
our embrace, did not become British territory. A dualism had been
imposed from the start on the structure of our Rule—and how this
complicated things when we came to hand over! In the period of
expansion it no doubt suited us to have the choice between two
courses of action, and I do not suppose the Englishman on the
spot would have had thoughts beyond the expedient step to take
in the immediate case. Our political opponents, however, credited
us with a conscious design. We had maliciously sacrificed two-
fifths of the country to the horror of Indian regimes, they
discovered, in order to throw into favourable relief what we
ourselves had brought about in the rest. You couldn’t help liking
the Congress sometimes.
To be accurate, therefore, we have to think of a ‘British’ India
and an ‘Indian’ India rubbing shoulders inside the ambit of our
Empire; the Indian, or ‘princely’, India being an aggregate of well
over 500 states. Not more than a hundred of them were of
much significance; and of these again only, say, a dozen were
really important. Hyderabad stood first, equal to the United
Kingdom in area and supporting a population of 16 million;
Kashmir next; followed, if at some distance, by the other three or
four whose names have been cited already. It is preferable to use
the English word ‘Princes’ of the rulers collectively because the
native titles were apt to vary as between states; so that if,
generally speaking, the leading Hindu rulers were known as
‘Maharajas’, one said ‘Gaekwar of Baroda’, ‘Jam’ of Nawanagar,
‘Maharana of Udaipur’; and the Muslim ruler, commonly ‘Nawab’,
was ‘Nizam’ in the case of Hyderabad. Miss Venner, as some of us
will remember from our Kipling, lumped them together as ‘howwid
Wajahs’ but that won’t pass either, except colloquially, because
there were many, many ‘rajahs’ who were simply landowners and
not ‘Princes’ at all.
The grander Princes wore the trappings of royalty and visibly
enjoyed being greeted with a salute of guns, anything from twenty-
one to nine according to precedence. It did not seem to them
idiotic to assemble and debate whether the Sovereign was under
obligation to turn out the Guard at Buckingham Palace whenever
a member of their order drove through the gates. They knew by
heart that promise of Queen Victoria’s: ‘We shall respect the
rights, dignity and honour of the Native Princes as our own.’ Of
course there was a pill to swallow underneath this thick coating of
sugar and it was proving latterly more bitter than expected. To

surrender foreign affairs to the Paramount Power in return for
protection was, as seen, part of the agreement. But they had
scarcely bargained for Her Majesty’s sanctimonious preoccupation
with their moral safety. They had been adjured, if you please, to
remember that their thrones were ‘not divans of indulgence but
the stern seats of duty’. Faithful allies, not subjects, they had to
receive willy-nilly at their courts an Englishman who would be
there in season and out of season to watch, to warn, and—it had
happened already too often for their liking—to bring to book.
As I propose to invite a Maharaja to have his say in my chapter
‘About Princes’, it may be that certain of the wilder assumptions
of the British public, the international press and the Hollywood
film studios will come in for questioning. But until then, by all
means, let the ex-parte judgments prevail. Nor are all of these
adverse: far from it. Think—and it will be very easy—of some ill-
favoured politician in homespun slumped in the back of his Ford
car as he hurries to a conference. Then think how the Maharaja,
lissom and debonair, sits his caparisoned horse as he leads the
Dasahra procession through the streets of his capital. The aroma
of another India altogether clings to him, the India of peacocks
and elephants, palaces and lakes, veiled beauties and bejewelled
potentates. Did it so much matter if he kept his budget in his
head? Was it a crime to pay the Inspector of Dancing Girls £150 a
year plus an allowance of £10 for acting as Chief Justice? And
which of us loved moneylenders? Which of us if he could would
not have harnessed them in a team and driven them round the
racecourse?
To the progressive-minded this ‘Indian’ India was anathema;
and in particular to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru whose faith was in
‘scientific socialism’. The princes, he declared, were a ‘blatant
anachronism’ who belonged to India’s past and deserved to lose
their place in her future. When the day came, the irascible Old
Harrovian saw to it that they did.
This introduction will have prepared the reader for the following
chapters rather in the manner of a prelude which conditions the
ear for the fugue. Or if that metaphor will not help, then let me
change it and simply say that I have here been painting the
backcloth to the stage on which the recreated scenes will be
enacted.
2
UP-THE-COUNTRY
1.
REPORTING FOR DUTY
Nobody told us in advance where we would be posted, or to whom
we ought to report. Apparently, it had been like that from the very
beginning, and it has since amused me to read how a young writer
in the Company’s employ, a Titan-to-be in our imperial past as it
happened, his name Mountstuart Elphinstone, turning up at
Mirzapur on a borrowed horse and weary from the road, had met
with the haphazard reception which—even down to the last detail
-I was myself to know when I arrived at that very same station one
hundred and thirty-three years later. No wonder we were slightly
apprehensive as we made our way ‘up-the-country’. For several
days, and sometimes much longer, we would have scant cause to
be cheerful—and then some affecting little episode, trivial in itself,
would seem to set everything right. We woke up one morning to
find that the clouds on the horizon had been dispelled.
The sixteen-hour day in Bombay, my first in India, had been
kaleidoscopic emotionally and pictorially. You caught the aroma of
India that stole out to the ship as she slopped at anchor, waiting
for the dawn in the roads—and then they made you go down into
the airless baggage hold to put your things into your mis-named
cabin trunk. As the sun came up over the palm trees on Malabar
Point you gave a little gasp at so much beauty—and might have
succumbed to it more but for that slight hangover from the last
night aboard. Ashore finally, and through the Customs, you saw
that the white turbans jerking and nodding everywhere weren’t all
that clean; and when you emerged into the strident thoroughfare,
the sharp light was already draining the colour from every vivid
pink or acid green or turquoise blue saree that tried to please the
eye. Farewells then on the pavement between lifelong friends
of twenty-one days standing who would nevermore meet. Next, the
Secretariat to report—no, first to Grindlays to touch a cheque; to

touch in the literal sense your first rupee. Did Indians, banyas or
something, really bow down physically and worship the coin as we
did figuratively in front of our gold sovereign, and the Americans
in front of their dollar? Now the Secretariat—for the young Civilian
who knew his Province a whole year in advance would only learn
his post at the last minute, orally; and there were forty
possibilities. Mirzapur? Where’s that? I was shown it on the map.
Then off in a hurry to be lunched with a certain formal stiffness at
an imposing club by a truly terrifying box-wallah, friend of a
family friend. But I am being churlish in my reference to a man
who was kindness itself—and it is not easy to be kind to
somebody you haven’t taken to one little bit.
Bombay, then, hadn’t helped; and from the carriage window on
the journey up country, instead of the finished landscape of some
great painter I had only seen endless preliminary drawings—quite
colourless, with the odd gawky palm or cluster of tumbledown
shanties to serve as an occasional point de repère—beyond which
the artist had not advanced. On the evidence so far, the pageantry
of India was a myth.
Understandably therefore I was not in the highest of spirits as I
began my unpacking next morning. I had some books among my
things: the Odyssey and the Aeneid, for example, wrapped in a
page of The Times already more out of date than either; and there
was Sa’di’s Rosegarden, too, for I had taken Persian, which was
optional, in addition to the compulsory language of the Province. I
had brought no Bible with me, but I did have an attractively got-
up, gilt-edged New Testament in Urdu which the British and
Foreign Bible Society had generously presented me with. And
thinking this might prove hard going, I had taken the precaution
of throwing in my Novum Testamentum Graece for use as a crib.
Then the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure,
both of which had loomed large in the syllabus of my three
academic terms on probation and been among the subjects of my
qualifying examination.
Two other items there were, exceedingly slim, to be squeezed
into three-quarters of an inch of shelf. The first of these, elegant in
scarlet and gold, had been supplied by Authority, and was entitled
Manual on Indian Etiquette. It was, as the covering slip dated 1910
was at pains to make explicit, compulsory reading. The seventeen
m pages of contents moved to a grand finale, for they bore the
cachet of ‘John Malcolm. Camp Dhooliah: 28th June 1821’. The
instructions, penned so long ago, were not superseded, an
introductory note emphasized: They are as appropriate at the
UP-THE-COUNTRY 27
present day as when they were compiled’. To my own thinking,

however, they bore the mark of a bygone attitude. My power in
India, I read, rested on the general opinion of the natives of my
comparative superiority in good faith, wisdom and strength. But it
was up to me —naturally the writer had not employed an
expression which in his time could scarcely have been heard out of
earshot of the card-table —to lay aside my pride of station. It was
from the possession of truer principles of morality and religion,
not from their ostentation, that benefit could be conferred upon
those I was now summoned to rule.
The other consisted of forty odd pages of poems from the pen,
literally so in several cases, of Alfred Lyall. This most
distinguished and versatile nineteenth-century Civilian filled his
leisure by writing not only classics such as his monumental
Studies and his British Dominion in India, but light verse. This
little volume—and I have it still—is not a book in the normal
sense: it comes from no publishing house and is partly, as I said,
in the author’s handwriting. The rest, the printed portion, may
well have been cut from say, the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette
(on which the young Kipling worked as sub-editor) or the Central
India Times of Nagpore, and the whole is stitched or pasted
amateurishly within cardboard backs covered in left-over
wallpaper of flowery design. How this charming relic permitting a
peep into the privacy of an eminent Victorian had fallen into my
hands I have no notion, nor does it matter. What is relevant is
that one of the poems exactly hits off the mood I was in that day
as I began my unpacking. So exactly that I have to quote from it.
In this Swinburnian lyric a discontented Competition-Wallah (a
stiff competitive examination had been made the door to the
Service in 1853) lies
Recollecting old England’s sea breezes

On his back in a lone bungalow,
and soliloquizes:
What lured him to life in the tropic?

Did he venture for fame or for pelf?
Did he seek a career philanthropic
Or simply to better himself?
Why, he asks himself in exasperation, had he not been satisfied to

stay put, to stop dreaming, to be average? What wonder if he is
driven
…to curse Oriental romancing

And wish he had toiled all his day
At the Bar, or the Banks, or financing
And got d d in a common-place way.
At least I was not the odd man out, it seemed.

My bout of homesickness had been largely induced by an
isolation as complete as it was sudden. This needs explaining. In
Mirzapur, although the Collector was the one and only British
Officer, there were several Indians of high official standing: the
Judge, a chief of police, subordinate magistrates, and so on. And
this being an up-country post, not the over-wrought capital, some
of them must have heard what fifty clerks plus another fifty
orderlies, messengers, constables, myrmidons had heard: viz, that
a Chhota Sahib—the expression will be explained further down—
had joined. Why then did it occur to none of these educated
gentlemen to look the young man up in the course of those lonely
days? The answer is: precisely because they were educated. They
would do the proper thing at the proper moment—and this had not
come. They were quite right. It was for the Collector, as my
sponsor, to make the first move. If they themselves did, it would
be pushing.
Meanwhile, I was not merely flat as a flounder, I was in slack
water. For some reason I have forgotten, my sailing from England
as originally fixed had been retarded by three weeks; so my
Collector, obliged to adhere to his own time-table, had proceeded
on tour without me. Until informed officially of my arrival in the
country he could hardly give me my instructions, and since the
runners would require a couple of days to get out to him and
return again, I could only possess my soul in patience. In the event
this was rewarded sooner than I expected.
‘You will be beginning your service in some of the finest jungles
in India.’ That is how the Collector’s three pages, written in a rapid
and none too legible hand, opened. He was at Dudhi for the time—
indeed the heading was ‘Camp Dudhi’—where I was to join him as
soon as I had got my bearings. A mare had been bought for me
from a reputable dealer at Saharanpur through Charlie(?)
Grant and should be turning up shortly. I would doubtless
possess a gun of my own, and as for a rifle I could always borrow
his. The Nazir, Durga something, could be relied on to see after
me during my halt at headquarters, and a bearer (a son, it
seemed, of his own man) was there in camp waiting for me. And my
main job for a bit would be to get down to the language…
UP-THE-COUNTRY 29
2.
CAMP DUDHI
Meantime, however, it is still Sunday and I must sit down to my
first letter from India. The previous one had been written on board
the Ranpura so as to be included in the outgoing mail. Afterwards
I would sort out the clothes I would presumably need in camp and
perhaps take a swim before lunch. The water with the sun on it
should have warmed up within an hour or so.
My letter, I am sure, was short. I told my mother where I had
been posted and that I had got there safely—that’s all. I did not
lie. I did not tell her that I was finding my feet in a new place, was
already enjoying to the full the excitements of the tough and
vigorous life I had chosen. Nor yet the truth that I was moping and
alone. But she probably read this between the lines.
The letters from India of a Victor Jacquemont are the exception
proving the rule that these were dull. But dull as no doubt they
mostly were and without claim to be classed, like his, as literature,
our letters did document a period and a situation: and
particularly, I dare say, when written by an unmarried son to his
widowed mother. In a bureau, at the back of a drawer in an
English home the bundle done up with ribbon would accumulate
as the months went by; and then bundle 2 would be started…and
so on as the years went by. The day of course would come when
the series would cease abruptly and these faded packets, now
cluttering up space required for less sentimental use, be relegated
to the deep recess of some commode.
In the ordinary course, then, I might, as I write these present
lines, have been in a position to extract the appropriate bundle
from its limbo and refresh my memory of the ride to Dudhi so long
ago, and of my twelve weeks camping in the region which had
suddenly become the hub of my universe. A spiritual centre, it
was by a minor miracle a geographical Omphalos too; for I only
needed to open my Times Atlas at the two-page plate ‘India’ and
lay a ruler diagonally first this way and then the other across it, to
discover that the intersection occurs—at Dudhi. But let me
explain why I must do without my documentation. It happened
that except for a few items to be counted on the fingers of one
hand all our furniture, placed in storage at Maple’s Depository in
Gower Street, perished in the flames of the Blitzkrieg. Alone
spared the holocaust were: our grand piano which had gone
separately to Steinway’s and survived to be given subsequently on
loan to the Royal College of Music; plus three items I had taken
out to India with me. These were: what we called the Gladstone
chair (because bequeathed to us by his family), a mid-Victorian

concession to luxury equipped with iron levers under the arm
rests which, being gripped, allowed the oval back to tilt to 45° in
which the G.O.M. on holiday at Hawarden would of an afternoon
both imbibe and sleep off the Iliad; my mother’s copy of Gitanjali
(which I have mentioned already); and a canteen of cutlery.
I have digressed, but there was a point in that too. I have
wanted, while the chance offered, to support by concrete evidence
what can be inferred from the first section of this Chapter: namely,
that the Civilian travelled light through life, and whilst in statu
pupillari was not expected to be encumbered with more than could
be loaded on the back of a pack-camel.
Unaided memory serves me none too well in regard to that first
Sunday. My letter finished I must, I suppose, have explored the
Collector’s house and may have noticed that though empty it was
not, as empty houses are apt to be, dusty. I did not yet
understand that there is no such thing as spring-cleaning in the
United Provinces. From March to June a west wind called the loo
is blowing from sunrise to sunset—sometimes it will go on blowing
far into the night—and develop every so often into a choking and
blinding sandstorm. From July to September, it is the monsoon,
the Indian ‘mausim’, when you cannot spread out the carpets and
curtains and coverings on the lawn to beat them. And therefore
the annual cleaning of your Bungalow occurs in October. That is
why the old Boar in the vestibule looked as if he’d just had a Wash
and Brush-up, and those turned up tusks of his, surely eight
inches each of them, gleamed like waxed moustaches.
I must have strolled out into the garden, visited the row of
outbuildings, stables, servants’ quarters. How many Collectors
had there been here before the present one? I believe my mind
may have run on that sort of line, for we Probationers during our
three academic terms had been introduced to Indian history with
special reference to the British period, and I was aware, if vaguely,
that the Company, pushing its dominion forward from Bengal, had
utilized the old Mughal routes, had to a certain extent allowed
these to govern the direction of its own thrust up-the-country.
Most of them had radiated from Delhi or Agra to run east and
west; but one great highway had run more or less at right angles
to the rest from Mirzapur to Jubbulpore. That caravan route
which we can picture with its milestones, its avenues of trees, its
police-posts and toll houses, accounts for the early significance of
the region later to be known as the Districts of Mirzapur, Benares
and Ghazipur. More of an effort is demanded to appreciate that
England’s gaze, having shifted from the United States as a result
UP-THE-COUNTRY 31
of Cornwallis’ defeat at Yorktown in 1781, had settled in these

very parts. Here, it seemed, she might win compensation for her
loss. Behold the same Cornwallis, now an actor in the new theatre,
considering the application of the Prince Regent for the post of
Collector at Benares—and rejecting it on the ground that the
claims of a man like Samuel Davis were superior to those of the
royal applicant! Of course, I don’t suggest my reflections carried me
that far; for one thing I was not au fait of the details and knew
more of the growth of the Roman Empire than of our own. I could
not have put my pencil point on either Plassey or Wandewash.
But I did have the sensation, up country and alone in that dear
old house with its antlered walls and the Tusker still giving me his
confidential wink, that at least one of my race had been seen
around here without interruption for a very long time.
Anyway I piled up on the bed the things I would want to take
with me into camp. First the khaki clothing purchased from F.P.
Baker and Co. off Regent Street; including shirts with special
buttons, two where the wearer’s shoulder-blades would be and a
third one at the waist, to fasten the quilted T-shaped spine-pad; my
puttees; my riding boots; my sola topi—not that I needed to put
that on the pile. I was not likely to forget it after the tales of horror
I had listened to at the School of Tropical medicine. It seemed you
must not even dart across the Compound no, not even at tea-time
on a December day, without it. The ferocious lecturer had gone
further: I must cut half-moons out of all my clothes under the arms
to let a salubrious puff of air in; but here, visualising the morning
coat and the tails my mother had not without sacrifice, given me
when I became an undergraduate, I had rebelled. And there were
two more things, likewise from F.P.Baker: the bedding roll or
bistar and the metal washbasin called chilamchi. I wonder
whether a London shop assistant would still use the words.
Anyhow, here was my camp gear assembled, each article flaunting
an exotic Indian name as its passport to Dudhi. For even sola is
Hindi, and those who spell it ‘solar’ should refrain from sneering
at others who by a similar example of folk-etymology turn
asparagus into ‘sparrowgrass’. Well, those items were obvious, but
—such awful apprehensions torment us in youth—could I leave
anything at headquarters without making an ass of myself? There
was that story, perfectly authentic, about King George V who,
travelling North to shoot tiger on the Nepal border whilst Queen
Mary went sightseeing at Agra, observed a Collector’s camp not far
from the track and stopped the Imperial train to pay him a
surprise visit. He found the Collector seated in his tent dressed, it
being near sunset, as he himself was dressed, that is, for dinner.
In the end I opted for the black tie and boiled Shirt, and not
unwisely as the sequel proved. I will not say I wore these regularly
those next months under canvas, but I wore them on occasion,
and then for the best of all possible reasons, viz. that my Collector
had elected to wear his.
But wasn’t it time now for that swim? The dawn chill had
yielded to the sun’s rays and the Ganges would have warmed up.
The bank, steep at this central point in the river’s curve, began at
the bottom of the long garden and it was not many minutes before
I was in the water. The sight of a crocodile sunning itself, mouth
agape, on the mud and then slithering in ahead of me had,
somehow, not put me off. But when I had had enough, and began
climbing the slope back to the house my thoughts recurred to it.
Just then I came upon two villagers who, since they were
squatting on the ground, must have been watching me. They got
to their feet and the broad smile they bestowed on me invited the
question, easy in Hindustani even for a beginner: ‘Is that crocodile
dangerous?’ My interlocutors, if I may stretch the term, turned to
one another and laughed; then looked again towards me, one
nodding his head energetically and the other shaking his with the
same amount of conviction.
Now nobody can be certain what the Indian peasant means by a
nod or, conversely, a shake of the head. But he means something,
and I doubt, on the basis of later experience, whether those simple
men could have given sounder advice. I expect the zoologists will
tut-tut; but just as history is not wholly a matter of books, so
their science could occasionally benefit by a holiday from the zoo.
Over the years that followed I saw plenty of crocodiles cut open to
reveal a woman’s forearm with the bracelet still adorning the wrist,
or a human foot. But I was in each case persuaded that the
creature had feasted on an ill-cremated corpse. Nothing indeed, as
it seemed to me, was more poignant a reminder of a people’s
poverty than the frequency with which imperfectly cremated
bodies were consigned not only to holy Ganges but to any river or
pond whatever, the bereaved being too poor to shoulder the cost
of the complete incineration of their loved ones. No doubt the
Indian crocodile (Ghariyal: Magar) with his long slender snout and
sharp interlocking teeth, could he employ our idiom, would insist
that fish is his staple food, but the evidence I have cited proves
that he will vary his diet. Moreover, as every villager knows—why,
I have seen it myself scores of times—he will lie half submerged
with nostrils, eyes and part of the back visible, pretending to be a
floating log— and woe betide the unsuspecting beast, quenching
its thirst there, who is taken in. But does he or does he not attack
UP-THE-COUNTRY 33
man? I answer that I have no proof of it. Seeing however that

through the weeks of drought he has frequently to travel overland
in search of a ‘tank’—a pond, that is—where he may eke out a
bare subsistence, it is fairly obvious that he will grow hungry
enough to eat anything he can get. His instinct, so the authorities
affirm, is to keep clear of man, but with the crocodile as with
many of God’s creatures one instinct can be overpowered by
another. I have known crocodiles to make a bee-line for a tank
even though this led them right past a village. My conclusion is
that a starving crocodile in a confined area of water would be
dangerous company. And very likely that is what my two
informants intended to tell me.
Well, tomorrow came, and with it, if I’m getting the days right,
the Collector’s instructions. To say these had a tonic effect is to
put it mildly. In the Bombay Secretariat they had ‘noted’ my arrival
— my coming out to India fired with the wish to spend my working
life there, ten thousand miles from home—‘noted’ it. But here was
somebody steering unerringly between feeling and formality. I
reread what he had written. There was one particular, perhaps,
that puzzled me: that mare from Saharanpur. How could she ‘turn
up shortly’? Out with the map. Yes, Saharanpur was the better
part of 500 miles off, way up north of Delhi. This dismayed me
because I was ignorant enough to suppose that the syce would
have to ride her all that distance by road. I did not know that a
horse-box could be hired at short notice at any main-line station
and hitched to a passing express.
Imagine then my delight when Shireen turned up unexpectedly
soon (would it be the third or the f ourth day?). I know I ran f rom
the room and down the verandah steps when I learned she was
there. As I went to examine her, she backed her ears and showed
fright but presently permitted me to rub her forehead. She was
very young, a two-year-old light bay with blaze and four white
socks nearly matching, delicately built. She had more than a
touch of Arab blood. Those ears she had backed were small and
pointed, her eyes were huge and protruding and she had a mouth
that could drink out of a tea-cup by the look of it. She was
skittish, and judging by her subsequent performances, it must
have been a job coaxing her into the horse-box. Skittish, too, she
would remain. I christened her on the spot after the heroine of the
Persian romance Khusraw and Shireen. She would be Shireen, ‘My
Sweet’. Let me peer ahead into the years: she played polo—
shockingly, and I was incompetent to improve her; caught by
accident in a city riot she displayed not a single one of the
qualities of a police horse; as for pig-sticking, I had at least the wit
never to ascertain how she would behave; out with the Delhi Hunt
she was to come down so heavily that I bear the marks of it still.
Below average in her accomplishments then? Possibly. But she did
have a turn of speed and three or four years after we met, she and
I in combination won an amateurish event grandiloquently known
as the Agra Plate. And—need I add it?—she had another gift,
pronounced beyond measure: the gift of captivating me completely.
It was not for me to know it, but the Collector’s private
communication to me had been accompanied by directions to the
Office; and in that area of activity as yet outside my ken, my
immediate movements were being arranged. When the Nazir,
whom by this time I regarded as Hermes, messenger of the gods,
puts in his next appearance, it is to present me with my own tour
programme. Typed in English, it read:
Date……
.................March: Mirzapur to Robertsganj

.................March: Robertsganj to Son River
.................March: Son River to Dudhi.
Listening to villagers (see page 56)

UP-THE-COUNTRY 35
Going into camp (see page 125)

‘Shireen’ (see page 36)

Underneath was the footnote that the Collector’s motor car would
be made available for the first of these ‘marches’, and the services
of Risaldar Abdul Aziz Khan for the second and third. At the
bottom of the page to the left was added:
Collector for information.

Tahsildar Robertsganj for necessary action.
Station Officer Police Station ditto for necessary action.
Finally over to the right and more gratifying than all:
Signed ................. with a space for my signature.
I was about to ask Hermes to interpret a few of the particulars

here when he got in before me with: ‘Your Honour will kindly
insert the dates considered proper, and sign’. It was the first time
I had been addressed as Your Honour (Huzoor, lit. Presence), and
the first time I was issuing an order. Fifty years on, the
recollection causes me to smile as it will, I hardly doubt, cause
others to yawn. But the fact was, the Collector’s word to the Office
had amounted to a brevet. I was now the Chhota Sahib in the
Mirzapur District of the United Provinces, India. The literal
rendering ‘Little Gentleman’ won’t do at all. The grade—for grade
it was—designated the Collector’s Number Two. ‘Assistant’,
therefore; further, not any assistant but specifically a Collector’s
Assistant. The standard dictionaries, such as Platts Urdu and
UP-THE-COUNTRY 37
Classical Hindi Lexicon 1884 (a veritable Liddell and Scott) will

confirm that this was so.
Just one small matter I had to settle for myself. Planning to be
two days in the saddle, I had to decide what to keep with me and
what to send ahead. If it was the first time in my life that I had to
work that out, it was also the last; for my bearer, once engaged,
would relieve me of that responsibility ever afterwards. The
situation was saved by something so humble I didn’t think it
worth listing above: viz, my old haversack. No problem now: so I
threw all my assembled gear into the smaller of my two trunks,
heaved it to the bedroom door and stood it on end. On it I
balanced my bed roll, the basin (have to wash meantime under
the tap—but there’d be no taps!) and my gun. The operation was
understood, and I was next to see these possessions inside my
spacious tent at Camp Dudhi. Meantime a syce set out for
Robertsganj with Shireen.
On the morning of departure a Ford car of the model associated
in the minds of most of us with the immortals of the Silent Screen
drew up, and from it alighted the Tahsildar who had come in
person to fetch me. I should here explain once and for all who he
is.
As will be realised from my introductory pages the Government,
being the sole owner of the Indian soil, levies a Tax on every rood
of land in every village. This Tax, known as Land Revenue, is the
keystone of the financial edifice—in my United Provinces it
exceeded 50% of the total revenues—and its payment, if injustices
and avoidable hardship are to be eliminated, can only be secured
by a decentralised system. The Tahsildar is there to bring it in,
within the territorial jurisdiction of his Tahsil, and there will
commonly be 3, 4 or 5 of him to the District. Since it was our
policy to grant remissions of Revenue (and of course Rent at the
level of tenants) wherever some calamity or straight crop failure
dictated clemency, he must pass for the expert—in my experience
he almost invariably was—on the agricultural conditions exhibited
at the given moment in his Tahsil. If I had to translate Tahsil and
Tahsildar (which nobody ever did!) I would borrow the French
‘Perception’ and ‘Percepteur’; but this, mind, would be literal
translation; it would not convey a meaning which is, to my
knowledge, peculiar to India.
Robertsganj then was this area’s ‘Perception’, and I supposed
(not wrongly) that a Civilian of the past had been commemorated
(Lyallpur, Campbellpur, Jacobabad—there were many parallels) in
the name of that little ‘ganj’ or market centre.
Leaving by the road that serves Vindhyachal, a resort of

pilgrimage some three miles out, we were very soon raising a
feather of white dust across the plateau that separates the Valley
of the Ganges from that of the Son. The northern tracts are highly
cultivated, and it dawned on me as we drove southwards how
fortunate I was to have as my travelling companion a most
competent guide to the agriculture of these parts.
India was divided climatically and therefore agriculturally by a
line which we can imagine as drawn from, let us say, Surat just
north of Bombay up the Tapti valley to Khandesh and onwards to
Nagpur whence it bears north-east to a point about one hundred
miles above Calcutta. The northern region was Upper India,
including, but much larger than, ‘Hindustan’; and the southern
was, in our forgotten parlance, ‘the Peninsula’. Now in northern
India there were two distinct harvests: the Autumn crop (kharif)
reaped from October onwards and the Spring crop (rabi)
reaped from, say, the end of February onwards. Seated alongside
my Tahsildar I was being introduced to a countryside somewhat
bare at this juncture, for the Autumn harvest was now in and the
Spring crops had only just been sown. I understood the principal
components of the Autumn crop in the neighbourhood to be
various kinds of millet, barley, rape and mustard. I could not have
got even that far, had the Tahsildar not given me the English
equivalent of each. I tried to scribble the words down in my little
red-backed Woolworth notebook as we swayed about. ‘Don’t
bother,’ said my instructor whose commonsense exceeded mine.
‘Wait till you see these different crops with your own eyes’. There
were scattered villages as far as the eye could reach on either side
just here. ‘How big would they be?’ I asked. Three hundred people,
he thought, four or perhaps even five sometimes. I had read that
there were half-a-million villages in India, so putting the average
population of each at four hundred, that makes two hundred
million villagers— all watching with anxiety to see how the crops
would turn out. But the driver was toot-tooting the horn, for we
were drawing near the Tahsil at Robertsganj.
The brick building, rather grim architecturally, reminiscent of
those wayside railway stations of ours in England—minus the
platform and the track, that is—dating from the middle of the last
century. I remember it with affection for never before had I been
greeted anywhere with pomp and circumstance. In the
receivingline stood the Sub-Inspector in charge of the local Police
Station, flanked by half-a-dozen of his men with arms at the
‘present’; the Assistant Tahsildar; and ten or twelve notables,
small landholders presumably, from round about; and not least,
UP-THE-COUNTRY 39
Risaldar Abdul Aziz Khan. I had found out that this officer (for a
Risaldar is a lieutenant of cavalry who has risen f rom trooper)
resided beyond the Son, was on leave preparatory to retirement
and, happening to be up at the Robertsganj Tahsil on some
business had offered to wait for me so that we could ride south
together.
It is possible that my telescope now turned upon those three
‘marches’ so far away is rose-tinted, but of this much I am
certain: I would have been happy to stay much longer in my novel
company; long enough to enter, stumbling but dogged, into the
animated conversation; long enough to pick up a snippet here and
there from the constant banter of those four—cavalryman, police
officer, and two Tahsil officials—among themselves. The veriest
beginner can distinguish between Hindu and Muslim names, and
I knew that my companions were two and two. Frequently of
course one could tell by dress; for instance, the Risaldar wore a
fez. There was a bottle of Red Label on the board—I wondered if
one could tell by that too. Not that evening, anyhow, for presently
a servant brought in a tray with a single glass. But I did learn,
and as early as this, something about the hospitality of the people
in whose midst I had chosen a career.
Shireen went well alongside the big roan on which the Risaldar
was mounted. As we trotted steadily that second march I was
taught the points of a horse in Hindustani, the terms for the parts
of the bridle and of the saddle. It made it all the better that the
teacher had not one word of English. He would lean over towards
me and stretch out a finger, then pronounce the word and I would
imitate him like a parrot. His white teeth would gleam, and then
he would lean over again picking on something else. At intervals
he would say ‘Canter’. And then we would continue in unbroken
silence for the next quarter of an hour.
My syce, all this while, was keeping pace with us at a discreet
distance behind, safe from the worst of our dust. He was riding a
mettlesome pony borrowed from I don’t know whom. Oh, I had
already given up worrying about these trifles—spare horses,
bullock-carts, bed, board. On tour up-country it was a game of
leap-frog, and these people from Nazirs and Tahsildars down to
the syce in your own employ were past-masters at it. One week in
India and I could see that. No, the real worry—and it would
persist for many a month—was how in the world I would ever be
in a position to earn my pay.
As we came within view of the Son, the sun was setting in a
blaze of glory and the river shone like silk shot with many colours.
The level evening light of India, how it could transfigure all it
touched! I saw there were two or three tents pitched on the sandy
shore and a little knot of villagers squatting close by. A policeman
recognizable from afar by his scarlet turban and khaki uniform
was standing guard. Lo, our lodging for the night.
We crossed on a gigantic raft next morning, horses and all,
hauled and poled simultaneously, and were in the saddle on the
far bank while the air was yet chill. I was thoroughly stiff, as may
be imagined, and could not disguise it. The old cavalryman
laughed and said: ‘All the English officers are like that coming on
a boat from Blighty (vilayet)’; adding, countryman born and bred
as he was: ‘Riding a ship is different; riding a horse is different.’ It
sounded so funny that the remark has stayed with me ever since.
We were leaving the cultivated plain to our rear, and heading
now towards the Vindhya Range. The population was thinning out
already, for we were entering a tract which from here on would be
more and more scarred by ravines. We came into a gulley,
threaded it, climbed out at the far end, and there, not half-a-mile
away was the Collector’s camp.
The Collector’s Camp is a British period piece. It does not
antedate the Raj. Here at least was something of which the
Mughals had never dreamed; of which, grand administrators in
their heyday and their fashion, they had never felt the need. It is
to our credit that we did. At this very moment there must be
hundreds of thousands of underprivileged Indians, querulous
septuagenarians many of them, illiterates most of them, who can
conjure up a Collector’s visit to their neighbourhood; and
thousands who can still see their fathers and grandfathers face to
face with the Englishman outside a great big tent gesticulating
excitedly and demanding the redress of a wrong—or else cracking
gaunt fingers and looking sheepish because of some words which,
pronounced in a strange accent, have gone home. But except in
India (and I must not keep on saying in these pages that my India
embraces Pakistan and Bangla Desh) there are few today who
know from experience how a Collector went on tour and why. In
these next paragraphs I shall be recounting both the how and the
why.
Four months of the year would normally be earmarked for
touring. In Districts such as Allahabad or Agra (a man must be
forgiven if he instances what he knows rather than what he hears
about), containing large cities too often simmering politically or
communally, the programme was liable to interruption and
dislocation. But in Mirzapur or say, Bahraich right up by the
foothills of the Himalayas, the seasonal tour would be
accomplished according to plan. And the plan, other things being
UP-THE-COUNTRY 41
equal, would be to select an area whose turn it was. Ideally, tent

would be struck after three or four nights and the Camp could
march ten or twelve miles; so that an energetic Collector might
reckon to pitch on some two dozen sites in the course of the
winter. This presupposed not only the sparkling climate of Upper
India, but a clockwork operation which the subordinate staff, the
henchmen, everybody, performed con amore. You are eating your
breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast at 5.30a.m. in a roomy tent
which has a bathroom attached, flap doors and a drugget on the
ground, and you will be enjoying your cooked luncheon twelve
miles away at a table in a marquee where at the moment nothing
identifies the landscape save a mango grove or an avenue of neem
trees. By that hour you will have been through the morning’s mail
delivered at the new halting place, and your Reader, your Clerk of
Court, will have classified the petitions presented there. You will
have intimated to those concerned the inspection you propose to
carry out that afternoon, and your Stenographer, already
accustomed to his fresh surroundings, will be prepared to take
dictation when you send for him. There is no rural bazaar, let
alone a shopping centre to depend on, yet you will go to your
neatly made bed by lamplight after a menu no whit less adequate
than one served in your more permanent dining room. The retinue
at either of my two remote Districts would comprise, not counting
the Reader and the Stenographer, the following on the official
establishment: the armed Police Guard; the Orderlies; the
couriers; the elephant mahouts; the cameleers (muleteers in
mountainous country); the bullock cart drivers; and the team of
men-of-all-work. The domestic personnel with you in camp meant
the entire household except the gardeners and ranged from the
bearer, cook and tableservants to the syces, grass-cutters,
laundry man, water carrier and sweeper. The total could vary but
I would not put it lower than fifty souls in the less get-at-able
tracts—south of Dudhi, say, where the couriers, for example,
would be relay runners in the most literal sense. This then,
without, I hope, too many burdensome details is the how. I come
to the why.
The impression is often gained that the British official in India,
hedged about by venal underlings, was inaccessible to those who
could not pay. I concede that the word baksheesh comes to us
from India and I could add that in Persian ‘bribe’ and ‘manure’ are
expressed by the same noun. But there is a tendency to
exaggerate, and what Indians have the right to resent is the
implication that greasing the palm is a practice of which they have
the monopoly, is something not countenanced in the West. At
headquarters, even in big cities like Delhi and Allahabad a

sprinkling of poor men could commonly be noticed among the rich
or influential in the waitingroom three mornings a week. To none
was the door barred. I dare say the chaprasi, the orderly wearing a
great sash, expected his obol; rather, however, in the spirit of the
guard on the Great Western Railway who used to get you a corner
seat—and a shilling for it. For the immense majority of India’s
population, however, the peasantry that is, a journey to town was
a formidable step; to be contemplated, if at all, in extremis. Now the
seasonal tour brought the Hākim (the man who gives the order)
into their very midst, and I think a Collector usually treasured all
his days the memory of a certain response. You see yourself once
more, seated uncomfortably on the edge of a charpoy, the four-
legged low frame, in front of some windowless hovel—too wretched
to be called a cabin or hut which serves your host and four or five
of his family, both sexes, as bedroom, living room and kitchen, as
can be told from the raftered ceiling blackened with soot; you are
drinking a cup of rather sweet, very smoky tea, the buffalo milk
glistening on its surface; and Data Din—for this is his chance—is
doing most of the talking. Or, still in your thoughts, you are
taking your evening stroll after work and perhaps observing how
the blades of the young wheat, quite colourless at noon, are
showing emerald green in the setting sunlight. You sense that you
are being followed, you expected that anyway, and you wait for the
opening gambit from behind, the ritual ‘Huzoor’, ‘Huzoor’,
‘Presence’, ‘Presence’—‘Your Presence is Mother and Father to
me…’ Of course the Collector does not camp for months on end
merely to listen to one side of every case, and the villager knows
it. But he also knows his adversary will be getting his word in as
well and will embellish; therefore he must do likewise. And to the
peasantry there is comfort in the sheer obtaining of a tête-à-tête
with the Hākim. And the latter for his part found it worth while
too. Living in a tent, there is no escape; but he did not go into camp
to escape—or only from the quires of foolscap, not from his
people. ‘I am never alone except at meals,’ wrote a collector from
the wilds long ago in a letter home. It was not a complaint, it was
a boast.
Nor will the contact be all. There will be the scrutiny of papers in
selected, but not pre-selected, villages. We have to visualize an
isosceles triangle. The Collector is at the apex, three or four of his
principal officers will be along a top line; under these, the
Tahsildars along a second line; and then (I am skipping the
remaining intermediaries) along the base hundreds of village
accountants called Patwaris. The Patwari holds the Crop Record
UP-THE-COUNTRY 43
in which is entered the serial number of each field in the village;

its proprietor; its actual cultivator; its area; the soil classification;
the crop sown in the current year (a) in Autumn (b) in Spring.
My excuse for introducing these technicalities is that we are
touching here the very core of the system. The State owns the
land. Good. Everybody accepted this, always had from time
immemorial. In return—and this was our British contribution—
the people deserve to know exactly where they stand in law; each
cultivator vis-à-vis the landholder, each landholder vis-à-vis the
Government. A very little reflection will show how much hinged on
the correct maintenance of records which would be at the disposal
of the courts in the event of litigation. They were evidence of the
rights and the obligations of the rural population of the District; of
the Province; of the whole of India; affected the welfare of over 200
million souls in half-a-million villages. In the given touring
season, the particular Village Accountants responsible for the
immediate environs of the two dozen odd camping grounds would
be on their mettle, obviously. But remember (and the Patwaris
did) that the Collector on his horse can cover a good deal more
than the ten or twelve miles constituting the march, and will
frequently have it announced at twenty-four hours’ notice that he
will be at Pandeypore or Jasra (both villages being off the line and
chosen either at random or because of some disquieting rumour
that has come to his ears in their regard) to inspect the records.
He can be certain of an attentive audience, for this is an affair
which nobody in the two named villages will feel he can afford to
miss. Hanky-panky was not eliminated, it would be foolish to
pretend such a thing: in a country where few of the cultivators can
read what the Village Accountant writes, opportunity is bound to
be the ally of temptation. But it was combated untiringly. And one
authority, acquainted with what happens elsewhere, has
concluded that the accuracy of our Indian returns was probably
unapproached in any other country; adding that the agricultural
statistics periodically published in the United Kingdom would
strike a competent Patwari who investigated the methods of their
compilation, as a mass of assumed and unverifiable figures!
However, I am getting out of my depth now.
Half a mile to go. Ought I to freshen up a bit before meeting my
Collector? Too ridiculous. Everyone riding in shirtsleeves under
that cloudless sky would be in my state. Nevertheless we reined in
our horses for a breather, and wiped our brows. The resourceful
Risaldar produced a cloth to flick our boots with. I thought we
might go forward, when he said ‘Please’, unslung his field-glasses
and handed them across to me. They were powerful and I had no
trouble in focussing the camp, several very large and several

smaller tents, surmounted by the Union Jack; and studded round
about them various tiny white huddles, motionless until one of
them dissolved into movement and trickled towards the central
marquee; an elephant too, in a patch of shade, and a semi-circle
of camels couchant. These things I could distinguish with ease
from three or four furlongs off, but much concerning them was
three or four days away and not yet in my focus. For example,
that you became drowsy in those tents when the sudden sun
began beating on the roof, and grateful for the contained warmth
within when its rays were as suddenly withdrawn. I could not yet
take for granted the presence from an early hour of all those
villagers in white, squatting immobile and patient, waiting for the
summons from an imposing usher in a scarlet sash to come to
life, to advance, to go into the big tent where the Hākim was. I could
not know that the elephant’s name was Ram Pyari and that you
mounted by treading with one foot on the sharp edge of the heel
as she knelt, and placing the other on the looped-up tail held out
for you, before crawling with the aid of the girth-ropes onto the
pad (not howdah, notice) where you would sit in comfort as well as
style ten feet above the plain. Or that those camels would be
gurgling contentedly as they rested; but that at loading time each
package, even the first, was by definition ‘the last straw’ and apt
to provoke extremes of rage and utterance.
I was approaching Camp Dudhi. More, I was approaching an
important private landmark. If elated, I was also anxious. I was
confident the coming year would be absorbing but apprehended it
might be testing. I was not entitled to expect that it would be pure
delight. That it turned out so was due to the wisdom, tact and
humour of the man I was soon to meet. It was of consequence,
this matter of wishing the novice on the master who would have to
initiate him into the mysteries of his craft. Admittedly the two
would in the usual run be of similar background but in no walk of
life is that a guarantee of harmony, and obviously there were fairly
long odds on a so-so outcome. Between the protégé and his
Collector the communion was closer than that between the former
and, say, the dons who had tutored him hitherto; it bore no
resemblance to the relationship of a subaltern with the colonel of
the regiment, none to that between the houseman and the hospital
chief. It was not like being articled to anybody, devilling for
any body. Of course you would be free to go your own way after
office hours; but a very early lesson to learn was that in this
profession there were no such hours. So I come back to my word
‘communion’ with its hint of mutual fellowship. If in that first hot
UP-THE-COUNTRY 45
weather one of the pair was down with a bout of fever, who but
the other would sit at the foot of his bed for twenty minutes each
evening after sunset? In the inferno of that first summer when the
two of you, stretched in long chairs in the open, waited for the
night to rise up as from the earth and enclose you—it never
seemed to descend in India— who but the other was there to
respond to your enthusiasms even if he failed to share them; for
Cricket perhaps, for Greek History, for whatever it was? Who but
the other could co-operate in the solution of the month-old Times
Crossword Puzzle?
The severe lines of his face suggested an eminent judge gazing
down from a portrait on the wall. But no, that is wrong, for the
glance instantly belied severity and spoke only of kindness, of
modesty. In my mind’s eye I can see, coming forward from the tent
to meet me, a very tall figure in a slightly shabby tweed jacket. I
notice the knitted MCC tie and the heavy ‘Cawnpore’ topee with the
chinstrap dangling behind, but at this distance of half-acentury
only a few of his remarks are audible. What I am sure of is that
from those first moments he stood for me above the common
stature of mankind. Hugh Bomford, born in Calcutta, was to die
at Meerut—how could such as he be considered Strangers in
India? When, in 1939, the word was gasped out to me in Delhi by
a breathless messenger, I knew I should not look upon his like
again.
46
3
VILLAGES AND VILLAGERS
1.
LEARN BEFORE YOU TEACH
‘Our villages are dung heaps’ cried Gandhi on one occasion, and
there could be no more sincere or more influential champion of
the 200 million souls who lived in them. Now dung was the symbol
of wealth, not misery, in the countryside; and certain critics,
unable to resist this chance to be flippant, rejoined: ‘Hooray and
hurrah! With so much and to spare, the peasant can at long last
plough it into his field instead of burning it away as fuel.’ An
orthodox Hindu, in private conversation and with a humour which
would have tickled Gandhi himself, asked me: ‘Has our Mahatma
forgotten that tale in the Mahabharat where the peerless goddess
Shri chooses to take up her abode in the dung of the sacred cow?’
For my own part, in and out of those villages on horseback,
stopping at them, inspecting them, going back to them over the
years, I judged Gandhi to be right, or more right than wrong: in
their majority the villagers, twice-born and untouchable alike,
were dragging out their existence painfully indeed. However, if you
must criticize the Saint it was: first, for a seeming dismissal of the
style and degree of contentment which the village life engendered,
something absent altogether among the urban poor; and second,
for omitting to consider the sizable minority composed of peasant
proprietors cultivating their own few acres. A small army of
cultivators of 20 acres gladdens the memory, Spartan and
dignified men, men to whom the dictates of conscience and custom
were stronger than the lure of economic gain. ‘Come inside,’ one of
these has said to me, and in the spick and span little homestead
the brass pots are gleaming. Outside, in the evening light where
shadows are achieving the weirdest shapes and most prodigious
lengths, it is ‘the hour of the dust of the cows’ and the beasts are
returning from pasture. Here was no ‘dung heap’, but a setting of

beauty and tranquillity.
However, the majority claims us, and this, as I am saying, had
little in the way of solace. Upon the lot of the rural masses the
politicians were apt to spread themselves—and lay the blame
squarely at our door. The degradation of the villages ‘like every
other major problem today is the direct result of British policy’. This
time the bitter words are Nehru’s.
Tolstoy has a little story about a young intellectual on a visit to
his father’s village. It is harvest time, when everyone lends a
hand. ‘D’you mind coming along and bringing a rake,’ says the old
man. The lethargic youth excuses himself: ‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten all
my moujik words.’ But strolling later out of doors he treads on a
rake, the handle of which flies up to hit him on the forehead.
Rubbing his brow, he bursts out: ‘What damn fool left that rake
lying around!’
It is scarcely possible to transplant that scene in Indian soil. No
Indian intellectual would boast he did not know how the peasant
lived; he would pretend he did know. For political purposes he
must affect to know. But it would have been revealing to take a
bus load of top politicians—a bus to seat twelve rather than twenty
— including Nehru and Jinnah naturally, to a village a couple of
hours’ run from Delhi and, having assembled them around a
threshing floor, to have put them through a viva. Dr Rajendra
Prasad and Pt Govind Ballabh Pant would have emerged
unscathed from this. I would not have expected any of the others
to put up much of a show; to be at all certain, for instance, how
the peasant referred to that rake with wooden teeth pointing
upwards for turning over the sheaves, and what he called that
other implement, his scoop. But Gandhi, surely Gandhi…? I dodge
the question; he was at odds with the Congress party, out of
politics temporarily, when my imaginary outing was organized. In
this place I am simply saying that between the urban intelligentsia
from whose body the political leadership was drawn and the
villagers representing ninety per cent of the total population, a
chasm yawned. It need not therefore astonish us that when
Pandit Nehru in My Discovery of India comes to describe the
Indian village, he has to do so not in his own words but in those
of an English Civilian put on paper in 1830. And of his sister Mrs
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, most strikingly decorative of all the Society
ladies ‘messing about’ (her own father’s phrase) in the arena, and
whom I had the enviable duty of escorting when she was Minister
in the very last lap of the Raj, what can I truthfully record except
VILLAGES AND VILLAGERS 49
that she could go rustic as charmingly as Marie Antoinette could

go shepherdess?
Who, then, not being a villager, did know him? Surely I am not
hinting that an Englishman in my situation did? I make no such
claim, it would be preposterous. The educated outsiders who came
nearest to knowing him were: first and foremost, the sturdier of
my assistants, a Rajput from Jhansi, a Muslim from
Bulandshahr, somebody else from somewhere else, who having
battled successfully with their books at school and university and
been appointed to a Government post, had remained countrymen
at heart; second, the landed proprietor of moderate means living
his whole life on his estate and in the well-nigh undiluted
company of his tenants; and third, our small-town lawyer of an
earlier page, born and bred in one of the remoter Districts, of
whose clients at least nine out of ten will be rustics. No, the
utmost I maintain is that a certain Englishman could take his
pulse. By dint of camping for four months each winter within
walking distance of some village; of inspecting the villager’s crops;
of hearing his reply when sued for arrears of rent; of judging him
in a criminal case; above all, of attempting to elicit from him his
attitude in the chronic tug-of-war between religion, or more
properly custom, on the one side and material advantage on the
other—by dint of these things the Collector could, if but by a little,
narrow the gap that separated this man from himself.
I said that Nehru borrowed his version, eloquent and roseate, of
the Indian Village from a Civilian of past days. This was Metcalfe
who had called the village communities ‘little republics’ which
have nearly everything they want within themselves and are
almost independent of any foreign relations. Now that description
itself echoes the language of an equally acute, much more ancient
observer: namely, Megasthenes, ambassador to the court of
Chandragupta Maurya shortly after the death of Alexander the
Great. A recorded opinion may not amount to gospel truth, but it
is worth notice surely that in 300 B.C. and again in 1830 A.D. the
Indian village conjured up for a Greek and an
Englishman respectively something they each of them had been
educated to admire; a politeia, a self-governing institution.
The inference is that until as recently as the second of our dates
the rural community was still exhibiting its traditional solidarity.
During the hundred years, however, that followed Metcalfe’s
famous minute the integrity of the independent little units was
being steadily eroded by the tide of the British presence. The
Village Accountant, that influential functionary whose
acquaintance we have made already, is no longer as in olden times
a local nominee but a Government servant; and his jurisdiction,

moreover, may well embrace two or three other villages if these be
small. Communications are so improved and secured that a poor
peasant may supplement his frail resources by, say, haulage or
cartage in a neighbouring place during the agricultural off-season;
or that a more affluent cultivator may send his sons to a Primary
School three miles away. And, finally, our villager if he falls badly
from grace will not, as in days of yore, be judged by Five Wise Men,
his peers in the community to whom he will not dare to lie, but by
a tribunal of the modern sort to which he will not be so foolish as
to tell the truth. In gauging the extent of this process of
disintegration the contrast offered by villages behind the times, by
villages in Princely India I mean, where it has not occurred or
anyhow been less pronounced, is of help. A later chapter reports
the visit I paid to some examples of these at the invitation of a
Maharaja. But for the moment let me sum up by saying that while
one could no longer consider the village to bear any resemblance
to miniature republics as they still did seemingly in 1830, one
could nevertheless hardly fail even in 1930 to be profoundly
impressed by their internal cohesion; by their amazing staying
power; and by the immobility, possibly unequalled anywhere in
the world, of their inhabitants. To refer to my own experience of
the Indian village, I found myself invariably aware of a self-
contained society, suspicious of, and usually resentful of,
interference from without—no matter whether this came from an
agent of the British Raj, or from a party politician, or from a social
reformer.
Two hundred million peasants distributed among half-a-million
villages; ninety per cent of India’s children thinking of a particular
village as ‘home’. The statistics convey the immensity but not the
quality of the scene. They do not tell us whether villages
vary greatly or at all in importance or in character; whether one
village community is or is not comparable with the next.
India is a continent spread over twenty-nine parallels of latitude
— Virginia is on its northern line, Venezuela on the southern—a
continent therefore as varied as it is vast. But what chiefly used to
astonish us half a century ago on the journey, four or five days of
it, by train from Peshawar to Madras, or, not quite as long, from
Bombay to Calcutta, was that the variety of the landscape never
obliterated its uniformity. And man’s touch was even more
monotonous than nature’s. From the carriage window some of
those untidy huddles were visibly larger than others—that is about
all you could say. There were those huts, thousands upon
thousands of them, mostly thatched, mostly of mud, occasionally
tiled, occasionally of dry stone, always windowless, always

chimneyless; huts of a couple of rooms with a yard and a byre
attached. In the world of the Indian village, it was evident, dif f
erence was in size, not in style. It may be remembered from the
preceding chapter that I had put the question of size to my
Tahsildar guide out of Mirzapur and learned that the average
village flanking our route that day was of four hundred souls.
Elsewhere in the United Provinces I was sometimes to find the
figure climbing towards the thousand mark. In several other
provinces, no doubt, e.g. in those parts of the Punjab which
benefited by modern schemes of colonization, or in the tropical
Peninsula where heavier soils, red or black, favoured the growth
of more extensive crops, villages were as a rule larger. As against
this, they were apt to be very much smaller in fringe areas.
Smaller in the sparsely populated tract south of Dudhi, say, which
ravines and gullies rendered unrewarding agriculturally; smaller,
too, in the hilly districts bordering the Himalayas. But let us have
done with it—the figures do not alter the case much—and suggest
that a village of less than two hundred inhabitants is particularly
small, and a village of more than two thousand particularly large.
Our initial impression of the Indian village obtained from a
railway journey was of a huddle rather than a lay-out, and a
closer look would have confirmed this. Admittedly there are likely
to be a couple of focal points such as a tree of some girth
surrounded by a raised masonry platform on which the wiseacres
may relax and gossip, and a central well for drinking water (those
for irrigation being out among the fields they serve). But the
houses cluster higgledy-piggledy, the intersecting lanes lack the
least alignment. Hamlets? Around Delhi, the Eastern Punjab,
Agra, Meerut—in those regions the cluster is compact, centripetal.
But towards Allahabad and Benares the hamlet is common
enough: and in Peninsular India is usual. I suppose that where a
village is, or in the past has been, exposed to attack it will be
disinclined to throw off satellites; that where the community is
strongly heterogeneous it will be inclined to do so; and so f orth.
My recollection is that the peasantry in the first of the areas I have
named had no specific term even for ‘hamlet’; this being a concept
they never had occasion to express.
If to the passenger in our train the village was just that clump of
mean dwellings, to the villager it signified the inhabited site plus
the lands belonging to it. Or more exactly the villager would think
of it as certain lands plus the inhabited site associated with these.
He would employ one vernacular word for the ensemble (mauza),
another for the collection of houses within it; and he would never
confuse the two. It was similarly this aggregate that constituted the
administrati ve unit in which the Government was directly and
most intimately involved. The boundaries of each of the five
hundred thousand communes, unchanging down the years and
very likely down the centuries too, will be known to a nicety and
recorded in the official registers.
Finally, the question of size will be put, and once again my
answer will be hesitant. In the parts I knew intimately an average
mauza was between one hundred and two hundred acres. Yet in
certain other parts of India my lower and upper limits could, I
understand, be multiplied by as much as ten. And it was in my
experience emphatically the small holding, anything f rom three
acres to twel ve acres per cultivator that prevailed.
It would be idle to generalize further on population and acreage.
2.
A MODEL COMMUNITY
If I had turned up at this village about one hundred years sooner
than I did, I should no doubt have been welcomed in the meeting
hall or Chowpal by the Council of Five known as the Panchayat.
And dancing attendance on this would have been the hereditary
Headman, an elected Accountant, and the Foreman of the
Untouchables; three employees composing the executive. But in
the 1930s the Headman, the Accountant and a third village
functionary, the Watchman, a Dogberry in blue tunic piped with
red, who line up to receive me, are on the Government pay-roll
and therefore outside purely local control. Worse than this, though
the meeting hall is still in evidence, its hallowed purpose has
lapsed beyond recall. Truth to tell, it is simply a shed and a
dismal one, so we move towards the neem tree in front of it. Under
the shade of this I see a rickety iron chair, manifestly intended for
me, and a score of villagers seated on the ground in a semi-circle.
I ought to make it clear that the present is not a composite
photograph of the village community. I am portraying an example,
a real example of one species of a genus. Its place on the map is
the District of Agra; an area, that is to say, distant in mood and
not only mileage from Benares and even more palpably removed
from Peninsular India. You would easily find its double in the
neighbourhood or, pushing north, anywhere around Delhi; or,
looking still further afield, in the eastern Punjab. I am choosing it
now because it came as near as any I knew to the ideal—for surely
it is an ideal—of homogeneity. It was ‘small’ according to my
definition, worked by ‘small’ cultivators. The latter were
predominantly Jats: that is, they belonged to a farming caste

middle-ranking in the hierarchy. And those who were not Jats,
just a few houses of them, were Brahmins. Outside this combined
body of cultivators was the complementary element in the
community—the Untouchables. It is misleading to call them
‘outcastes’; Hindu society does not disown them; it owns them. But
keeps them in the bottom drawer.
How then could there be the homogeneity I talked about? I merely
mean that differences in my Jat village were reduced by the two
salutary tendencies which always seemed to me worthy of
considerably more attention than they got. The Brahmins in my
village had come down to earth and were doing things they were
not supposed to do: they were touching the plough and behaving
like Jats; while on the lower rungs the Chamars, untouchable
tanners, had given up eating carrion, were washing themselves
more frequently than my Jat friends washed, and generally taking
to Brahminical practices. And in any case a small village like this
was apt to be less riven than your large one; and more respectable.
It might not have a priest literate enough to read the Mahabharat
aloud in the vernacular, and might only have a very paltry temple
indeed; but the ugly extremes would be absent. It hardly attracted
the professional thieves and bogus ascetics who swarm over the
Indian countryside, and it was comparatively clean. Because the
inhabited area was restricted, it could be ringed by a belt
accessible to every one when nature called—to the marked benefit
of the interior lanes which were thus kept free of human
excrement.
That Brahmins should unbend and Untouchables display more
dignity than is their wont was due to the Jats who set the tone in
the village. The finest farmers in North India, they were also the
best levellers, up and down, in rural society. On the occasions,
rather rare, when a Jat finds himself in a temple, his demeanour
is unconventional. Face to face with his god, he betrays not the
slightest sign of awe, is even capable of giving the deity a thorough
dressing down. As a Magistrate I therefore felt flattered on the
occasions, numerous these, when a Jat pointed an indignant f
orefinger at me in my court room. Moreover, the Jat, possessing
skills himself, was quick to value these in his neighbours. He
could see that the barber, the oil man, the smith, the tanner, the
whole contingent of the Untouchables had theirs; he could not see
that the sanctimonious Brahmin had any at all. I have heard him
refer to syces and tanners with a respect verging on fellow feeling.
The result was that in the village now claiming our attention, the
socially inferior caught the Jat manner themselves and to that
extent were uplifted. On one of my tours in this vicinity, we were

striking tents when the office marquee flopped heavily upon a
table which had inadvertently been lef t inside: and smashed it.
The village carpenter was sent for to repair it, and I found him
presently seated on the ground, and working with such
concentrated zeal that he made no move to get to his feet at my
approach. I picked up his saw by its rectangular wooden f rame
and idly ran a hand over the blade. ‘My dear chap (Are bhai) the
teeth are cut in the wrong direction,’ I said. They ought to bite
when you push, not when you pull.’ Without looking up he replied:
‘I hold my job down with my toes, as you see. How you hold down
yours I can’t think.’
Somewhere in Chapter 1 I commented that the Collector was
prone to favour his own protégés. I shall very likely be charged
now with showing undue bias in favour of my Jats. My defence is
not simply that they were the ideal farmers on account of their
skills and physique, but that, in their unsophisticated fashion
they were having a healthy impact on Hinduism itself. And the
reason no doubt why I was to return to this mauza and sit on that
iron chair under the neem tree whenever chance offered over the
years, was that here if anywhere a latterday Englishman might
sense something of that ancient community of interest which from
time immemorial had been the stamp of Indian village life.
In the village the individual is more demonstrably submerged in
the collectivity, and enmeshed by it, than he would be in any town.
His two primary allegiances as a Hindu are more obsessive. To
begin with, the ‘house’ or joint family consisting of father, sons,
grandsons and the corresponding womenfolk all living under one
roof, will be exposed to fewer disintegrating forces; and second,
the ‘brotherhood’, i.e. the small caste group made up of a number
of such ‘houses’, will be emotionally more intense because so
narrowly parochial. Moreover, his relationship with the lower
element of the community could not but be close. The
untouchable section was remunerated in grain from the threshing
floors in Autumn and in Spring, and might receive supplementary
rewards. For example, a Sweeper, if I remember, could normally
count on a chupatty (girdle cake of unleavened bread) a couple of
times a week from every family he served. And then he could send
his wife along to deliver your children, women in travail being
unclean. She would earn one rupee (ls.6d. or seven and a half
pence) for a boy, this fee covering conventional publicity as well:
such as the announcement of the arrival of a one-eyed girl, so as
to trick the evil influences. For a daughter she could charge half;
that is, eight annas. Another ‘Untouchable’ of consequence in the
community was the barber, and I am putting the label between

inverted commas to indicate how inappropriate it is in his case.
For the Twice-born suffered his touch regularly, and, as if this
were not enough, would of ten appoint him— or they did so in the
parts of India I knew best—as their trusted gobetween and a
match-maker! And a third man to keep in with was the Chamar,
or tanner, whose leanings towards self-betterment I have already
noticed in this chosen village of mine. He made your shoes for you,
and should your cow expire in the living room—no uncommon
disaster in a society which nursed the creature so long as there
was breath in her body—who but he would be on call to remo ve
the carcase? Of course the last barriers were not down. I believe
that if I had asked my Jats under that neem tree about temple
entry, they would have grinned and left the question in the air. But
if I had pinned them down to say whether their Untouchables
could draw water from the central well in the village, what then? I
can hear in reply the Hindustani equivalent of ‘Oh, come! There
are limits.’
3.
THE RURAL ROUNDABOUT
I argued early in this chapter that the vocabulary of the villager
was largely incomprehensible to the more sophisticated politicians.
No less apparent was it that the voice of the latter, however
repetitive and shrill it might sound to us officials, went unheard
even a little way out of town. The anecdote of the rustic who
surmised that Dominion Status must be one of the grand-
daughters of Queen Victoria is doubtless ben trovato. But everyone
will accept the testimony of so reliable an informant as Mr
M.N.Srinivas that just after Partition, with all that this entailed,
‘intelligent’ villagers twenty miles from Mysore City had not heard
of either Jinnah or Nehru. In my experience the usual social
space, as the anthropologists term it, of the poorer people in rural
areas was about fifteen miles. Not more, in spite of the lorry that
occasionally passes, trailing its streamer of dust, along a metalled
road three kos (leagues) from their home; in spite of the need to
take that lorry into the city, should litigation occur; in spite of the
decision of a lad from one of the Jat houses to join the Army and
see the world.
The score or so of villagers who wait to greet me under the neem
tree—we might as well go back to them—are either charged with
the advocacy of some local cause or else are in venerable
retirement on account of age. The rest of their number, aided by
such of their sons as have grown beyond the toddler stage, will
have been out in the fields since sunrise; nor will they return until
dusk when they will smoke the hubble-bubble and chat until their
womenfolk have cooked the evening meal. And this would be their
routine save in the period of enforced idleness, some eight weeks
of it from midApril to mid-June (that is after the Spring crop and
before the land can be made ready for the Autumn crop), when
they stayed at home thatching and pottering about; or, if energetic
enough, sought subsidiary work in an adjacent place. The
economists, the reformers, the Collector too, all of us properly fed
and unacquainted with the toll of physical strain on the under-
nourished, deplored this unproductive interlude. I doubt if we
always bore in mind that each field must be ploughed ten times
and levelled six times against the Autumn crop, eight and six
times against the Spring crop. Did we take due account of the
intensive toil exacted at the time of irrigation? If by luck a pond be
near, its water will be channelled into a suitably sited reservoir,
and be lifted from this in baskets into a catch basin a few feet
higher. Meanwhile, the given field will have been divided into
small squares having raised borders of deftly patted soil. Into
these squares in turn a rivulet of water will then be coaxed in an
operation which, as I watched it, would take me back to childhood
experiments on a sandy beach in Cardigan Bay. Sometimes—it
depended on the distance of the pond from the field or fields—
several reservoirs would be required; and as many lifts, with half a
dozen men posted at each.
Otherwise there was nothing for it but the well. And in this
particular at least Nature relented: there would be water no
matter where you drilled at a depth of, say, seventeen to twenty-
one feet in the areas I have been naming. A huge leather bucket is
attached to a rope which passes over a pulley at the well mouth.
The other end of the rope is fastened to the yoke of a pair of
bullocks. These are made to descend a ramp equal in length to the
depth of the well, thereby raising the bucket to the surface; and
they lower the bucket again when emptied by walking back up the
slope.
Dharti, the Good Earth of India, demanded much of those who
were pledged to her cult, and the onlookers were possibly too
quick to reprove a community which so far from being idle was
periodically in sore need of a respite from its labours.
However that may be, the women of the village profit from no
such holiday. If their men are stretching themselves, yawning,
ejaculating ‘Ram Ram’ or ‘O Prabhu’ by about five o’clock in the
morning, their wives will already have begun the daily task of
grinding grain, pounding it in a stone mortar with a mighty pestle.

The woman holding this by its iron ring swings it into the air and
lets it drop with a thud into the bowl, and will think nothing of
repeating the movement for two uninterrupted hours. A song
accompanies the action, and deaf was the Collector riding past en
route for an early inspection who did not hear it. To hear it was
not to catch the words, however, and for myself I never could.
Next, the women will have the yard to clean, the floors to sweep,
the pots and pans to scour. Then it will be time to prepare the
mid-day meal to be sent or taken out to the men in the fields. This
is a picnic rather than a spread, meagre for a farmer who has
been fortified at dawn by no more than a cup of water and a few
pulls at the hubblebubble. It is normally of grain parched and
ground to flour and whipped into a paste. Some wild-growing
greens, tough and leafy, may be boiled to go with it. The evening
meal will be grander, requiring longer preparation. At this,
chupatties of barley or spiked millet—wheat is too dear—will be the
main dish, and with these there will be pulse boiled with spice;
and if the weather is hot, there may be a sherbet of unrefined
sugar in water. It could be nine o’clock before the family
assembles to sit down to this, and the hour will be late by the time
dinner is over and done with. And all day long in between there
will have been that stately parade back and forth, the procession
to and from the well. In the role of Rebeccas the village women
have a second song, much quicker moving than the other, and,
except for the refrain, quite near to ordinary speech. The difficulty
of grasping it was not linguistic but had to do with manners. Not
in purdah, these women were none the less of good name, and if
an outsider such as my Muslim assistant or myself approached so
as to get within earshot, would stop singing, draw their bordered
headdresses across their mouths, and giggle self-consciously. To
entreat them to resume was of absolutely no avail. One might at
most hope to do better some other day when the effects of a novel
situation had worn off. It was due to Jafri and not to me that we
managed in the end to get the words down on paper.
A recitative of this sort is a jingle not a ballad; but at least a jingle
in which the bells are shaken in sequence, not in unison. In the
refrain of this one there was, as I have hinted, a literary echo. An
imperious vocative of six syllables: ‘You-with-the-sallow-face’ can,
I am fairly certain, only be an apostrophe to Krishna.
I do it into English here in the hope that the flavour of Indian
village humour may prove pungent enough to be tasted even when
thus adulterated.
SONG AT THE WELL
We each have got our grouses as we sing about our spouses.

Krishna, be a listener to our song!
I being the first have a husband with a thirst,
He’s drunk and he’s lying on the floor.
Krishna, just you listen to my song.
I am the second and to mine a harlot beckoned,
I being the third have a lad who can’t be stirred
In our bed where his pleasure is to snore.
I am the fourth, and the reason for my wrath
Is that Auntie’s pushed us in and locked the door.
I’m a newly wedded bride and she says it’s time I tried
But I shrink from my beloved more and more.
The spinning of thread for the weaver was another of woman’s

tasks and it may seem odd that I have left it to the end. I have
done this deliberately for the reason that it was taking up less and
less of her time. In the past each woman would have had her
wheel, but nowadays one or two sufficed for the house, and
usually an old crone would be seen at it rather than girls and
younger women. If ever I enquired why, the answer was invariable
and rational: Millmade clothes are cheaper. Working so hard as
these village women did, five a.m. to ten p.m., it was perhaps a
good thing that they were no longer obliged to spend much energy
on this traditional occupation.
4.
HE MADE BOTH ENDS MEET
Take Ram Din—and it is sheer luck that I can. Occasionally I used
to choose a village I had visited and get my revenue assistant to go
back there at leisure, without me, and elicit, check and record the
budget of some crony of mine from among the cultivators. A
notebook meant for ephemeral reference found its way in the
sequel into a tin-box instead of the wastepaper basket.
How Ram Din, grazier by caste, of Pandeypore in the Kantit
circle of District Mirzapur in the United Provinces fared in the year
ended 31 March 1930 can therefore be told in this place. The
figures are not guesses: all I do below is to touch up the running
comments the speaker allowed himself in his several detailed

chats with Najmuddin Jafri all those years ago:
‘We are five men, five women and six children in my house. We
cultivate nearly twel ve and a half acres, six in the Autumn crop
and a bit more in the Spring crop. We use two ploughs with two
pairs of bullocks. We have cattle also, twenty cows; for we are
Ahirs by caste, graziers.
‘You ask if I have read in school. No, because my life is here.
After schooling village lads cannot work in the fields; they are too
weak, and become loafers. What? Yes, I know, I know the eldest
son of Baijnath did read in Primary School only two miles from
here and is now in service Allahabad way with the Raja of
Shankar garh, but he is Brahmin. And his two other sons, they
also read in school, and what are they doing? They are sitting,
sitting. This is all right, for no Brahmin touches the plough in
Pandeypore; so the two boys are back where they were. I am not
against Baijnath. No, all I say is some can afford to sit quietly, but
we people cannot.
‘I told this to Collector sahib also who was with us the other
day, but he said, “No, education is a good thing.” “Look,” he said,
“if I want to send an important word I write it instead of asking
the barber to go somewhere and speak it with his mouth.” “Like
this,” he said, taking a stream-pen (sarit kalam) and paper from
his pocket. But the ink gushed from that pen, making the white
sheet black as night, and everybody laughed. “It seems it is not
my lucky day,” says he. “Perhaps I ought to have consulted my
Prohit, my spiritual director, before coming to you.” And we
laughed again. It is true we all have our family priests to cast
horoscopes and tell us whether to go out or stay home. We paid
ours sixty four pounds of grain this year.
‘What am I saying? I mean last year. For today is the middle of
the month of Chait (March-April) and the old year is out. This is
why I can sit here, pulling at the hookah although the sun is up
these many hours. The Spring crop is garnered and a man takes
rest. But soon we must begin carting on hire hereabouts, our two
pairs of bullocks being idle; and also we will thatch the house.
Just for now are we passing the hookah round.
Today is a day for thinking, for counting; not a day for doing. I
told the Collector this and he said, “That is right. People,
especially villagers, prefer not to count, but one man in the village
is fond of counting and he is the money-lender.” I replied: “We
know it. I remember what our father would repeat to us sons:
“Take a stride according to the width of your skirt.” “Clap hands
at that,” said the Collector, clapping his. So we all clapped.
‘I had persuaded our Village Accountant who is Kayasth by

caste and clever at arithmetic to write down both what resulted in
Autumn and what came out in Spring. This he did in Aghan
(November-December) and again lately. He was willing, for he
always drinks milk when he visits our place. “Everything is
written,” I said to the Collector, showing him this very paper, “and
may be read.”
‘For the Autumn crop I sowed as usual great millet, spiked
millet and pigeon pea, having obtained the necessary seed, 60 lbs
in all, on loan from my landlord. I harvested nearly 3,000 1bs.
‘For the Spring crop I sowed barley, grain and wheat, with 100
1bs of seed likewise borrowed; and I harvested nearly 2,000 lbs. I
had to pay back the landlord 200 1bs, being the loan plus
interest. And during the year I paid the village servants (washer-
woman, barber, carpenter, smith) 600 1bs of grain—and there was
our Prohit to reward as well. Thus the grain left in my bins was 4,
000 1bs; that is, 50 maunds (2 tons).
‘At the prevailing prices of the different grains this is valued at
about Rs300.
Then my cattle. My twenty cows have been yielding 5 1bs of milk
daily and this fetched Rs250. The sum would have been more had
they not been thin cows. We sold the yield to Brahmins, not
drinking a cup ourselves and only pouring off a little each day for
the three smaller children. But I admit we also consumed ghi,
clarified butter, to the value of Rs60.
‘So income came out at about Rs600; from which my annual
rent of nearly Rs100 was paid, leaving Rs500.
‘But wait. Our bullocks are strong and usually earn us that
much in the off-season. This time cartage was also demanded at
Vindhyachal six miles from here where they are building a hospital:
so we gained an extra Rs500 in the slack months. This was
against hope.
‘Of course we had manure f rom the cows and enough dung
cakes for fuel. And from the various crops we got sufficient grain
stalks and chaff for our fodder.
‘Well, then, we sixteen souls had about Rs1000 to live on, and
this would have done us nicely, eating as we do. But I have not
told you our daily diet. Per person it was: 21bs flour of barley or
millet; 4oz of pulse; 2oz of unrefined sugar; wild-growing greens;
and some ghi, clarified butter, but not much. And tobacco, to be
sure, 2oz for us men. But no milk for any of us except the little
ones, as I have said. It would have done us, yes, but for the
marriages…ah, the marriages. We had three this last year.
However, mindful of Father’s advice I had put by Rs100 from the
previous year; and not only this but I celebrated all three at one
and the same moment, thus keeping expenses down to Rs300. We
could not observe the festivals or save a maund (80lbs) or two of
grain for a rainless (sic) day; but at least there was a new sari at Rs3
for each of our women, and there was oil for the cressets. We were
able to pull through, thanks to Father. Father spoke true. We
people are hobbled by our skirts and must tread gently, gently.’
He was a sensible man, Ram Din.
5.
THE MUSLIM VARIANT
I have been describing village life in terms of Hindu society for all
the world as if Islam had not impinged on it. But did not Muslims
predominate heavily in the Punjab, in Bengal, in Sind; were they
not present in sizable minorities elsewhere including, and notably,
the United Provinces where my scenes are laid? True, quite true.
But I consider my method to be defensible. Perhaps I might hang
this postscript on the following casual reminiscence. I was riding
away from a village one day with Jafri, my Muslim assistant, at
my side. ‘You know’ he said, ‘the villagers we’ve just been among
don’t exclaim ‘Ram! Ram!’ when they wake up in the morning,
but, punctuated with several yawns, ‘La ilāha illa ‘llāh…There is
no God but the one God: Muhammadur Rasūl-Ullāh…Muhammad
is his Apostle.’ He was of course being mildly sarcastic; was
implying that Muslim villages were identical with Hindu villages in
every essential, and distinguishable by no more than the
occasional expletive to be heard on the lips of their inhabitants.
It is not easy to reply to this gentle taunt. In the Muslim village
there will be a little white-washed mosque in lieu of a temple
where the officiating Mulla, almost certainly illiterate, repeats the
Koran without understanding what he recites. Amjad Ali, if that be
our villager’s name, will repair here to worship; while in the
corresponding Hindu village a couple of miles away, Baijnath will
go along to the temple now and then and tinkle a bell there, or
listen to a Pujari (no more literate probably than the Mulla) blowing
a conch. And in the Muslim village each family will be counselled
by a Pir instead of by a Prohit. Through both villages a constant
trickle of beggars will be wending its way: in the one case he will
be an unkempt Sadhu announcing his arrival with a wooden
clapper; in the other a dishevelled Fakir announcing his in a sing-
song chant. In either setting our villager will put a pinch of grain
or a morsel of food into the extended pail or bowl—and feel much
better for having done so. It can be argued that these are parallel
not identical performances. So be it. But a shock is in store: in

our Muslim village the caste system, which gives Hinduism—or so
we all say—its identity, manifestly retains its hold. How is one to
account for this?
I think we have to remind ourselves that the village
communities were not subdued by force of arms when the
Muslims descended upon India in their several waves of conquest.
On the contrary, they were left to the continued expression of
their traditional character on the single condition of loyalty to a
distant throne. Largely Hinduism’s reaction to foreign dominion
had been to withdraw into itself: to harden its institutions; so that
caste became more not less rigid. To be sure, in the regions where
the aggressors had established their strongholds and where,
consequently, Islam was ‘in the air’, countless villagers who were
low in the social scale welcomed conversion as an escape from
degradation. But these converts, having sought a new status
rather than a new society, clung to their customs. I was never
inclined to attach much significance to the interest of Muslim
villagers in this or that Hindu festival, or even to the eagerness of
some in the region of Hardwar or Prayag to bathe in the Ganges at
the time of the great pilgrimages to these centres. With them it
was a case of joining in the fun. But the organic structure of their
own society was another story. Where several Muslim villages were
clustered together it was no rare thing for the agricultural and the
artisan groups to be rigidly endogamous, and to be otherwise
steeped in caste. There was no doubt about it.
Perhaps then there was point in my companion’s gentle irony.
The Indian villages, label them Hindu or label them Muslim,
conformed to the stereotype; and the people in these tiny,
coherent communities did so no less. They differed outwardly in a
few things, of course they did; but they shared their inner
attitudes. And if in retrospect a Collector had to frame a sentence
about them I believe it would be this: Two hundred million
rustics, deprived of nearly all the material advantages that life can
offer, were unshakeable in their conviction that man shall not live
by bread alone.
4
THE PRETERNATURAL
‘Magic’ was the heading I had in mind for the present chapter, but
I have changed it at the last minute, considering that in modern
English we employ this word only when speaking of something
which is not magic: a conjuring trick for example, or even the
drying property of a certain make of paint. The Supernatural’,
which I next thought of, would fill the bill, but fill it to overflowing;
being hallowed on a plane far above most of what I shall be writing
about. So I have come down a peg or two to fix on The
Preternatural’. My definition of this is: that which, situated
alongside the world of the senses, is not explicable by the known
laws of physical science. By insisting on the preposition
‘alongside’ I hope to convey that this adjacent region is not heaven,
that its inhabitants are as often as not cantankerous, spiteful,
malevolent, and deserve to be outwitted by stratagem or, should
they unhappily get inside you, to be cast out for the devils they
are.
At the time of my arrival in India the health authorities of
Bombay were improving their measures to combat malaria. An
obvious step was the sealing up of the large number of
mosquitobreeding wells in the yards or paved enclosures of private
houses; these serving no purpose whatever since the introduction,
long ago now, of a piped water supply. Strong objection was taken
to this proposal on the ground that if the wells were to be covered
over, the spirits which reside in them would be unable to get out.
The protest was not held to be unreasonable, and the Health
Department proceeded to suggest that the concrete covers, which
had been envisaged, might be fitted with perforated metal discs
drilled with holes to allow the entrance and exit of the spirits. The
only point to settle was the size of these holes. In the opinion of
the entomologist of Bombay University who was called in, a
mosquito could not drag its tiny frame through an aperture of,
say, onetwentieth of an inch even when starved. How would that
do? The response was favourable: according to the best advice at
64 THE PRETERNATURAL
the disposal of the objectors, a spirit, being unencumbered with

wings, and of course unlikely to be bloated, would have no trouble
in negotiating perforations of that measurement. The Municipal
Commissioner was now in a position to go ahead, and announced
that ‘in order to give access and egress to the spirits, brass plates
with fine holes not more than one-twentieth of an inch in diameter
may be inserted in the covers’. Fresh to the scene I seized on this
little episode in municipal government as an early opportunity to
raise my eyebrows and murmur
‘Match me this marvel save in eastern clime.’
It was a bad mistake that I made. The Indian habit of thought was
different from ours not because it was specifically oriental but
because we had been engaged on and off in changing ours for some
centuries now, whereas the Indians had not, or hardly noticeably,
been changing theirs. Anyhow, I quickly forgot about the thing
and it was not until a good ten years later that I recalled it.
Fortune had by then set me down in the presidential chair at the
Delhi Town Hall; and one day, happening to have several members
of the council with me in my room, I related the Bombay incident
to see how they would take it. They exploded with laughter. And
salaaming me before dispersing, they declared how much I had
lightened the day’s burden for them by telling them that comic
story. Nevertheless I was quite sure that each one of them believed
that there had indeed been spirits in those disused wells of
Bombay even as there were spirits inhabiting wells and cracked
boulders and trees round about us at that very minute in Delhi;
believed that only a fool did not reckon with them. One of those
same committee-men in fact, Harish Chandra who wrote B.A.
LL.B. after his name, would in the sequel come to me, his eyes
rolling with apprehension, to report that a mischievous Muslim
was planning to lay an axe to a Pipal tree in his Ward, the Pipal
sacred to all Hindus on the branches of which the Devs were wont
to recline and listen to the music of the leaves. Today they had
guffawed, Muslims and Hindus both, because it had been
expected of them.
In a word, my experiment hadn’t come off. These representative
burghers had not revealed their thoughts; any village
audience would have been better value. To get anywhere I would
have to broach the subject with a Muslim divine, and with a
Pandit of the traditional sort nurtured on Brahmanic beliefs.
Of the former Khwaja Hasan Nizami was a graceful
embodiment. I do not have to jog my memory in his regard: his
LOOKING BACK ON INDIA 65
photograph is in front of me, his Koran in Urdu at my elbow. Each

time I encounter that humorous gaze, each time I read the
inscription to me on the fly-leaf of The Book, the years fall away.
And how the Sage of Delhi looked the part! He habitually wore a
flowing robe with capacious sleeves, and a conical cap. His tall
delicate figure was familiar alike to the unlettered and to the
studious; to the humble pilgrims from far and near who streamed
out of the city of Delhi to visit the tomb of the celebrated
fourteenth-century saint Sheikh Nizamuddin Aulia, of which my
friend was the hereditary guardian, and to those who sat at his
feet spellbound as he discoursed on the life and works, including
at least one very famous malediction, of their patron. The austere
would sometimes hint to me that Khwaja Hasan Nizami was a
showman. But the austere (the Imam of the Great Mosque among
them) were of the puritans of the Faith who in India, as
throughout the Islamic world, were inclined to raise their voices—
not always convincing themselves, let alone others, as they did so
—against the veneration of saints. ‘It is more right and worthy,’
the Imam would quote severely, ‘to dwell beside God than to dwell
beside His creatures.’
Certainly Khwaja Sahib had his critics. He also had his
enemies. One of these had tried to murder him. He never tired of
illustrating for me on the site, and with the aid of a plan, how the
attempt had been foiled by higher agency. ‘I am seated here in the
courtyard,’ he would begin, ‘Holy Writ on my knees, my head
bent, my eyes lowered on the page. The would-be assassin enters
by the only door from the outside, that narrow one; he is therefore
straight in front of me. He takes aim, he fires. Now look at the
spot (it is ringed in bright colour) on my right, three yards from
me, where the ball deflected in its flight struck, and embedded
itself in that wooden partition…’ Presently, the drama narrated for
the umpteenth time, he would call for tea to be served; and as we
drank this would point to the graves, several of them very ancient,
surrounding us, and extol the character of each of the occupants
till we reached the newest. ‘Here is uncle,’ he would say curtly.
Curtly, I would guess, because he revered the tomb exceedingly
and did not want anything untoward to happen to it. Praise is apt
to stimulate the attention of the Evil Eye. You have to be careful of
this, as every Muslim knows.
To Khwaja Hasan Nizami, then, I put my question: ‘were those
brass plates with the little holes in them really necessary?’ There
are drawbacks about a conversation in an oriental language, but
there is this advantage, that the salient words spoken by your
interlocutor tend to stick. ‘They were not necessary,’ he replied,
‘but they were proper.’ He elaborated. It is only in fairy tales, he

explained, that jinns (this Arabic word has made itself at home in
Urdu as in English) can be bottled. ‘In real life,’ he went on, ‘they
can get through concrete if need be. But the thing is there are
benevolent and malevolent genies, and we should endeavour to
assist the former and propitiate the latter.’ ‘Assist?’ I interrupted,
‘how, pray?’ ‘Look,’ he continued in his soft mellifluous Urdu, ‘if
you return to your residence this afternoon to find a pile of bricks
on the front verandah you will enter by shifting some and climbing
over others; but you will not regard the obstruction as a seemly
reward for your benevolence.’ ‘I see,’ I said, flattered to be aligned,
albeit simply for purposes of illustration, with the well-disposed
spirits, ‘but what of the second category? Is it right to be
conciliatory in the face of evil?’ ‘In the preliminary stage, yes,’ he
answered, ‘as a manoeuvre; as a ruse merely, while the trap is
being laid for the adversary’s lasting discomfiture.’ He paused
reflectively. ‘But, alas, the favoured few alone know how to
accomplish this.’ Then he chuckled softly, leaving me to infer that
a man of his spirituality might aspire to be among those few.
It remained to feel the Brahmanic pulse and Pandit Jyoti Prasad,
Shastri, of Benares was obliging enough to extend his wrist. I did
not know him, wanted anyhow to meet him, and here was a talking
point. In India, perhaps more than elsewhere, a first conversation
between strangers may too easily peter out in a series of hesitant,
inconsequent trivia. The Pandit was fair, lean, long-headed, of
intellectual countenance. He was carefully shaven, neatly
turbaned; and wore over his shoulders a lovely snow-white flimsy
muslin shawl like a toga. His dress was a linen dhoti dangling to his
heels and a shirt worn outside this. He was of the old school,
versed in the Hindu sacred texts (that is what Shastri means),
educated at the centre of Sanskrit learning and emphatically a
product of that environment. Which is to say, he was observant,
and acutely so, of the sensuous world but utterly undisturbed by
it: was, for instance, totally apathetic in matters political, suffering
Gandhi with an amused tolerance. Enough for him the puzzle of
existence.
‘You are troubled, sir, needlessly,’ he began, speaking to my
delighted surprise a pure English the tone of which was only
slightly alien to the ear. ‘You have been worrying about this
insignificant incident, asking yourself—and, now, ten years later,
asking me—whether the Bombay City Corporation ought to have
stood by the real world and to hell with the unreal world invented
by some barmy objectors. For, excuse me, that is how you are
viewing the matter. Now, to start with, I do not like your “real”. Of
course I accept what is evidenced by the appearances, but I

accept it only provisionally. I deny that it can impose finality. And
I treat— we of the priesthood all treat—what is not so evidenced in
precisely the same somewhat, if you follow me, cavalier fashion.
Why, the popular deities, they too are liable to vanish! And what is
this antithesis you are introducing? Surely, sir, it is you who are
inventing —inventing frontiers without warrant, yes, without
warrant. Those mosquitoes, now, and those spirits—do you mean
to tell me…’
‘Panditji, Panditji,’ I interrupted by way of setting a limit to the
discussion, ‘if I understand you aright, you are complimenting the
Bombay authorities on their rational attitude.’
Was there or was there not a smile drawing those compressed
lips sideways and up?
‘You understand me aright,’ he said.
It was not in the wolds, it will be seen, not in some outlying
subdivision of a remote country District where souls are simple
that I was given this lesson in India’s unabashed acceptance of
the preternatural. India’s acceptance I am saying because it was
everywhere, everybody’s. You could not be long in the company of
those about you, cultivated or untutored, polite or boorish, without
becoming aware of their constant preoccupation with a department
of existence which is pooh-poohed—or at any rate unrecognized—
by modern science. In the picture I have been trying to recapture
and reproduce the concern was with the antics of hobgoblins, but
of course the area of the ‘department’ as I have called it was large:
it extended to the uncanny in any form. Everybody believed in
sprites and ghosts—that went without saying: but everybody
believed also that some of us men, quite ordinary men, are
endowed with latent powers which are perpetually seek ing, and
occasionally obtaining, release. Whether such release just
happened or could be assisted by secret technique, breathing
exercises, self-torture etc. was uncertain and much debated: what
was beyond dispute, was that powers of the kind were sometimes
released, were sometimes exerted. The particular power, so far as
I could understand, might be mental (expressed, for example, in
clairvoyance, prophecy, thought-reading, witchcraft) or physical
(expressed in various manifestations of bodily control baffling to
medical science). It was not very many months before I listened for
the first time to an allegation of witchcraft; nor many years before
I was solemnly assured by a subordinate official that there lived a
mendicant in his home town who could lift cannon balls with his
eyelashes. For the strangest tale everybody had an ear so that I
began to wonder whether ‘unbelievable’ could be translated into
any Indian vernacular. Some of the stories, candour compels me

to admit, were in danger of becoming stock. For instance there
was that wizard whose pleasure it was to reduce a buffalo to the
size of a pea, persuade his enemy to swallow this and then cause
the buffalo to resume its original bulk. And there was the Rope
Trick—but more of that in a moment.
On my own in a District, I very soon grew accustomed to the
pattern of thought I am here tracing, and took it for granted that
people would cling tenaciously to their traditional beliefs. It ceased
to strike me as odd that the humble rustic in his millions should
prefer to suspend a potsherd containing a charm—a word or two
scrawled by a semi-literate spiritual preceptor, or perhaps only a
few circles and strokes—across the entrance to his village when
his cattle fell sick, rather than take the poor beasts to the
veterinary hospital; and should submit to vaccination against
small-pox or to cholera inoculation merely for the sake of the
benefits that might be calculated to accrue from humouring the
Collector.
Humble those rustics were, but I dared not write them off as
ignorant—not in this context. Think of the Greeks here. The
Greeks for all that they had exalted Reason to as high and
glittering an eminence as it has ever attained in the story of
civilization, remained a society which saw gods everywhere, gods
meriting a very small ‘g’ for the most part, who loved to interfere in
human affairs. Wasn’t it Thales, the Father of Science, himself
who declared ‘All things are full of gods’? But what need was there,
for that matter, to go back to Antiquity? Why, Dr Johnson,
incredulous on all other points, hard-hitting, magisterial, was a
firm believer in miracles and apparitions. As an Oxford
undergraduate, while turning the key in the lock of the door to his
room at Pembroke, he distinctly heard his mother calling him by
name; and later on in his career went eagerly to Cock Lane on a
visit to a little girl of eleven who could feel the spirit running
about like a mouse up and down her back. Or let us be more up
to date still. Here is Bertrand Russell claiming in one of his Essays
that some unaccountable strength within him compelled him to
persist (in his plea for Great Britain’s neutrality in 1914). It was a
force, he adds obscurely, that others would have called the Inner
Voice. What on earth is the great philosopher, as a rule so adroit
in his management of language, trying to say? In Gandhi you
expected this kind of utterance; not in Russell. And if in the 1980s
half the glossies on sale at the bookstalls in London, Paris and
New York have their Horoscope page, was it really so laughable
that in many of the Indian States of my time the Department of
Astrology prepared periodical reports on future events? Of the

fifteen bedrooms at the Athenaeum none is No. 13. The Members,
literate to a man, and not a few of them bishops and scientists,
have shown the sense to approve nem-con. the painting of 12A on
a middle door along the fourth floor landing.
Deep down then, undeniably, the human species relishes the
Occult. Only in India the appetite for it is avowed. We have to bow
to the habit, the genius of a people, and if India has had an
aptitude, it has been for contemplation as opposed to action. And
as a sort of side effect of this, a premium has always been put
upon mendicancy. I can remember how in one of the very first and
very simple criminal cases I tried as a junior magistrate, a witness
on being called to the box gave his occupation with self-conscious
dignity as House-on-Shoulder, Khana-ba-dosh. I had just been
reading a Persian tale in which this expression meant ‘snail’ so I
was momentarily nonplussed. But my sympathetic Reader, who
knew some English, leaned towards me and whispered: ‘Sir,
mostly he roams.’ I there and then made it my business to learn
the various ways of conveying ‘beggar’ in Hindustani: and half-
acentury later I can write down six. There is nothing to boast
about in this, considering how regularly in the court-room, in the
bazaar, in the Chowpal of a village, one or other of those six terms
would enter the talk. A Punjab Civilian friend once informed me
that there were some 600,000 ‘friars’ wandering about his
Province living on alms, men asserting their claim to the charity of
the public in virtue of their superior otherworldliness. Thus, at a
conserva tive estimate the All India figure might have touched ten
million or more—who knows? This idle and malodorous horde
battening on society without shame and indeed with positive
insolence, consisted chiefly of charlatans, thieves and scatty
tramps. Yet a small proportion of them there would undoubtedly
be who were genuinely wedded to a vocation which the whole of
India concurred in regarding as half-way to sanctity. I am
approaching here the case of those possessing powers pronounced
impossible by medical science, e.g. the arrest of the blood flow at
will, or the control of the breath over long periods; which, subject
to correction, have never been exhibited in the West.
I have been avoiding technical terms, but there is one I cannot
help introducing at this point, seeing it can only be rendered
periphrastically: Samādh. To carry out Samādh means: to
suspendone’s-breath-for-a-fabulous-period-of-time-and-submit-
tobeing-buried-alive. Every now and again the report would
circulate of a Sannyasi, an ascetic, in some place or other usually
distant, who had acquired this faculty of intense absorption, but
it was not until (I think) the winter of 1941 that such a one was
heard to be at hand. At hand signified Delhi; signified moreover
my own doorstep. ‘Heard’ too seems fair, for protesting voices were
being lifted outside my room. A Brahmin of the fourth order of
Ashram, a holy man who has abandoned all affections, does not
await his turn in a queue. Straight away a characteristic Sannyasi
made his entrance: masses of neglected hair piled on the crown of
his head; scanty beard and moustaches; tattered garments; a long
staff. He might be unwashed; he was certainly not uncouth, and
when I indicated a chair he muttered something self-deprecatory
and seated himself on the floor. He was an unconventional visitor
in this respect, also, that he came without preamble to his
business; announcing that, a native of Ajodhya but wedded to the
length and breadth of the land, he was now in the capital to
perform Samādh in aid of one of the War charities. ‘In a good
cause,’ he said. This ethical consideration surprised me a bit, for I
had always understood that in the Fourth State the very
distinction between Good and Evil is blotted out. However, it was
not for me as Honorary Treasurer of the said Fund to quibble.
Arrangements in the way of publicity, site, enclosure, police
and, of course, ‘gate’ he would leave to me; but his own two or
three assistants would do the spade work.
My trusty lieutenant Khan Bahadur Mumtaz Hasan
Qizilbash, Secretary of the Delhi Municipal Committee, selected an
area not far from the Fort, and had it roped off. The Senior
Superintendent of Police supplied a guard of sufficient strength in
charge of two Sub-Inspectors, picked officers not likely to collude.
Moreover, the Khan Bahadur promised to remain present himself
into the hours of darkness, for dark it would be according to the
timetable laid down by the performer for his disinterment.
The Samadh lagāne-wālā, the ‘man-doing-Samadh’, having
faded out on schedule, was covered by a layer of soil in a shallow
trench and unearthed hours later. He came to showing only mild
signs of exhaustion. Qizilbash, the Shi’a Muslim, undemonstrative
as the high-born know how to be, recorded in a written report of
two lines to me that the Samadh had been ‘uneventful’.
A second Sannyasi I had dealings with likewise passed for a star
in his profession. His feat was less spectacular but, I was told, not
less mysterious medically. This second homeless wanderer offered
to appear on a public platform in the centre of a semicircle of
observers to be chosen by myself, and under their gaze to drive a
skewer into one of his veins; more precisely, into the vein situated
just below the bend of the elbow (from which I believe patients are
usually bled). On the withdrawal of the instrument, he said, his
blood would gush freely until commanded by an observer to stop.

At the word ‘Stop!’ the flow would be checked and not resumed
until some one else called out ‘Go!’
I turned for assistance to my friend Colonel Cruickshank, at the
time Chief Medical Officer of the Delhi Province. Martin
Cruickshank suggested a modification in the seating: he would
take up his own position immediately alongside the holy man and
himself shout the Stop and Go orders; otherwise there would be
scope for cheating—a blunt skewer; a goat’s blood squirting all
over the show from somewhere; all manner of things.
The resulting performance gained much credibility in the eyes of
the audience from these precautions, and was wildly applauded.
There had been no hoax, Martin assured me afterwards.
I fear I cannot add the Indian Rope Trick to the tale of the
Wonders it came my way to witness. For I never met a soul
prepared to allege that he had seen it done, never a soul who
would even tell me candidly whether he considered it a
demonstration of magic or a juggler’s illusion. In fact I can’t
remember anyone’s volunteering to discuss it at all. Yet it must
have been commonly performed or talked about—or both, at some
time or another in the past. How else can the Western world have
come to regard it as among the ingredients that must be
swallowed in the Indian dish?
Anyhow, as described to me, the claim is that a length of string,
thread or twine—these were the words employed, never ‘rope’—is
thrown into the air and a boy climbs up it and dissolves into
nothing. Patently, if a trick, such a performance would do mighty
honour to the foremost of the Indian Maskelynes; if magic, would
signal an indubitable victory of wizardry over the regime of nature.
But supposing one of those Indians who have just been in and
out of my paragraphs had, on his solemn affirmation, witnessed
the ‘Trick’, what then? Then, for sure, we his companions would
have concluded the poor chap had been ‘seeing things’;
hallucination is a vastly more probable occurrence than that of a
little lad swarming up a cord and vanishing into thin air. Perhaps
the Indian atmosphere is heavier with suggestion than ours; I
believe it is. I know that an expression I of ten used to hear, and
in all sorts of situations, was ‘sight binding’ (nazar bandi): the art
of making the other man see something you wanted him to see.
‘Come and see the Library,’ said Sapru, laying an avuncular
hand on my shoulder. The room resembled a don’s in a rather
sombre angle of the quad with books from ceiling to floor, on
occasional tables, all over the place. Except on the day-bed
beneath the single window where the Right Honourable gentleman

could relax after hours on his feet in the High Court.
‘We can talk there till the others arrive,’ he went on, ‘and
anyway I wanted to show you that powder I’ve found at last for
sprinkling my shelves with.’ For he had lost many a rare volume in
the harsh climate of Allahabad.
‘It works,’ he added in Urdu, ‘like magic’
I remember his phrase to this day, and I believe I reflected even
at the moment that when an Indian uses it he means it; whereas
when we say something acts like magic, we merely mean it acts.
His other guests were then announced, and we were soon
splitting our sides over our host’s account of a recent visit he had
paid His Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose legal adviser he
was. Anecdotes concerning the Faithful Ally were many and
mostly chestnuts, but two or three were told in that room for the
very first time. If I drag these in here, it is because I want to create
the mood, verging on the hilarious and mundane as could be, of
Sapru’s company that night, before I come to something that
changed it in a way I can never forget. The richest man in the
world’, I hear him saying, ‘has now had his walking-stick repaired,
and he even offered me a cigarette. But when I accepted it he took
it back with a polite “Excuse me”, and clipped it neatly in two with
the nail-scissors he keeps in his waistcoat pocket for the purpose,
remarking “Let’s go halves.” And you haven’t heard this one,
either. Just before I got there he had granted a party of
Congressmen permission to hold a meeting on State territory, and
placed a luxury coach at their disposal to be hitched to the
scheduled express. Our politicians fell for the cajolery—but
imagine their dismay when the carriage, noiselessly uncoupled at
top speed, ran smoothly but with a constant deceleration to a halt
in a desolate spot.’
We could imagine it and relish it the more since several of the
said group were firom Allahabad, and one at least was known to
us all as a sanctimonious bore.
That was the point at which an anxious face appeared at the
door. Was the Collector there? There had been a fatal accident: an
Englishman, Resident Engineer of the Electric Supply Co., had
been returning from Benares, where he had been to see his
brother, when his car had left the road.
Our shocked silence was momentary. Sapru broke it. ‘Then I
know where it was exactly,’ he said quietly. ‘It was by the big tree
overhanging the route at…’ and he described the locality
minutely. ‘Bhūt hai,’ he explained, gazing gravely at me through
his spectacles. ‘There’s a ghost there,’
Bhūt hai. Readers of Kipling’s Kim may possibly recall the

haunting phrase. And now a Privy Councillor, a Member of the
Viceroy’s Executive Council was pronouncing it, a man whom I
was not alone in regarding as among the maîtres à penser in the
India of my day.
In that India, as in immemorial India before it, it was admissible
and even good manners for the pupil, the chela, to question the
guru.
‘Is that your verdict?’ I asked.
‘I see my place as not on the judicial bench but in the witness
box,’ he replied.
I have related how when I landed at Bombay for the first time,
the aldermen had lately been engaged in placating the City’s hob
goblins. During the next twenty years repeatedly some event,
whether grave or gay, would endorse a whole people’s inclination
to fuse what we separate and to regard what is patent as no more
than a pathetic fringe of that which is latent. To the cultured in
the land the frontier of sense-perception was at best provisional;
among the masses the very notion of such a frontier was absent.
It was an April morning in 1948, it was Bombay, and I was
leaving India. When the sun rose again over Malabar Hill I should
have said good-bye to her for ever. I had been leaning for a while
and possibly longer than I knew, on the massive parapet near the
Gateway of India, just by the stone stairway, watching the
rhythmic heave and relapse of the sea. Each time the water came
flooding over one of the broad steps, a wavelet would detach itself
to gain a yet higher tread, course along this, and then run back
laughing to its parent.
Coming away, I crossed the road diagonally towards the Taj
Mahal Hotel and took the narrower street that flanks this on the
left. I had gone a dozen yards down it when I became aware that I
was being followed. I went on a bit to make quite sure, then spun
round to face a Sikh, turbaned but otherwise in neat, if shabby,
European clothes. His eyes, I noticed, set somewhat close together
as is not seldom the case with Sikhs, were extraordinarily steady.
There was no fanaticism in their stare, simply a distance.
‘Hindostani?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said, raising and shaking the flattened palm of my hand
to discourage him. But I was not to be so easily rid of him. He
persisted in halting English: ‘You think…for marry…she, she also
think. She seven’—he couldn’t get the English here—‘seven kyā
nām (what d’you call it) hurūf (letters), sāt hurūf: M————.’
Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (see page 73)

I was so startled that I recoiled a pace or two backwards against
the wall of the hotel building. I fumbled foolishly in my pocket for
a coin.
‘No, no,’ he protested hastily. Then turned on his heel and
walked away.
My mother in India. On tour with the Willingdons (see page 90) On tour
with the Willingdons I
76
5
CASTE
‘The money-lender pursed his lips: “I say that there is not one rule
of right living which these te-rains do not cause us to break. We
sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples.”’
The quotation is from Kipling’s Kim, and served in my time as an
effective enough lead-in to the argument that Hindu attitudes had
been changing, and probably changing out of recognition, for quite
a while. Consequently, I set out for India half thinking I might find
caste, after so much palaver about it, to be little but a custom
more honoured in the breach than the observance. And in the
event the evidence of laxity was everywhere. The passers-by, or
such of them as were hatless, were manifestly not wearing the
traditional tuft; and none of the bicycles I saw in the streets had
the saddle covered with the inoffensive deerskin. A Brahmin
caller, amused at my enquiry, assured me he sat down to his
dinner at a table, not on the floor, and without the precaution of
first removing the shirt from his back. People I took to be among
the Twice Born smiled pityingly when I asked them about their
Sacred Threads. Thousands of the well educated were reportedly
boasting that when the date came round for the next Census they
intended to reply to the question, What is your caste? with a
blunt, defiant ‘None!’
However, the neglect of certain items of ritual which, all said
and done, bore very remotely on piety, the bravado of an
insignificant, if vocal, fraction of society—these proved nothing.
The crux was: how did Hindus behave at the crises in their lives?
How did the finest among their spirits teach them to behave? The
answer to both questions stared one in the face.
The Hindu is born into a particular caste because of deeds in a
previous life, and his deeds here and now condition his future.
The wages of sin is not death but suffering. It follows that caste is
the gauge of a soul’s progress towards God. It follows that the
duties of taste are the rules of right living. The money-lender on
the 3.25 a.m. southbound from Lahore said so, and the verses of
78 CASTE
the Bhagavadgita said so. You cannot get away from caste and
stay Hindu. That is why so eminent an intellectual as
Radhakrishnan, whom I shall be quoting directly, summoned his
erudition to its defence; and why Gandhi, the greatest teacher of
the age, while fearlessly condemning what was evil in the system,
lauded caste to the skies. These and other minds only less fine
than theirs knew it for the very cement that held Hinduism
together.
In 1926 Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan delivered a course of
lectures at Oxford in which, to repeat his own words, he attempted
to state the central principles of the Hindu view of life. I was not
among the audience, but I read the lectures in book form years
later in India. I found they expounded the outlook of the Hindus in
terms I could understand; I did not find that they prepared me in
the slightest degree for their social system as I observed it around
me. This, of course, is not criticism: I have already said that the
lecturer’s concern was with a view, not a way, of life.
In so far as he did attend to the Hindu attempt to regulate
society, it was of ‘a four-fold caste organization’ that he spoke. The
wellbeing of the whole, as he eloquently phrased it, was assured
by the serenity of the teacher (Brahmin), the heroism of the warrior
(Kshatriya), the honesty of the businessman (Vaishya), and the
patience and energy of the worker (Shudra). Those who listened to
his persuasive sentences or those who afterwards read the printed
page, were being introduced to India’s traditional conceit of ‘colour
grouping’ connoted by the extremely learned Sanskrit word varna;
they were not being allowed a glimpse of the caste system as it is.
How were they to guess that the Brahmins were not a select corps
of tutors, but were the largest caste in the land? How were they to
know there were not four but more than two thousand identifiable
castes, and that a considerable fraction of these were despised by
the others; that the lowly in the fold aggregating at the time, if I
remember, about forty-five million souls were Pariahs?
Now if we are to be guided, as the lecturer certainly seemed to
suggest, by the concept of varna which does not signify ‘caste’ at all
but ‘colour’, we shall remain, so far as I can see, in the halflit
dawn of history when the fair-skinned Aryans descended upon the
darker complexioned aboriginals of the continent. The scheme
assigns to society four broad categories: priests, soldiers,
merchants, artisans or farmers. And it places these in an order of
precedence which is still respected—this is undeniable. But it
does not bother with the actual units. The word for ‘caste’—and it
oversteps linguistic boundaries—is jāti or, dropping the barely
pronounced little ‘i’ at the end, jāt. The average Hindu in the India
of my memory was conscious the livelong day of his jāt, and

expected in any context to be asked: Name? Father’s name?
Caste? Like Charity this thing began at home. To start with,
hemming him in, even elbowing him literally in the house, was the
joint family— we met it in one of our excursions into a village—
consisting of father, sons and grandsons with the corresponding
womenfolk; ‘people eating food’: as the Hindostani had it, ‘cooked
on the same cooking place’. And his joint family was one among a
number of other joint families which together constituted an
exogamous group. The latter was in its turn a subdivision of a
larger group; a group, this time, not exogamous but endogamous.
This was the group within which you were obliged to marry; this
was your ‘caste’. And it followed that with caste-fellows one and
all you need not hesitate to sit down and eat. Of course there was
much else to it: a man’s caste was conventionally associated with
a calling; occupied its particular position in the hierarchy; was
governed in its relations with other castes by rules of pollution
and purity, and so on, and so forth.
The system is thus complex with a vengeance, so complex that
sociologists have not finished defining it. But there is this saving
grace. The ‘family’ seated around that hearth, now in loving
harmony now getting thoroughly on each other’s nerves, never, so
far as I managed to observe, had much difficulty in grasping if not
exactly what caste was, at least exactly what it demanded of them
in the given situation.
It mapped for these ordinary men and women not the tenor of
life simply but the precise direction they must take at every
turning point in it; prescribed for them the rites and ceremonies to
be performed within the home; taught them how to propitiate
ancestors and local deities; said to them: After this manner pray
ye. It took them on fatiguing pilgrimages to shrines and to sacred
rivers; and it lifted them, finite as they were, out of the temporal
dimension into a state transcending time.
In very large part the traditional way of life was followed within
the home, where the outsider could scarcely hope to go.
However, the great festivals in the calendar might bring it into the
open, even though lopsidedly, noisily. So, short of watching the
Hindu family going about its sacramental occasions behind its
own closed door, you could hardly do better, provided you had the
chance, than observe how it managed on Ganges’ bank when it
rose in the morning, busied itself with the symbols of its worship,
took its repast and retired to its makeshift bed.
I had that chance.
80 CASTE
Munshi Iswar Saran was waiting for me as arranged on the

track leading to the level foreshore of the Ganges upstream from
the confluence of this most holy of rivers and the Jumna. The
locality was the chief bathing place in all India. Its Sanskrit
designation was Tirath-Pati, ‘Lord of the Pilgrimages’; and, extra
refinement, the specific spot where the waters mingled was
Triveni, Three Streams’. For behold, the Saraswati, invisible except
to the inner eye and supposedly subterranean in its earlier course
surfaced just here—or so the pious would tell you—to make Twain
into Trio. More prosaically I was going to a rendezvous on the
fringe of the city known to the outside world as Allahabad ever
since the heyday of the Muslims, but still named in the older style
Prayag or ‘Oblation’ by many Hindus.
I wanted to show the persistent, but undeniably engaging old
gentleman, the site I had in mind for the camp of those whom
India had been learning at Gandhi’s instance these last four or
five years to call Harijans, ‘God’s Children’; instead of
Untouchables or Pariahs or (in the British euphemisms)
Depressed Classes and Scheduled Castes. For Munshi Iswar
Saran was President of the Society of the Servants of God’s
Children: proclaimed on his visiting card as ‘Harijan Sewak Sangh’.
He was other things too: Advocate of the High Court and a
talented parliamentarian who had made his mark as a member of
the Central Legislative Assembly on the Congress ticket—and he
was amongst the closer and more amiable of my acquaintances in
the Party. In the late autumn of his career he was devoting his
days to the crusade which Gandhi had recently inaugurated. I
think I ought to relate how.
A Round Table Conference had been convened in London in
1930, and at its second session in the following year when Gandhi
himself was present, the thorny question of minority
representation had been debated; the principal minorities being
the Muslims, with whom we are not concerned in this chapter,
and the Depressed Classes whose number was nearer fifty than
forty million. Their accredited leader, Dr Ambedkar, demanded
separate electorates for them, but Gandhi—though of course he
was only a selfappointed spokesman on their behalf—would not
hear of it. They would be cut off, he protested, more than ever from
the body of Hindu society and he would resist such a demand with
his life. Faced, and it was no novel experience, with Indian
disagreement, the British Government had no option but to make
a Communal Award on its own. This, when it came out, provided
for reserved seats in the legislative assemblies to be filled by the
separate voting of the Depressed Classes. Gandhi’s entreaty had
been rejected. Back by this time in India, back in jail, he resolved

‘to fast unto death’. The Peacemaker in this as in many another fix
was Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. He pleaded for the acceptance of a
formula obliging everyone to give way a little without seeming to
do so, and a pact (to be remembered ever after as the Poona Pact)
was eventually concluded in the terms of which the reserved seats
would be filled in two stages. In the first round the principle of
separate electorates would be honoured, the Depressed Classes
voters electing four candidates for each seat; but in the second
round the ensemble of Hindu voters would take their pick from
the said panel.
Gandhi swallowed a glass of orange juice.
I make no apology for my dense paragraph on the origin of the
Harijan Movement. That Movement belongs here, and I have not
dragged politics into the story of caste. Politics was there already;
there from the far off days of Chandragupta Maurya’s empire three
hundred years before Christ when those ‘little republics’, the
Indian village communities, which made Megasthenes the Greek
so homesick, elected their Councils of Elders from all castes to
represent all interests.
But returning from Poona to Allahabad, I must make it a good
deal clearer why the Society whose energetic President was
standing beside me had applied for a ‘camp’ near the Sangam, or
‘junction’ of the waters. A pilgrimage is any journey to a sacred
place. But it gains in sanctity if performed at a propitious moment,
and the prescribed time at Prayag was the month of Magh which
is our January-February. To bathe then is to cleanse the soul, and
is worth the effort. Immeasurably more rewarding, however, is it to
bathe not simply in that month of Magh but when the planet
Jupiter enters Aquarius—which happens every twelfth year.
The Magh gathering, or Mela, then becomes a Kumbh (Aquarius)
Mela, and it is to this that the two of us were attending on that
midOctober morning. In barely three months the Kumbh, greatest
of Melas, would be attracting anything up to two million pilgrims
and these sandy flats now untrodden would swarm with ten
thousand sticky little stand-offish groups (a faded snap-shot shows
it) hailing from every corner of the continent. And who were these
bathers traditionally? In the nice Sanskrit they were Jatris, which
means ‘goers’; they were the people who ‘went’ par excellence,
went to places worthy to be visited. Any Hindu whatever his
standing social, political or economic could deem himself of their
number: he had only to ‘go’. However, there was a sting in the tail
of the licence: he might not cause pollution to higher-caste
worshippers than himself. Hitherto, as may be guessed, shelter
82 CASTE
had been taken behind this proviso to frown on the attendance of

Untouchables at the select bathing places; but very lately a wave
of popular enthusiasm had been stirred by Gandhi’s dramatic
stand in their favour and at the date to which I am reverting this,
though patently subsiding, had not lost all its momentum. And in
the eyes of the callous official I was, obviously if you could
consent to sit next to an Untouchable in parliament you must not
mind washing away your sins while he was doing the same a
hundred yards perhaps, or anyhow a decent distance, off. In
principle there was no objection, in practice no problem. There
were ‘camp’ sites galore already earmarked for the different
philanthropic or caste organizations, and all I had to do was to
find room for just one more. Munshi Iswar Saran was satisfied,
was gratitude itself. He would tell Gandhi next time he saw him
what a sympathetic young man I was.
When we had said good-bye, I went to watch my huge Office Tent
going up—for a giant Mela sets its administrative task. I had been
placed on six months special duty to discharge this, and from now
until March would be spending all my days on the site. I looked
forward to this interlude: it contrasted with the usual round. And
if interlude is a short entertainment between the acts in a more
serious play, then I have chosen the right word. I would have to
concoct a bulky report at the end—but meantime I looked like
being neither the recipient nor the initiator of tiresome ‘phone
calls and telegrams. A typewriter was being unpacked, I could see.
I could not see to what use it would be put. But all in good time.
No doubt I’d get to know the ropes when Pande joined me. The
Rai Sahib had been on this Mela assignment before when he was
twelve years younger.
It comes back to me now that an initial challenge was to plot a
branch railway, taking off from the main line and ending wherever
I decided on the Mela grounds. Challenge? Child’s play.
Describing a graceful curve on the large-scale map was simply the
test of a steady hand, inking in the sleepers a work of irresistible
supererogation. But my principal job from the start was to co-
ordinate the services: Police, Fire fighting, Medical, Postal etc.; and
then ensure that the multifarious voluntary bodies, mostly
sectarian and terribly consequential, worked hand in hand with
them. The caste factor—well, we were there to bow to it. On my
side everyone in authority was a Brahmin, had to be: even all our
Sub-Inspectors of Police were high caste Hindus. And everyone
down to those Sub-Inspectors had to parley English—otherwise
not a sentence could be exchanged with people from the South.
But even having hit on a medium of communication, how was my
team to put its case over? From the police standpoint the
hundreds upon hundreds of thieves and pickpockets hanging
around ought to be ordered off the field; but no pilgrim would
shoo a mendicant at a place and time like this. The Jatris would
be housed in thousands of flimsy huts constructed of matted
screens, inflammable therefore; and the Fire Brigade officers
pressed that meals should be cooked in the open air. ‘No,’ said the
Brahmins, and especially the Brahmins from Madras, ‘we will not
eat where the glance that pollutes can fall on our food.’ I was
myself the witness of a rumpus on this score. By the mistake of
some guide, a Kayasth family—a caste, notice, rating high, not low
—was brought along to a hut slap against a collection of Brahmins
who were dining alfresco. The Brahmins did not tumble to it for a
while and went on eating. Then someone must have put the word
around, for the whole line jumped to their feet, scooped up their
dining leaves, which the ultra orthodox use in lieu of crockery,
and scampered out of view. Admittedly there would not be much
to go up in flames, and there was sand all about and water
everywhere. Nevertheless, the danger to life was extreme. Fire, I
remembered, had broken out at the Hardwar Mela where
conditions were similar—and a multitude of pilgrims stampeded to
their death. So all we could do was to urge the volunteer
organizations to shepherd sensitive Southerners to the central
sector of the given caste hutment where they would be insulated
on either side by the less delicately adjusted Brahmins of + the
North—and train our firemen to flatten out a whole hutment in
double quick time by hacking at the bamboo supports.
Then Health. Notoriously pilgrimages were favourable to the
spread of cholera: a single carrier in the densely crowded grounds
of the Mela could transmit the disease in no time to a number,
and that number dispersing homewards before the symptoms
appeared, might introduce it to a whole Province. Alas, the higher
the caste, as I soon discovered, the lower the esteem in which the
notions of the M.O.H. were held. How could one count on the
notification of the first case or enforce the prompt inoculation of
all who had been exposed to risk? A Collector in his District with
presumed rewards up his sleeve might bring it off, not the Health
Department official whose audience was both kaleidoscopic and far
from home.
But enough of my administrative worries and back to the
Pilgrims. They were urban and rural and sophisticated and simple,
of a hundred occupations, whether the blithe North had sent them
or the sultry South. They ranged from pensive Benares pandits to
Mysore villagers who were never happier than when sacrificing
84 CASTE
The Magh Mela at the Sangam or Confluence of the Waters (see page 81)
animals to their deities; from people who would not have water
taps in their houses to others who skinned carcases and
consumed carrion; from those who worshipped the particular
species of mouse on which the God Ganpati rides to those who
regarded field rats as a tasty dish; from Brahmins of the Gangetic
plain who would not handle a plough to Kashmiri Brahmins who
were not even vegetarians; from the scholar of the Scriptures to
the dunce for whom a wavy Y, picturing the confluence of the
waters, had been printed on the railway ticket valid for the
journey from his home, wherever that was, to Allahabad.
Qualitatively they were Hindu society, these Pilgrims; and
exhibited its distinguishing marks. Pilgrim in the singular was a
grammatical abstraction; he lived in and through his caste, his
subcaste, his joint family. Every Hindu did.
Caste, I have said, had its minute prescriptions. It simply had
to. Otherwise Hinduism, innocent of any dogma concerning the
nature of God, would have run riot. Even as things stood, the
The All-India Cattle Show. Receiving the Viceroy and Lady Linlithgow (see
page 181)
distance from its centre to its circumference was so great as to

invite the question: Is there a circumference? And therefore the
population on Ganges’ bank for whose material comfort I
was responsible, would make religious room for every moment, big
or little, solemn or the reverse.
It must be understood that I am now well through the month I
had learned to call Magh. One day I had been down at the Sangam
for an hour, chatting with the constables and the Boy Scouts and
the volunteers on duty there, but most of all watching the
bathers. I noticed how many couples, man and woman, would
enter the water with the ends of their garments tied together. In
Hinduism, as I knew, monogamy is held up as an ideal, and here
the union of those who are joined together in holy matrimony was
being symbolised, beautifully enough, by a couple of yards of wet
linen. Still, there were one or two doubts. I was witnessing nothing
less than a sacrament, evidently. But did it transmit an equal
grace to the partners? And another thing, was the sex code
harsher towards women, as I suspected, the higher the rung in
the ladder of Caste?
86 CASTE
Presently I was back in my tent. Two pilgrims were ushered in,

mild in manner and respectful, seeking, as they said, a signal
favour. They had already been next door (these marquees had
doors; that is, flap doors) to interview my lieutenant, Pande, but
he had referred them to me. There was a shy charm in the bearing
of this obviously well-educated pair and an unfamiliar ring in their
Hindi. They were from Ujjain, they explained: that sacred city, one
of the Seven that are Holy, Septa-Pura in the Sanskrit, and I can
still hear their heavy insistence on the double ‘j’ and their way of
sounding ‘jain’ like ‘join’. Could they, coming diffidently to the
point, could they drive right down to the Confluence in their Ford?
I was taken aback. My rule was: No vehicles anywhere near. And
at the appropriate place on the approach-road huge multilingual
notices read: By Order. No Pilgrim shall drive or cause to be driven
a wheeled carriage beyond here.
‘Certainly not.’ I snapped.
They looked crestfallen. ‘It was not for ourselves but for the sake
of another who cannot speak for himself, having a handicap in
that regard. However…’ And they shifted as if to go. Then: ‘May we
repeat what Pandit Pande told us’.
‘Well, what?’
‘He told us you could consider a special case.’
‘Look here’ I said testily, ‘pilgrims, be they Brahmins, be they
Sweepers, shall not drive to the Sangam in motor cars.’
‘Could Pandit Pande drive to the Sangam?’ they asked, taking
me up. ‘He’s not a pilgrim’.
‘Oh! yes, he is,’ I said’ ‘that’s s just where you’re wrong. He’s
bathed here every Magh since I don’t know when.’
I had walked into the snare. ‘You are not a Pilgrim,’ they
countered. ‘You could drive, Pandit Pande said you could.’
‘The thing is’ they continued, ‘it is better, at least Pandit Pande
thought, that our friend should not go on foot to bathe, out of
respect for timid ladies.’
So that was it. The protégé was some sort of Naked Penitent.
‘He doesn’t wear any clothes, your silent friend?’ asked.
‘We have to admit it. But he has freed himself from animal
impulses. His dietary is strict; he may not touch onion, potato,
carrot, radish, or beetroot. He eats, as do we Brahmins all, off a
dining leaf and our women purify the spot where this has rested
with a solution of cow dung.’
I reached for my topee.
‘Come on, then.’
‘Oh! Sir,’ they exclaimed, ‘our people will be agog.’
‘Your people?’
‘Yes, a party has arrived, by train from Oo-dj-dj-oin and they are
betting on the outcome.’
‘How do you mean, outcome?’
‘What your Honour will decide.’
I took the rear seat alongside the mysterious worshipper who
wore no clothes and could not talk; my two visitors taking the front
seat, and one of them the wheel. And like this we toot-tooted our
way cautiously through the milling crowds towards the Sangam. As
we drew near I could see a double row of Boy Scouts lining the
route down to the brink. Pandit Pande’s work!
My persevering pair led, and I followed with the chief guest,
hanging on to him by a linen leash, through the ceremonial lane
and into the shallows. The lion refused to advance further but he
lowered his maned head to drink; then crouched blinking in three
or four inches of holy water while we sluiced his shoulders and his
flanks.
‘We shall soon have the Nagas here,’ Pande said, glancing at the
calendar. Their parade was hallowed by custom, was appreciated
by all and sundry, and on a religious occasion like this! It did not
make sense to me. Or perhaps not until, much after the event, I
recollected what Gilbert Murray had once taught me: that it is in
the tradition of the Indo-Europeans to mock at the things
they venerate. The Greeks did so through their Comedy, the
English in the Middle Ages did so through the Mummers who
turned nuns and saints and even the communion chalice into
ridicule.
But first of all, who and what were the Nagas? In the standard
works of reference they are a people of the Andhra empire in the
South over sixteen hundred years ago; or a barbarous tribe of
head-hunters existing in Assam to this day; or an ill defined
ethnic group in the Western Hills on whom the rules of caste sit
lightly. The Nagas whose name the Pilgrims bandied about at the
Mela had no connexion with any of those. They were Hindu, they
were Mendicant, they were Naked. Pressing Pande, I elicited that
though coarse they were not of criminal bent. Further I could not
get. There remained, and would remain, the contradiction that
whereas with mendicants the rule is each man for himself, among
the Nagas there is an acquiescence in joint behaviour. They would
duly appear, receive generous alms, perform their customary
march to the Sangam, and depart.
Thus I found myself making arrangements for the date; for date,
somehow or other there was. Several days in advance we cordoned
off an enclosure, and into this trickled the equivalent of, I suppose,
some three infantry companies; grubby, smirking men with
88 CASTE
matted locks; men unencumbered with the goods of this world

save for a staff, a thick bamboo with seven knots.
On the procession day the Mela ground was packed well before
the hour announced, and the police were having their work cut out
to keep the thoroughfare open down to the Confluence. Thinking of
those bamboos, I had seen to it that all constables were armed
with lathis, the heavy brass tipped quarter staff, instead of the
truncheon at the belt which was normal issue on Pilgrimage duty.
As the hour approached I cantered my Police horse in the
direction of the starting point and soon saw the Nagas falling in
with a surprising semblance of military precision. So I wheeled
and returned towards the Sangam and waited with everybody
else. They were coming now, and once again their unexpected
discipline impressed: they were marching; not in step admittedly,
but keeping ranks, and—marching. It was an astonishing sight.
They carried their staffs laterally across their middles, and from
where we waited it looked as if each man in the leading files was
gripping his with three hands. But individuals were not too
distinct yet, because the ashes smeared on their bodies and
foreheads merged with the grey sand underfoot. However, less
than a minute gave confirmation of what we had divined. I could
see wide grins on the faces of the leaders, and also that each
bamboo, held five or six inches clear of the body and steadied by
firm fists to right and to left, was entwined at its centre by a
clinging tendril. Laughter, awkward, inane and high, broke from
the crowd as our psychologically released pilgrims looked at one
another foolishly and then back at the spectacle. I never enquired
by what exercises, ointments, or adhesives the Nagas achieved the
results here chronicled, and it is anyhow more profitable to
consider what their rôle was in a society ridden, as we are seeing,
by caste and ritual. I don’t doubt that like that of the Athenian
actors in the ‘phallika’ or that of medieval comedians at the Feast
of Fools, it was to mock at things especially revered. Theirs was a
triple mockery—Hinduism is fond of doing everything by threes. It
was a mockery of the sacrament of the waters; a mockery of the
ideal of religious mendicancy; a mockery of the Great God Shiva,
Insolent and Ithyphallic.
Magh had ended, the pilgrims had gone their separate ways, my
team was breaking up. While everything was yet fresh, and while I
could compare notes with Pande, I began collecting my thoughts
on caste. Ought I to say correcting them? For manifestly certain of
my assumptions had been shaken.
To begin (where this chapter began) with Kipling’s te-rain. The
money-lender told one side of the story. The Kumbh Mela told
another. Railways, postage, telegraph, cheap printing in the

regional languages had enabled castes to organize as never before.
Postcards nowadays carried news of caste meetings, buses
enabled people to attend them. Certain castes, on the evidence of
their Associations present on the Mela grounds, actually had their
printed ‘constitutions’. A Madras Brahmin I met at the Sangam
had brought a pot of sea water from Kameswaram (the tiny spit
that points like a finger at Ceylon) and, to the envy of all
Brahmins of the North, there he was, pouring it into the Ganges. I
would say then that the fillip caste had received in the last
hundred years was more than compensating for the blows it had
taken.
In the span of a century there had been two really new events in
Indian history, and each had stoked the fires of caste. The first
was greater mobility. In pre-British times you had a chieftain or
raja, above him the viceroy or an emperor, and below him the
headmen of single villages; and the territorial boundaries of that
chieftain’s domain were also the horizons of local caste activity.
But now the vertical barriers were down and the horizontal
extension of caste was unchecked. An increase in caste solidarity
ensued, balanced by a livelier sense of caste interdependence on
the spot. Which is to say: whoever you were, you became more, not
less, casteconscious.
The other new event was the passage of political power to the
people from the rulers. Under a parliamentary regime minorities
could not obtain a hearing without preferential treatment; and
through such treatment caste gets into the house of commons.
The British set that ball rolling.
And what of the common belief that each caste abides by its
traditional position in the hierarchy? On the evidence of the Mela
there was considerable uncertainty and much argument over
mutual rank. Brahmins of course are the top people, the
Untouchables the bottom people in the system, and I never came
across a Hindu who did not know who were the Brahmins and
who the Untouchables. Moreover, just below the Brahmin level
and just above the Untouchable level there was scarcely scope for
doubt. It was in the middle of the hierarchy that you might notice
castes ‘showing off’, trying to prove on the strength of their written
or unwritten Book of Rules that they were equal to their superiors
and superior to their equals.
I have dodged the matter of occupation by choosing a Pilgrimage
as my setting. But I can hardly close the chapter without alluding
to it, because here again there is a popular misconception.
Hereditary association with a calling there invariably was in each
90 CASTE
caste, but it never followed that all, or even most, in that caste
made their living by it. India could count several rulers who came
from merchant or peasant castes. I could count several Brahmins
on my own staff who were peons carrying bundles of papers about;
true, without loss of dignity since this was not manual labour; but
it was not the function of a natural élite supposed to be wielding
the sacred power. Castes with a tradition of literacy, e.g. Brahmin,
Vaishya, Kayastha, understandably tended to become clerks,
schoolmasters, officials, lawyers and doctors; Banias slipped
easily into the commercial openings offered by the Pax Britannica;
the Jat, the Gujar and Ahir remained proudly wedded to the soil;
and Rajputs, modelled on the Kshatriyas of a golden age, proved
an unfailing source of recruits to the Army. That is about all
anybody could say.
‘What of caste in the future, Rai Sahib?’

‘It will be seen.’
‘How Indians love that; so impersonal, so passive! But what do
you yourself predict?’
‘I am a Brahmin brought up in a Christian College.’
‘I know.’
‘Well then, we people mostly obey caste and keep its
commandments, while taking its name in vain.’
‘In other words, it will absorb the present shocks?’
‘So far as I think.’
6
TO BE A HINDU
My duties soon brought me within range of Hinduism as a social

system, but they did not introduce me to a religion fit to blazon
abroad a message to mankind. Not that this troubled me. I was
content to affect an air of condescending amusement about the
whole thing. I smiled at the thought of adult Hindus sucking up to
a god who has an elephant’s head with a broken tusk, a fat
paunch and a cheerful disposition—the very spit of the adored,
battered jumbo we once had in the nursery—and even petitioning
him to remove obstacles in his capacity as Master of Snags,
Vighneshwar, each time they set out for the railway station. I was
an Englishman ‘Out East’, and did not share the propensity of a
certain West to swallow the syrup administered by the gifted
apologists of whom Rabindranath Tagore was prince. My mother,
on the other hand, was of those on whom the propaganda worked;
and toured India for a year-and-a-half armed with that copy of
Gitanjali which I have listed in my introductory chapter as being
among the few of my possessions not destined to perish in the
flames at Gower Street. A waste of breath to tell mother that
Tagore had sized up his public, was interpreting Hinduism in
Western terms which were alien to it; was anyhow an eclectic; to
tell her that his school at Shantineketan, guaranteed to instil an
instant appreciation of the divine, was rivalled by another
institution, also in Bengal, but more unsavoury: namely, the
Temple of Mali at Calcutta, reeking and slippery with blood. Of
course, and I admitted it, if you listened to him singing, say, his
hymn to the Distant Goddess, full marks.
I know thee, I know thee, O thou Bideshini; thou dwellest on

the other shore of the ocean. I have seen thee in the autumn,
I have felt thee in the spring night. I have found thee in
the midst of my heart, O thou Bideshini. Putting my ear to
the sky I have heard thy music…I have roamed through the
92 TO BE A HINDU
world and have come at last into the strange country. Here I
am, a guest at thy door, O thou Bideshini.
Full marks—assuming you wanted a pastiche of the Carmel

Canticle of St John of the Cross. However (I would then reflect
indulgently) let it be Tagore. Better Tagore than the latterday
Yogis, Vivekananda and his successors, who had not only sold the
promise of ineffable joy to shoals of rich American widows but
actually knocked Romain Rolland and Aldous Huxley, cerebral
and sensitive geniuses, all of a heap.
My own drift then was into the diametrically opposite camp. I
collected and passed on with zest and occasional embroidery any
stories that showed up Hinduism in a ludicrous light. Was
incarnation the topic? Krishna to the rescue, God Incarnate,
having fun with the milkmaids. Or if it were metempsychosis, I
would drag in the unfortunate woman who had little pleasure in
her promotion: scrub herself as she might, she simply could not
get rid of the smell of fish. And in the Census there had been that
householder who, in the space for ‘Head of Family’, returned a
local deity, specifying this personage’s ‘Occupation’ as subsistence
on an endowment, and his ‘Education (if any)’ as omniscience. Nor
would Lionel Curtis be let off lightly. Lionel Curtis, one of Lord
Milner’s famous ‘kindergarten’ and a man burning with zeal, had
lately visited India and been enthralled by her to such a degree
that he decided he must become a Hindu. So he consulted the
Pandits of Benares. But oh, dear, dear!—they replied that if he
supported a hundred poor Brahmins for a whole year and then
committed suicide, the odds were he would be reborn into a
reasonably decent caste. So it would go on. Without much doubt I
wanted kicking.
1.
SWAMI ADVAITANAND
If I grew out of that callow phase, I owe it largely to Swami
Advaitanand at Rikhikesh. This little place is not shown in any of
the standard atlases, and it may require a call at the address of the
Royal Geographical Society to locate it. But every Hindu of culture
knows where it is. It is where the Jumna, after being choked in
deep gorges and bashed against giant boulders, frees itself from
the Outer Himalayas to rush out over laughing rapids. It is
there fore above the immensity of the plain, but below the eternity
of the snows; sited mid-way between the dark forest and the
gleaming glacier. It called to the Rishi (which is Rikhi in another
spelling) of ancient days, and it has called to the modern seer, as

an ideal hermitage. There the Sage might meditate and perhaps
catch behind the muffled voice of the torrent the hum of the
cosmic dynamo itself. I had gone there on duty the first time. I
was distinctly raw; in fact just assigned to a Sub-division, the
subdivision which contained Rikhikesh. My job was to take a look
at the Notified Area Committee, as it was termed—something more
than a Parish Council but less than a Rural District Council in
status—which ran its affairs. In a region of India where Islam was
strongly entrenched (Muslims were a majority in the nearby city of
Saharanpur, for instance) there had always been a tacit
understanding that this was a Hindu precinct. It struck me then,
as it would continue to strike me on and off, that the Muslim
conquerors had on the whole been, if not exactly forbearing,
astute enough to allow Hinduism to withdraw into pockets.
Rikhikesh was one of these. In this Hindu enclave there was no
mosque because no need of one; no poultry; no kitchen-garden
even. It was hinted I might like to send off my bearer Husain Ali,
alias Kalloo on a week’s leave and entrust myself to the Brahmin
servant attached to the modest inspection bungalow where I
would be putting up. Since that occasion two years ago when he
had waited nervously alongside his father, Niaz Ali, for me to come
into sight at Camp Dudhi, Kalloo had not been beyond the sound
of a shout for a single day, and as we paused now on the edge of
the Area he dropped his eyes and after a second’s hesitation held
out a limp hand. I then walked on without him, my belongings
balanced on the head of an indubitable Hindu at my heels. A line-
up of notables, which is to say four or five members of the
Committee, was there in welcome. Their spokesman was Mahant
Paras Ram.
‘Mahant’ means Head Priest, and this smiling, tubby and, if
appearance counted, self-satisfied dignitary was the incumbent of
a benefice which many of his fellows must have envied him. For
the Temple at Rikhikesh, unremarkable in itself, was in receipt of
donations from far and wide; so that most of the properties
around, including a Pathshala or Religious School, were part of its
patrimony. The Mahant therefore was quite as much a
Comptroller of Accounts as a shepherd of souls. In an earlier
chapter we met the family preceptor, a simple Prohit, semi-literate
at best, casting horoscopes in the home or officiating at marriage
ceremonies; we have met the village Pujari tinkling the temple bell,
blowing the conch and, it may be, reading aloud from a sacred
text to an assemblage of rustics. Now we encounter a
sophisticated Mahant who is very likely the son and the grandson
94 TO BE A HINDU
of mahants, and will probably have been trained by some guru of

reputation rather than in a classroom. During a committee
meeting that afternoon his genial assistance enabled me to romp
through the agenda. He clinched the disposal of one of the items, I
distinctly remember, with a Persian tag, an exceedingly worldly-
wise couplet from Sa’di, and the lines are in my head to this day. I
ought not to have been startled, I suppose. His polish was that of
his native Delhi: to which, as gossips did not omit to inform me
before very long, he was never without the cash to repair on
mysterious jaunts; where, added other tongues not less malicious,
he was the life and soul of certain parties in a lane off the
Chandni Chowk.
If I have strayed into a by-way, no harm. The priesthood of the
Hindus is badly reported, its lower and middle echelons hardly at
all. The professional Pandits, perhaps it is worth saying, are not
exclusively a grade of scholars distributed among the celebrated
centres of learning and given to nice metaphysical speculation. Of
course there are those Pandits in excelsis; Pandit Jyoti Prasad of
my fourth chapter was a notable example. But there is also, and
ubiquitously, as befits a religion averse to congregational
attitudes, a teeming category of society which is thought of as
being in its entirety the heir to a ‘sacred power’; a whole class to
whom an ‘utterance’ has been vouchsafed; and it is with these
pandits, literate, semi-educated or totally unschooled, that the
mass will come into almost daily touch whether in the intimacy of
the joint family, or under a tree in the open, or in the temple at
the corner of the street. And from these pandits—how else?—the
average man could learn what Hinduism was about. In my villages
I would occasionally attempt of an evening to bring the talk round
to such matters. ‘Avatars, now. Do you think of some people as
avatars? Is Gandhi a divine incarnation?’ Or, ‘What is a
Mahatma?’ Or, ‘Can you tell me about Salvation?’ What usually
astounded me was not the fluency of the reply. This was never
fluent and was often unintelligible. What astounded me was that
the expressions (Sanskrit, mind, not everyday Hindi) did not seem
unfamiliar, were part of people’s vocabulary; that Karma,
Liberation, World Spirit and so on, were concepts somebody must
have repeatedly put to them—to these peasants who had in many
cases not moved thirty miles from their village in their lives and
could neither read nor write.
But on reflection was it not sheer commonsense? Hinduism had
caught on, evolved, and endured for two and a half millennia or
whatever it was exactly, exhibiting an amazing inner cohesion from
Himalayas to Cape Comorin. It could not have done so unless it
had been steadily assimilated and quietly practised by the

humblest in the land. In the nature of things, many, indeed most,
of those heirs to the sacred prerogative were of the earth, earthy. I
doubt if ‘spiritual is the just word to apply to that superior
domestic who can acquaint you with the astral influences of the
hour; or to Mahant Paras Ram either, setting off on a spree in
white silk muffler, tailored overcoat and shiny patent leather
shoes. But there was and always had been an élite as well; good
men, teachers of special sanctity and revered as such, and an élite
of that élite; and so on until you came to the great founders of
schools such as the ninth-century Shankar, a sort of Saint
Thomas Aquinas of Hinduism, who maintained the doctrine of
salvation by knowledge; or Ramanuja in the eleventh century, for
whom devotion was the key to it; and in more modern times to the
reformers: for example Ram Mohan Roy (we date him by recalling
that his London friend was Jeremy Bentham); Ramakrishna in the
nineteenth century; and, of course, Gandhi in ours.
Far up the slope, but visible from the Temple where we stood
was a stone-built hut I could see a saffron-clad figure moving
about on the parapet in front of it, and asked the Mahant who he
might be.
That’s our Swami,’ he replied in his jovial style—‘Swami
Advaitanand. Bengali fellow. Some Calcutta merchant pays me the
rent.’ Then ‘I’ll get him to meet you,’ he promised impressively.
Next day nothing happened; nor the day after that. On the fourth
day, returning from a walk up the hill after work, I had to pass
quite close to the rough little shelter—two rooms behind that
parapet, it looked. On an impulse I pushed at the rickety door.
Now a Swami, as Western and particularly the American world
had cause to know, could be almost anything from charlatan or
slob to real thing. Which would my Swami be? Inside, but
evidently about to come out, faced me a man in, I suppose, his
late fifties, wiry and spare, athletic looking. His head was shaven
as closely as his chin; he had a straight narrow nose and the
chiselled lips that go with a Greek statue. His saffron vestment
resembling a cassock was held at the waist by a cord, and he wore
the heavy sandals of a monk anywhere. The tough exterior did not
deceive, as I discovered a year later when tramping the hills in his
company. I had come back then to Rikhikesh expressly to
cultivate him. Ineptly put: I wanted him to instil the culture.
However, that’s jumping ahead. I have yet to make his
acquaintance.
‘I imagine you hate seeing people?’ I said awkwardly when I had
introduced myself.
96 TO BE A HINDU
He laughed. ‘I hope I don’t show it’

‘Mahant Paras Ram told me you were here,’ I ventured.
‘Ah, the Mahant.’
I bit my tongue. Needlessly, for the Swami side-stepped
instantly to a less controversial local character.
‘You’ll know Mannu too by this time,’ he said with a twinkle.
They all worship him down there. In and out of everybody’s
house.’
‘Know him? I should jolly well think I do,’ answered, glad of an
opening. I related how, my first evening at the bungalow I had
flopped into a chair in the half-light and was waiting for the
Brahmin attendant to bring me a lamp when my thermos, aimed
at me from the direction of the mantelpiece, landed in my lap. ‘So
you see,’ I ended, ‘I’m the odd man out—who refuses to do puja, as
you put it, to Mannu the Monkey down there.’
He smiled engagingly. ‘Bear with me and I’ll tell you why we
others do. But in English, in English.’
This conversation on the doorstep had been ten times more
laboured than it reads above. On both sides. For the Swami spoke
an awkward plodding Hindi, pronouncing the long a’s like o’s and
getting at least one of his genders wrong. Why hadn’t it occurred
to me after my two years in India that even an anchorite in his
hermitage on an Outer Himalayan slope, a soul aspiring to realms
loftier than those where the Hindu gods dwell in their glory, might
speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake?
We both laughed.
‘No merit,’ he continued, ‘I had digs near Belsize Park station on
the Hampstead and Highgate line for years. I ate my dinners— not
always with hearty appetite, I may say—at Gray’s Inn. Long, long
ago. However I was telling you why we Indians do puja to
monkeys. The whole story’s in the Ramayan, “The Doings of Rama”.
And if you ask me whether it’s religion or poetry I shan’t know
what to reply. But this I do know, it goes the rounds properly.
That’s how it is with us, our Scripture, our literature—call it
whichever you like—doesn’t stay on dusty shelves. It’s the same
with the Mahabharat, the Great Epic, which has that wonderful
Sermon, or Song—take your choice again—tucked away in the
middle of it. One day we’ll talk about the Gita; I’ll only say now
that no Hindu ever need go outside its teaching. But I’m
wandering. I was going to tell you a story. Well, Ajodhya—which is
near Fyzabad—was the capital of a kingdom in olden days, and
Rama the heir to the throne was a brave prince and always quick
to punish the demons who battened on the peasantry. In revenge
for this, the Demon King whose base was Lanka, Ceylon, chose a
moment when Rama had gone out shooting to kidnap his wife Sita
and carry her off in a flying machine. Luckily a helper was at hand
in the Monkey General, Hanuman. His acrobatic troops leaping
here, swinging there and dropping stones as they went, laid a
causeway across the straits, over which an army was able to
march and rescue the princess. And this Rama—as we know, but
pretend not to know for the sake of the thrill—is none other than
the High God Vishnu all the time.
That was written in Sanskrit before the Christian era, but the
people have taken it more closely than ever to their hearts, these
last three or four hundred years, in the homelier vernacular of
Tulsi Das.’
We had left the modest shelter absent-mindedly, and were
trudging slowly up the hill I had been descending less than half an
hour before. The unexpectedly sociable solitary stopped and faced
me. ‘We Hindus love it, and it is good for us,’ he said. ‘You see,
quite a lot is enshrined in that episode: the marriage tie, the fight
against evil, loyalty, the constant presence of God in our midst—
it’s all there. And every monkey, as the living embodiment of
Hanuman, recreates the incident for us.’
He may have sensed I was about to put my oar in at this point, f
or he went on without a pause. ‘I know, I know—it’s the worship
of the destructive little wretch you can’t stomach. But let me
finish. We Hindus see things as graded, tiered as it were, but not
disparate, if you follow. We don’t separate the animals from man
as you do. We hold the distinction between them and ourselves to
be in status, not in kind. The divine possibility, if it be ours is also
theirs. Hasn’t the cow stepped from her kingdom to become a
goddess in our eyes? Divinities, we see them everywhere. We place
them, however, we place them. Vishnu and Shiva are High; alone
in fact in their splendour. Others are—don’t laugh—mediocre. We
should not look down on mediocrity even where gods are
concerned; we should look up to excellence. But come back to
Mannu. Hindus don’t regard him as a god, please be clear on that;
they consider there is just a bit of something that is holy in him.’
We continued walking, neither of us speaking. He was not
waiting for me to say anything, I’m sure.
Presently he resumed. ‘Always remember that we Hindus are
conscious of that progression. We think of ugliness as already on
the road to beauty, we think of error as already on the road to
truth.’
Another silence. Then: ‘Altogether, my friend, we are deeply
shocked by your maxim that the best is the enemy of the good
98 TO BE A HINDU
At this he spread his arms upwards towards the eternal snows,

let them drop to his sides, raised them again. Endeavour, relapse,
renewed endeavour in the gesture.
‘And if, but only if, you wish,’ he added, his shy engaging smile
returning, ‘we might go on with this discussion sometime.’
2.
CREED
I am always reading or hearing it said that the Hindu religion is
non-credal. Probably the theologians are right in their phrasing,
but to the rest of us the punctilious formulation of a belief is of
secondary importance to the holding of it. I employ the word
‘creed’ here to mean the body of beliefs which Hindus actually
hold. Whenever I used to ask Hindus to enlighten me on some
point they would begin: ‘we people believe…’
So I shall try now to state the essentials of the creed. In the sub-
section of a chapter I have to stick to what is both central and
undisputed. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism are offshoots of
Hinduism, but they left it altogether in the guise of separate
religions and are consequently not in focus; and even the
protestant movements such as Brahma Samaj and Arya Samaj,
although they are within Hinduism, are aberrant so far as we are
concerned here.
Well then, I do not think it mistaken to name four or five
presuppositions—I shall not irritate scholarship further by
terming them dogmas (‘Hinduism is free from dogma’)—occurring
in the main stream and unchallenged, which Hindus in general
accept as the self-evident facts of life; self-evident and not
therefore dependent on revelation.
The chief of these grand assumptions, at the core and
uncontested, is that of the rebirth of all living things: gods,
demons, humans, animals, fishes, birds, reptiles, insects—all. The
word for this is Sansār and I have heard it on the lips of quite
ordinary people. I translate it The Round’. Now the Round
presupposes, in Hindu thinking at any rate, an allied principle;
which is that the condition of the individual soul on rebirth is
determined by the sum total of that soul’s activities to date. Here
and now, declares the Hindu, I am eating the fruit of all my
yesterdays. The technical term this time is well travelled: Karma,
which I translate ‘The Deed’. Too often Karma is presented in the
West as fatalism, but it is exactly the opposite: I am this because I
have done that. So you have in these two doctrines taken together
an explanation of life’s inequality and life’s suffering.
But if the Round is dependent on the Deed, what must you do?
The Code tells you. This, known as Dharma, is less easy to put in
a nutshell and I am perhaps exonerated from trying, since the
Hindus themselves confess it to be extraordinarily elusive.
Etymology is not everyone’s hobby, but it helps occasionally: Latin
and Sanskrit are cousins, and Dharma is simply our word ‘firm’,
as also our word ‘form’ , making an Indian appearance. It has
thus the sense of holding or maintaining in position. The
conventional translations of it, ‘Righteousness’, ‘Eternal Law’ seem
to me highfalutin for the essentially practical Dharma which
orders you to stay put, to do this, that and the other—or else. The
Rules of the Game’ might hit off the meaning, especially
remembering that the Code is formulated with painstaking
precision throughout the whole corpus of Hindu scripture. It looks
therefore as if we are intending nothing less than ‘religion’ by this
word, and in fact I do not know how ‘Hinduism’—which is sheer
western terminology —can be expressed in an Indian language
otherwise than by its use.
Now the Round, the Deed, the Rules of Behaviour were all very
well, but where did re-birth lead except to re-birth? Something
more was wanted: not surprisingly, the Hindus grew profoundly
dissatisfied with an orthodox religion that offered nothing better
than bondage to a roundabout. Their doctors, and still more
perhaps their mystics, accordingly arrived at yet another basic
assumption: viz, that escape from the revolving wheel is
possible for all. This release they named Moksha; which therefore
is the eventual liberation of the human soul from the trammels of
time and space. A common rendering—I have used it myself—is
‘salvation’, but the Christian overtone is misleading. To the Hindu
the salvation is not from guilt but from the human condition. My
translation here is ‘The Way Out’. Whether the state of bliss is to
be reached through effort or through grace, the schools would
debate.
I arrive at the fifth and last of the grand assumptions (as I am
naming them) of the Hindus and once more am obliged to burden
my text with a technical expression. The fact is that such terms,
lacking as they do a precise equivalent in a different language,
must be supplied in the original as they crop up, if only as pegs on
which to hang rough and ready definitions. Since there are more
words for philosophical and religious thought in Sanskrit than in
Greek and German combined, perhaps I shall be forgiven for
resorting to five. My fifth is Brahman, the label of a concept which
is as Indian as can be. Some of the attempts to translate the word
bring English to the end of its tether. I have seen it served up as
100 TO BE A HINDU
‘the Non-This indwelling the This’; I have seen it as ‘In-ness’. A

third shot, ‘The unspeakable It’, is booked poignantly in my case
since boyhood as the nickname we gave a puppy that did puddles
on the drawing-room carpet. The term, as I say, is Bráhman. But
beware! This is a neuter noun accented on the root and having as
its grammatical doublet the word with which all Western
civilization is acquainted: Brahmán, accented on the suffix. The
first has the meaning of a sacred power while the second is the
agent wielding it. The transliteration of the pair is of small
consequence: throughout my pages I write conventionally
‘Brahmin’ for the agent, and in the present chapter—it will occur
nowhere else—‘Brahman’ for the authority which he exudes. We
have noticed it already indeed as that ‘something’ of which the
Brahmin is the vehicle, and I rendered it ‘sacred power or
utterance’ when discussing the priesthood. However, that power
or utterance which is the priestly Brahmin’s prerogative is but one
manifestation, Hindus hold, of an energy that unites the whole of
temporal existence with what is eternal. In its totality Brahman is
that Reality which is both outside the world and inside it; both
transcendent and immanent. Brahman is the Absolute, Brahman
is Being. And it is into such an extra-temporal state that the soul
on escape from the Round may aspire to enter.
3.
POINT COUNTER POINT
So much for the deposit of doctrine on which Hinduism stands.
Even when thus hurriedly resumed it betrays a curious
ambivalence of thought. The Rules of the Game which you ignore
at your peril lay the emphasis squarely on duty in this world; yet
the goal of the individual is simultaneously announced to have
nothing whatever to do with this world: it is union with a
governing reality outside it. There are consequently two competing
trends within orthodoxy itself: the Hindu is committed to
righteous action and to an escape from it.
Obviously only introspective intellectuals would give much
thought to what the goal, so prized in advance, was likely to
amount to. But in India the introverts have never been noted for
keeping their thoughts to themselves, and historically an extreme
position soon declared itself known to Hindus rather
characteristically as ‘Non-Twoness’ (Advaita) and to us, less
indirectly, as Monism; which supposes the individual soul at the
last to be dissolved in the One of ultimate reality. Monism has
claimed its adherents without interruption these two thousand
years and more; and it does so still. For instance, it is almost

invariably in this dress that Hinduism has crossed the oceans to
advertise itself as a great and living religion.
Nevertheless, all the time—in India, I mean—there has been an
answering evangel running counter to Monism and matching it in
strength. The evangelists, if I can lend them this name here,
proclaimed that you did not lose your identity when liberated; on
the contrary, you found it—in communion with a personal God.
They could dialogue, that is, with Christians or with Muslims. I
want to insist on this in greater detail before I close my chapter if
only for the reason that so many of the propagandists, as it seems
to me, have chosen to soft pedal it. But for the moment there is an
anomaly to record. In this astonishing religion of the Indians,
Theism and Monism are not in flat contradiction (as any Christian
or Muslim would maintain they simply must be); far from it. Of
the two positions which we would pronounce mutually
antagonistic neither wishes the least harm to the other. I suggest,
then, it is away from Logic and towards Music that one is driven in
the search for a clue to such tolerance. In Hinduism two distinct
melodies are heard, and separately appreciated, of
competing value as in a successful piece of counterpoint. My
Swami was a Monist, was in the procession of modern teachers,
mystics, philosophers headed by the internationally publicized
Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose and indeed the restrained
Radhakrishnan. My friend’s very sobriquet, Advaitanand, means
‘Non-Twoness Bliss’. Yet he it was who would have me see how
powerfully an entire people is gripped by those morality stories
from Epic literature which establish man’s duty to his neighbour
and before God. We Hindus love it:’ he had said, ‘and it is good for
us.’ He included himself, that is, among those upon whom Theism
—even when this made room for the worship of the ignoble and
pestilential little Mannu—had a tonic effect. If cornered he would,
I suppose, have reverted to his image of the stiff climb. The
worship of sticks and stones, he would have reminded me, thrusts
upward to become the worship of spirits; upward once more to
become the worship of incarnations; and this again achieves its
higher manifestation in the worship of a personal God. ‘And at the
highest level of all,’ the latterday Seer would have added quietly,
since there is no shouting in such rarefied air, ‘the soul, Atma,
worships, until it ultimately becomes lost, extinguished in the
Brahman which is Reality.’
When I went back to Rikhikesh in the following year my time was
my own, and since my companion most generously set all of his
time at my disposal we tramped that mountainside together a
102 TO BE A HINDU
good deal. Of course it was a shallow understanding, all said and

done, that I got of his Hinduism; but enough to convince me that
Monism, Advaita, Non-Twoness, had been, and still was, in the
central stream of Indian thought. Whether my instructor was a
typical member of the community is beside the point: the
character of a society is expressed quite as much by its élite as by
the mass.
To the mass—apart, it is somewhat needless to remark, from
that fraction of it, not inconsiderable in India, whose depth of
misery may provoke an urge to be out of it at any price—to the
mass, presumably, the prospect of annihilation does not present
itself as enjoyable. The village wiseacre lecturing me at the
Chowpal and wagging his finger in my face, the Gandhi-capped
draper in the bazaar protesting his detestation of the Congress
Party, the hundreds or thousands, rather, of witnesses who swore
by God in my courtroom to speak the truth, did not ardently
desire to identify their ‘ego’ with a featureless substrate. From
them, and they counted, counted in their hundreds of millions—
an impersonal It could not evoke a religious response. Vishnu
could; Shiva could.
Vishnu, benevolent and near, in whom the spark of divine grace
and divine love is ignited; Shiva, awesome and erratic, veering
from the ferocious to the gentle and back again—which of them is
the Lord of Lords? If each fulfils the function by turns, might it
not be that the two are but different ways of regarding the same
God who is King of all? So, at any rate, the educated Hindu has
argued for the past couple of thousand years. In popular religion,
admittedly, Hindus to this day are worshippers of either the one
or the other of this pair; but allegiance is largely dictated by
regional custom or family tradition. Religion has little to do with
it, and I can remember no instance of tension between the two
groups (Vaishnavites and Shaivites in the usual spelling) of
devotees. There is a nice tale of a Vaishnavite who could not abide
Shaivites. As he bowed before the image of Vishnu the face
bisected and Shiva’s features appeared on one half. Then a smile
united the two halves, a pitying smile on the bigot, and a voice
spoke to him saying: ‘Look, we are one!’
Besides the Lord of Lords, be he Vishnu or be he Shiva, there
are lesser gods in plenty, there is no denying it. But, paradoxically,
polytheism there is not. If we have to allow an -ism in this place,
let it be pantheism. Some sign of God the Hindu is always
detecting in most of what is around: nature to begin with; then in
many of the human beings he has to do with. The Brahmin is ‘god-
on-earth’; to every woman her husband is god-like, and the child
does puja to his parent. A fortiori the divinities with whom the air
is charged, borrow a certain glory from the Lord. The gods of the
small ‘g’ thus enjoy the status of the Saints with a big ‘s’ whose cult
is celebrated in Christian churches. ‘Does it seem to you in the
West peculiar,’ India asks, ‘that we invoke those who may aid and
assist us?’
4.
NEW TESTAMENT
The doctrine of The Way Out had stemmed from an engrossing
desiåe to escape from The Round. But it did not per se tell you
how to engineer your exit, nor yet about the Bliss that awaited
your soul at the end of the passage. Upon the blessed state itself
the learned and contemplative pronounced in due course after the
Hindu fashion; which is tantamount to saying: contrapuntally. I
have described the two distinct tunes that were audible in
com bination. Now as to the path leading to Liberation—and all
the teachers agreed upon this—an inner discipline would be called
for in order to tread it; a ‘harnessing’, as Indians put it, having
recourse at this juncture to the graphic but nowadays badly
mauled word yoga, which is our English ‘yoke’ and the French
‘joug’. But a harnessing to what? The Monists leaned towards the
chill virtue of indifference, a passionlessness in this vale of tears.
Those, on the other hand, who conceived ultimate Being not as a
neutral Absolute but as a personal, beckoning God, proclaimed
the validity of fervent attachment and of this alone. ‘Devotion’,
Bhakti, became their watchword.
Glance backward across two millennia, and this impassioned
self-abandonment to the mercy of a loving God will be noticed
breaking surface from time to time. The fact that it has often done
so in the larger context of some attempted reform or other has, if I
read the case aright, disposed Hindus themselves to regard it, on
each given occasion, as a new and salutary injection. Salutary it
is; but not new. Or only new in the sense in which our own
Gospel is ‘new’ compared to the Old Testament. The parallel is by
no means absurd. For in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘The Lord’s Song’,
where Bhakti, ‘Devotion’, was first preached, it must have fallen on
Hindu ears as a new gospel indeed.
The Bhagavad Gita—‘no Hindu ever need go outside its teaching’
my Swami (the Monist, remember!) had said. I think he meant
that for more than two thousand years it had both prompted the
lonely speculation of sages—men of his own stamp—and, equally,
had been the food of rustic piety.
104 TO BE A HINDU
The scene of the Gita is a battlefield in the neighbourhood of the

modern Delhi at zero hour. The opposing hosts are drawn up
facing each other, the air vibrates to the loud uplifted conches of
the captains. The struggle is for a throne, and the contenders are
cousins; so that the war is practically fratricidal. Krishna, head of
one of the clans involved, has failed to bring about a reconciliation,
and joins one of the armies as the charioteer of his young friend
Arjun. The latter, an Indian Achilles, quails at the prospect of
killing his kinsmen. Warrior of the warrior caste, he takes up the
bow as he is bound to do—only to lay it down in an agony of
mind. ‘I will not fight.’ Comes a pregnant pause in the march of
events almost as in grand opera while we, the audience, watch the
charioteer, still in his car, gazing at his protégé with a wistful
smile. We are not wrong in guessing that he is about to deliver the
Song of the Lord, a song in dialogue which will extend to eighteen
cantos and contain the answer, immediate and long term, to that
question of Arjun’s: Master, what would’st thou have me to do?
The epic contest is now properly at the mercy of the operatic
device and hung up until further notice. We are in for a discourse,
profound and—we are expecting this—self-contradictory. But—
and herein its miracle—as light in manner as it is weighty in
substance. ‘Oh, come!’ Krishna can say colloquially in one of the
stanzas, ‘snap out of it, boy!’ Arjun is lectured on The Round, the
Deed and The Rules; is commanded to remain true to his caste, to
his station in life. Obedient to the dictates of these, he can still be
detached, the Teacher insists: for contemplation is inward and
beyond the reach of outward action.
From here the pupil is led to the fourth of the concepts we
defined: Liberation; and told that those who strive earnestly for
deliverance from death shall know the Absolute. ‘But what is that
Absolute?’ asks Arjun. In the two or three Cantos assigned to the
answer, ample concession seems made to the Monist postulate of
Reality as a boundless, neutral substrate. At the same time
nobody can miss Krishna’s constant employment of the first
person singular, and his frequent use of such expressions as
‘devotion’ and ‘loving faith’. The atmosphere grows more and more
electric. The Teacher is speaking now as the Lord. ‘Show me Thy
face’ pleads the pupil, and Krishna is then momentarily
transfigured before his eyes.
But the climax is not yet. It is delayed until the very last few
stanzas, and imports into Hinduism in the space of about forty
lines something completely new and which will be a part of it from
then on. We hear the Lord’s final word. It is a summons.
Because thou art my dearly beloved in whom I am well

pleased, forsake all (all Dharma, all the Rules of the Game)
and come unto Me, for I only am thy refuge and I shall give
thee rest.
Arjun replies: ‘Thy will be done.’

The Indians were not among those to whom a revelation was
made: they are not People of the Book. But they did come into
possession of a luminous scripture to which they have never
ceased to turn for light. For the Bhagavad Gita teaches what it
means to be a Hindu.
106
7
THE INDO-MUSLIMS
1.
ISLAM IN INDIA
‘You’ve asked about the Muslims.’
My reply was ready-made. Years ago I had written it out for my
mother, I had even got it down on paper for Rosita Forbes when
she turned up in Agra. I didn’t need to check my names and dates
again for the benefit of the elderly little person who was opposite
to me now.
‘You ask me if the Muslims are just like the Muslims in Egypt or
Morocco and places, and I think the answer is, no. Because, you
see, they are Indians, and Mother India is a strong character who
has a way of compelling her own to take after her. Theologically, of
course, they’re exactly the same. There are Sunnites here, the big
majority, who are the same as the Sunnites anywhere else, and
there are Shi’ites here, one in every thirteen to be precise, who are
like those in Persia or Iraq.
‘But I suspect what you really want to know is about Polygamy
and Purdah! Well, Polygamy is the exception nowadays, and it is
becoming good form to condemn it openly. Purdah on the other
hand—I am talking of the towns, mind—is the rule. You simply
couldn’t imagine Muslim telephone girls, for instance, here in
Delhi, or typists, or nurses in the male ward of the Irwin Hospital.
And as for the gentry, trying very hard I can count perhaps a couple
of dozen wives I see at functions or sitting next to me at table, or
acting as hostesses in some way or other. And—oh, yes—there
was that unmarried girl, of an Agra family, who came to my house
to borrow a book and get an address in London—so signal an event
that the eyes of the onlookers goggled. In the villages, though, it is
otherwise. This has to be remembered. The poor Muslims there
can’t afford such a luxury as Purdah.
‘You haven’t asked about it, but it comes in here. There is

actually just one Indian expression of Islam—or deviation from it,
if you prefer: the Ahmadiyya Movement. It was founded at the end
of last century by Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian in the Gurdaspur
District of the Punjab. He claimed to be the Messiah, incarnating
both Our Lord and Muhammad. The followers believe that Jesus
after the resurrection migrated to India to preach the gospel here,
and is buried at Srinagar: and also of course that Ghulam Ahmad
was indeed the Messiah. I have a ‘Qadiani’ on my staff at this
minute. They are exceedingly worthy people but a bit stuck up, or
so most other Muslims tell me. Anyhow, they don’t rock the boat.
‘Of course there are other religious minorities as well: Sikhs,
Christians, Zoroastrians. Who are the Zoroastrians? That tiny but
immensely influential colony of Parsees concentrated in Bombay,
a most westernized society rejoicing in an exotic faith, and balanc-
ing the possession of wealth with a taste for public charity. Oh,
diversity with a vengeance is the mark of social life in India. But
come back to the two big communities. What an absurd situation
it is, Hindus and Muslims peopling this whole continent since I
don’t know how long—and still looking askance at each other!
They cannot intermarry, do not apparently meet except in rather
anxious bonhomie, wear different dress, worship differently, call
themselves by an altogether different set of names—and hardly let
a week go by without having a crack at one another somewhere.’
By the time I set foot in India, I had been dipping into Indian
History for three terms under the guidance of one of the handful
in England at that day competent to teach it: Professor Dodwell of
London. I knew, because the rotund sentence was in one of the
prescribed books, that in India as nowhere else on the map of
mankind the spectacle had been witnessed of two vast, strongly
developed and yet radically dissimilar civilizations meeting and
mingling. And Dr Grahame Bailey in the same interval had
succeeded in arousing my interest in Urdu. Here, at all events, I
thought, was proof of the blending of the two cultures. ‘Urdu’, our
word ‘horde’, is Turkish for ‘camp’; and the Urdu language is the
Hindi spoken around Delhi overlaid by the Persian speech of
Muslim invaders of Turkic stock who had descended upon India
from the north. Surely after eight or nine centuries of partnership
there would be countless other proofs of harmony. But as yet I
was no better equipped than the next Englishman to give any
thought to the crucial question: These Indo-Muslims—were they
more Indian than Muslim or more Muslim than Indian?
Indian and Muslim. On the face of it the terms are contradictory.
Islam means awed obedience to the One God who is totally other
THE INDO-MUSLIMS 109
than his creation, and the Muslim is he that resigns himself to the
mercy of that One God, acknowledges Muhammad as his Prophet,
and knows that the Believer is bidden to pray five times a day, is
expected to fast in the month of Ramazan if physical conditions
permit, to pay the Community Levy provided he has the means,
and (again, if he can afford it) perform the Pilgrimage. The whole
thing is clear-cut, sharp as the desert horizon at the coming of
dawn—and challenges everything that India has stood for
throughout the centuries. A Muslim writer of renown, a
sympathiser too, one who had made himself a profound Sanskrit
scholar and whose knowledge of the Hindus has rarely been
excelled, put it like this: They differ utterly from us, these people,
for we believe in nothing in which they believe and vice versa.’ Al
Biruni wrote that nine hundred years ago and the position has
never been stated more pithily.
Kabir, indeed, the fifteenth century mystic, a sort of Indian
Ruysbroeck, did dream his way to the millennium, as the Western
world knows: the Poems of Kabir, in the rendering of Tagore and
Miss Evelyn Underhill, are part of English literature. His listeners
in Benares and Gorakphur no doubt dreamed with him, catching
the rapture, catching the charity of his songs. Yet in waking hours
no Hindu could bring himself to repeat that there was ‘nothing
but water at the holy bathing places’: no Muslim that ‘the Koran is
mere words’. And a second attempt, also famous, at reconciling
the two creeds was of course Akbar’s. I think myself the guide-
books on sale at Fatehpur Sikri are much too kind to the Great
Mughal’s Divine Faith. On the evidence, the Emperor’s motives
were political; his religious leaning was nil. The great man was a
vain man too; who rejecting the revelation of the Prophet, retained
next to nothing of Islam save the affirmation, or salutation as he
chose to consider it, Allahu Akbar—and this, very likely, for the
reason of its ambiguity in Arabic: ‘God is very Great’ or ‘Akbar is
God!’
2.
IN THE BEGINNING
We tend to think of Islam as having burst like a flood from
Arabian gates to inundate the lands of Syria, Egypt, Persia,
Transoxania, Asia Minor, North Africa and Spain; but as having
slackened before reaching India. That is quite a fair mental image;
needing, however, just this small correction that the flood did in
the sequence of its initial rush attain a thin stretch of territory in
India also, which it submerged in the political sense without
soaking it through and through culturally. For the eighth century

had barely opened when the Arabs, apparently in reprisal for acts
of piracy, overran and mastered the extreme north-western strip
of the Indian continent: Sind, that is to say. But there was
absolutely no follow-through during the next three hundred years;
and Islam’s assault on the Indian world, when it did begin in
earnest, was at one remove from the Arabian source. Mahmud of
Ghazni in modern Afghanistan set the ball rolling. In a series of
lightning raids he crossed the Ganges into Bundelkhand, sacked
the temple of Somnath on the coast of Kathiawar, and wrested the
entire Punjab from the Hindus. Now his troops who settled at
Lahore in 1027 showed small inclination to leave it. Their
commander might, and did, retire to Ghazni in order to govern
from the centre; but their own preference, evidently, as hectoring
soldiers in the very active enjoyment of local perquisites, was to
stay. Stay they did, and became the first Indo-Muslims. They
cannot have regretted their choice, for the house of Ghazni was
soon supplanted by the house of neighbouring Ghur. It was
predictable that the ‘Ghurids’ too would one fine day turn their
attention to India, treating the descendants of that original
garrison in Lahore as subservient allies possessed of a valuable
know-how. And so it happened. By 1193 joint Ghurid and
Ghaznavid forces were in Delhi itself; and but a few years later
both Bihar and Bengal were Muslim provinces. Dates are not for
us here, but the two I have cited enclose William the Conqueror
and it surely helps us to situate the Muslim presence in India if
we can think of it as having originated at the time the Normans
landed on our shores. By the middle of the fourteenth century—I
am neglecting the ups and downs of two or three dynasties which
secured and then lost the throne in the meanwhile—a Sultanate
of Delhi has extended its rule to the Deccan and even includes a
slice of the Malabar coast. But then, and for roughly the following
two hundred years, the Muslim advance was halted, its progress
barred by the new Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar in the south. This
respite ended when Babur, the chief of a Tatar tribe from beyond
the Oxus, and Ruler of Kabul, invaded India in 1525. During the
next one hundred and seventyfive odd years his line would be at
the helm of the colossal empire to which the monuments of
Mughal architecture bear their arresting testimony. At the peak of
its glory under Akbar this empire comprised Afghanistan, all of
northern India and territories extending south to a boundary
running from modern Bombay in the west to Cuttack, in Orissa, in
the east; and the later seventeenth century actually saw the
imperial officers levying tribute as far from the capital as Tanjore
and Trichinopoly. However, by that date the Hindus had mounted

a counter offensive, the hero of which was the Maratha Shivaji.
And there was something else.
Just at this juncture—it is tempting to suppose a causal
connexion—a devotional revival, a Bhakti movement (we know this
word from the last chapter) was in the Hindu air, and charging it
heavily. So this best of Indian generals, in his bid to reassert
Hindu power at the expense of a Muslim regime now past its
prime, was able to draw simultaneously on the martial ardour of
his people and on their renascent spiritual fervour.
It was this scene of political disunity and religious division that
confronted us British when we took it upon ourselves to
intervene.
3.
WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME
It has needed a couple of rather dense pages, but I had to bring
out the temporal span and the spatial spread of the Muslim
Conquest. How else to account for the man I am seeking to
identify? Throughout those five hundred years, plainly, Islam was
pounding away at India, changing her. Unfortunately neither
contemporary records nor modern studies of the period appear
much concerned with our Indo-Muslim; their stage is peopled with
the invaders on the one side and the Indians on the other; the
number of the former seeming to us astonishingly small. A
chronicler reports the Ghurids to have numbered 120,000 on that
epoch-making march to Delhi, and this was reckoned a large
army; while Babur in his own diverting Memoirs claims to have
founded the Mughal Empire with a tenth of that strength: twelve
thousand men, including merchants and servants. Today’s
historians for their part inform us that ‘Muslim government was
sustained by constant importation of fresh blood from abroad’;
that ‘not only the military but the civil chiefs were vigorous
recruits from Central Asia who took service under sovereigns of
their own race and religion’; and that the foreign invaders ‘neither
ousted the Hindus established in trade and clerical occupations
nor won converts from among them’. Judgments of the sort
occurring passim in the standard Histories of India are
substantiated, but they leave much unsaid. Too much unsaid for
a period lasting, mind, not five years or fifty years but five
hundred years.
Admittedly we get warmer sometimes. As, for instance, when we
read that the Emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan were both sons
of Hindu mothers, or that the famous bulbous dome so typical of

Mughal buildings may possibly after all be of Indian inspiration.
But the vagaries of royal behaviour and controversial points in
architectural history do not supply us with the hyphen we are
after. Of course we accept the fact, we must, that for five centuries
the Hindus and Muslims lived side by side as parallel units in the
body politic. All I contend is that the proposition itself
presupposes a significant Muslim element at every level of society
to whom India was home. This had come into being in several
ways. By the date of the Battle of Hastings a proportion of that
‘Ghaznavid’ army based on Lahore must have been half-Indian by
blood, and by the time the ‘Ghurids’ joined up with them four
generations later, almost wholly so. The same story was repeated
when Babur came. Thus in the India of my memory you had any
number of families which could look back to, and take pride in an
ancestry hailing from beyond the North-West Frontier. I remember
how I would be told importantly that as many as ten per cent of
the Muslim citizens of Allahabad or Agra or Delhi, or wherever it
might be, were descended from the foreign conqueror; as if this
implied that onetenth of the Muslim community was actually of
Arab or Persian or Afghan or Turkic strain. It would have been
crushing to murmur that we all have two parents, four
grandparents, eight greatgrandparents, sixteen ancestors of the
fourth generation and, at that rate, millions of ancestors (albeit half
of them female who did not seem to count!) drawing breath at the
period of the first conquests. But of course it was a different
process, namely conversion —frequently group conversion—that
accounted for the bulk of the community right from the start, and
nine-tenths of the Muslims did not pretend to be of foreign
extraction. That the conversion was on occasion forcible can
hardly be doubted, but as a rule it was voluntary. The high
percentage of Hindus at the very heart of the Mughal Empire till
its very end proves this. Everything depended on the Sultan of the
age. If he were indifferent or lenient, as in most cases he was, all
would be well; if he were fanatical—and we think of the Emperor
Aurangzeb—then woe unto the Hindus within reach. I am not
suggesting proselytism went forward in either case by leaps and
bounds. On the contrary, I have pointed out above, as also in
another of my chapters, that Hinduism upon the whole was
sullenly resentful of Muslim advances, turned in on itself, and
rallied. This said, power attracts. And it was during those earlier
successful stages of the Conquest that certain soldierly Rajputs
whose clans had been lording it, unfortunately for themselves
without much cohesion, all over the north until the previous
evening, embraced Islam; to become the most scrupulously

Muslim of Muslims whilst retaining, as we in our day were
constantly given cause to recognize, the engaging characteristics of
Rajput chivalry. In Kashmir too, going by results, Islam met with
some degree of acceptance; possibly because the Hindus there,
being relatively lax about ceremonial purity, were less offended by
the manners of the uncouth Mlechchas or ‘barbarians’; I do not
know. But let me come without more fuss to Islam’s principal area
of recruitment; I mean the despised and rejected of Hindu men, the
Untouchables. Multitudes of these must have felt the appeal of a
faith in which all are proclaimed equal before God. Numbers
yielded to that pull. My mind here races back to the poorer Muslim
quarters of several large cities of the north, back also to a hundred
Muslim villages in various Districts. These urban or rural
concentrations were of long standing, they were centuries old. And
you had not to look very hard at the features of those who led
their lives in them to perceive that you were among the
descendants of converts from the lower strata of Hindu society.
The Muslim community, then, was of heterogeneous origin; and
a closer look reveals it to be only less stratified than that of the
Hindus themselves. There were those, we saw, whose ancestors
had brought Islam into India, and their number may, as claimed,
touch ten per cent of the total. The point I was making about them
was simply that ‘descent’ and ‘blood’ are not interchangeable
terms. With microscopic exceptions the blood in the veins of those
Muslims ‘of descent’ was as Indian as that of anyone else. What
really mattered was the ‘tree’ , and this mattered much. In the top
drawer were the ‘Sayyids’ (also written ‘Syeds’) who claimed
descent from the Prophet, no less; and below them the ‘Shaykhs’
who traced their line to somebody in his entourage or perhaps the
head of an Arabian tribe. Then there were ‘Pathans’ and
‘Mughals’, LBI—E honorifics speaking for themselves. I should
make it clear that the four resulting divisions are not castes. They
are merely the names given to groups which are supposed to
share the descent in question. It goes without saying that this
whole area of IndoMuslim society observes the doctrines of Islam
to the letter.
But what about the converts in that respect? By and large, the
only converts who keep the prescriptions of the Faith intact are
the Muslim Rajputs. So therefore we can list the Sayyids, the
Shaykhs, the Pathans, the Mughals and the Rajputs, all five, as
meticulous in their observances, and then draw a horizontal
stroke across the body of the community. The remaining segment,
comprising the overwhelming majority, has clung to social
customs that governed it before conversion. In Delhi, or in Agra,

for example, the butchers were to all intents and purposes a
caste, marrying only among themselves and obedient to a code of
rules enforced by a sort of panchayat. In the countryside the
survival of old habits was even more marked. How often has an
unprivileged Muslim, telling me his name, not added: ‘my caste is
Weaver’? How often would a Muslim village, set alongside a Hindu
village, not join in the latter’s festivals, imitate its rites, share its
superstitions? At Prayag in the month of Magh I once came on a
party of Muslims having a ritual bath in Mother Ganges. ‘What are
you at?’ I said jokingly, ‘You people and I are Barbarians here.
Outsiders.’
The jest was wasted.
‘You’ll be saying next that some of us bow down and worship
Hindu idols in between whiles. Well, you needn’t. I’m saying it for
you, and it comes better from me.’ The Imam threw back his head
and laughed his high-pitched laugh.
It would be difficult to imagine a less ‘oriental’ physiognomy
than his: the fairest of skins, bluish eyes and the Caucasian
profile. How on earth, especially after all I have been saying on the
subject of blood, did this fine old gentleman born in the
Bulandshahr District of the United Provinces some sixty years
previously, manage to look like that! Anyway there he was, Prayer
Leader at the largest Mosque of a country supporting far and a
way the largest Muslim population of any in the world. You could
see the tall swaying frame in the long robes any day mounting the
steps of the Emperor Shahjahan’s Jama Masjid at Delhi, as you
could, if very lucky, catch a glimpse of his double at the Dome of
the Rock in Jerusalem or on the avenue that leads to the Shrine
at Meshhed. Reading and writing Arabic and Persian with ease he
spoke only Urdu to my knowledge, had been outside India only on
Pilgrimage, and was not of those who hoped for Islam’s renewal
and rebirth through scientific achievement. In an age beset by
strident propaganda, banner headlines and hypocritical oratory,
he was often mocked.
Throughout my seven years at Delhi seven weeks would be
about the gap I could expect between the Imam’s visits. ‘I had
nothing else to do until the Noon Prayer’ was the usual opening
gambit. He would then produce a gunmetal watch from some deep
fold of his gown, glance at it attentively and, apprehension having
yielded to relief, settle down. So not surprisingly our talk had
frequent chances to turn on these things. He was stating now
something that more learned Divines were slow, or perhaps did not
want, to grasp. Namely that the Muslim peoples, wherever they
be, are peoples as well as Muslims. As Muslims they have their

Great Culture, meaning the universal norm expressed or
predicated in religion and law, which is recognized as
authoritative by all. As peoples—they are affected by Little
Cultures, each with its own interpretation of the Great Culture.
The situation is not that the ideals of the latter are whittled, but
that they are interpenetrated by other influences deriving from the
local way of life.
Considerations of the kind bring the Indo-Muslim into proper
focus so far as his religion goes, but we still have to locate him in
society. Say—and I do not have to use my imagination—say, there
are three of us in the room; two of my assistants and myself. Our
business done, the Indians get up to go. First, how do they regard
me? I am not talking here of feeling but of classification. As a
stranger, it is sure; albeit a stranger whose strangeness has
rubbed off in the course of the last one hundred and fifty years. In
fact I remember the senior of these two, a Hindu and a Rajput,
one day teasing the younger, Hashmi by name, whose forbears
were of the Banu Hashim, the Hashemite clan in the Prophet’s
time. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you people hadn’t queered the pitch we
Hindus could have adopted them (the British) as a pukka caste.
They’ve got the qualifications, you can’t deny it’ Hashmi, an
example of what modern India knew as ‘the Aligarh man’—the
significance of this label will come presently—slapped his thigh:
‘Jolly good, jolly good!’ However, all that was an idle ‘if’ of history,
and meantime I am a sojourner: in India, but not, like themselves,
of India. And now about them. How do they view one another?
They happen to belong to the same small township of the Western
U.P., have had similar educational chances, are social equals.
They have been with me nearly three years during which they
have spent much of the working day in and out of each other’s
company—and good company it is. Yet neither has been inside the
house of the other, neither looks forward to that experience. I
know the Rajput home is cram full of relatives; young Hashmi’s
bungalow is inconveniently equipped—all that sort of thing. But
bluntly the position is that the one household is conventionally
Hindu and the other conventionally Muslim. So those two
estimable assistants of mine, having just gone out of the room
practically arm-in-arm, I do not mind betting, will at this moment
be exchanging a valedictory wave of the hand on the verandah.
These eight hundred years, Indian society has been split from
top to bottom. At the apex you had the Muslim nobility and you
had the Rajas; and at the base were the Untouchables doing the
dirty jobs of the Hindus, and their Muslim counterparts,
sheltering under the euphemistic class name of Musalli, who did

the dirty jobs of the Believers. And should the dividing line lose its
sharpness at any point this will in general be somewhere near the
summit or somewhere near the foot. The professions and the
services, not to mention inherited wealth, sometimes fostered
close relationships on the upper rungs of the ladder; while in the
countryside a rustic fête or a common disaster could dwarf the
distance between the Temple and the Mosque. But for the most
part the social insulation of the one community from the other
was complete.
However, my metaphor of the vertical line cleaving the Indian
people is after all a figure of speech. Islam hacked off a quarter of
Indian society in a brutal downward stroke, severed it from the
block for ever. Fine—except that Islam was not an axe nor India a
block. As I interpret it, Islam and India each got just about as
good as it gave. From the start, and in various departments of
thought and action a two-way traffic passed between the
communities; with the result that the Hindus on their side were
never to be quite the same as they had been, or the Muslims on
theirs quite the same as Muslims anywhere else. I had been in India
a matter of months, had seen little of her but the scarred ravines
and the hushed jungle south of Mirzapur when one day, out
riding, I met a group of strolling minstrels who to judge by their
nasal index were on the outermost fringe of Hinduism. Pointing to
a six-stringed pandore I enquired what they called it. ‘Guitar,’ they
replied. Then I pointed to a tabor; ‘And this?’ ‘This is a tambour,’
they said. They were using the nomenclature of fellow musicians
from Samarkand to the Atlantic. I move my private clock on a
decade, and am in a more sophisticated setting now. Pandit
Amarnath of Delhi, a prominent poet to be found in anthologies of
Urdu verse under his nom de guerre Sahir, ‘The Sorcerer’, is
reciting to an audience consisting mostly of Muslims who are
ejaculating ‘Wah! wah!’ in admiration. The piece is one of lofty
sentiment; how God’s blinding radiance quenches equally ‘the
Ka’ba’s candle and the lamp that lights Somnath’—in that genre.
After which portion of religious flavour we are offered an airy
soufflé in contrast, a love lyric, and I can still hear the white-
bearded, benign, bespectacled Brahmin treating us to lines whose
burden was no heavier than this:
She passed this way and smiled one day,

The rose its head unbent;
She smiled that day—and all of May
Smiled with her where she went.
The form is Persian not Indian; the conceit also; and six of the
words are Persian words. In short a Hindu was giving the Muslim
literati that evening what they had given him: even to their own
entanglement in the toils of an adopted idiom. The elderly Romeo
is not in Shiraz, he is in Delhi where May—or the second half of it,
and he insists on the ‘all’!—evokes a shade temperature of 120°
Fahrenheit, evokes Hell. But I risk flogging a hobby-horse here to
the neglect of broader approaches. Let me therefore resume. Islam
taught those kings whom I have described above as staging the
Resistance from Vijayanagar and Maharashtra, to do what Hindu
rulers had never done before and would not have done then but f
or its own example: namely, to champion and defend a creed.
But now for some traffic in the opposite direction. I have spoken
enough of the hold Hindu culture retained over the humbler
Muslims, the converts. So I leave them and come to the nobility:
those Sayyids and those Shaykhs we singled out as forming the
upper crust of Indo-Muslim society. You would say they ought to
have been impervious to Hindu suggestion, but so sensitive had
they in fact become—and seemingly from an early date—to the
caste attitudes in the giant community adjacent to theirs that they
married only within their own particular group. Or, turning to a
totally different area of expression, consider the
abundant evidence of the Muslim monuments. I think, at random,
of the lovely Mosque of Sher Shah inside the Old Fort at Delhi. It
used to be officially described, if I remember, as a jewel of ‘Pathan
Architecture’. Well, I never saw anything remotely like that when I
was in Kabul. I saw that crenellated parapet in the gateway of the
Kailas Temple at Ellora. Why, the very dome of this mosque is
crowned with the Indian lotus-and-vase! To my thinking the touch
of the local craftsman is omnipresent in Mughal Architecture. I am
without title to discuss this, but having spent five or six years of
my life in Agra within walking distance of the Taj Mahal and
another seven or more in Delhi within walking distance of the Red
Fort, I cannot doubt that it is instinct with an Indian grace.
4.
THE ALIGARH MAN
I undertook to introduce the ‘Aligarh man’. We owe him a salute in
this place, for he served his fellows well and truly in the
penultimate phase. It was the Aligarh man who just one hundred
years ago, aghast at the condition into which his community had
lapsed, began a comprehensive long-term rescue operation. The
tide of Indian Islam had fallen to a low ebb about the middle of last
century—the years on either side, shall we say, of the Mutiny: a
low economic ebb vis-à-vis the Hindus, a low political ebb vis-à-vis
the British, a low moral ebb vis-à-vis itself. At this point of
unprecedented depression there came forward a man fit to
assume the virtual direction, both social and religious, of the
entire community. The name of Syed Ahmad Khan is unfamiliar in
the West perhaps, but Indo-Muslims of the whole continent
pronounce it to this day with a degree of reverence reserved for no
one else in their eventful saga.
I forget in which year it was, but not very long before I booked ‘a
passage to India’, E.M.Forster had written his brilliantly staged
novel of that exact title and I suppose there was none in my batch
who did not read it—read it with more than a shade of anxiety. If
this was the life in front of us, how could we endure it? ‘Dismiss
Forster till you are older,’ was to be my wise Collector’s advice,
‘then re-read him,’ I obeyed—and found, when the time came, that
though Forster’s central character, Aziz, is a highly sensitive
portrait of a young Indo-Muslim, a young Aligarh man in fact, his
district officials and the jumpy world in which they jerk and bob
are pure guignol. However, all this is an aside. Of sole concern
here is the detail that A Passage to India was dedicated to a
certain Syed Ross Masood.
Now Syed Ross Masood it was who first told me about ‘the
Aligarh man’ and the Aligarh Movement of which that man
became the spearhead in every corner of India. And a better
intermediary I could not have had, because Ross was the
grandson of Syed Ahmad Khan.
One particular evening comes vividly to mind. The two of us are
out on the lawn of the lovely old house at Agra, and I see again my
visitor’s oval face, large, handsome, pallid, glistening in the
lamplight. He keeps on pushing back a troublesome strand of
black hair from his forehead as he talks, talks very rapidly, of his
boyhood. Listening to him I feel I have tuned in to Mughal India.
In a manner, I have. These people had been of the Court.
Grandfather Ahmad was the son of a courtier close to the
Emperor and himself earmarked as a child for an appointment in
the Household. Ross’s own tender years had been spent largely,
he told me, under his grandmother’s vigilant eye, ‘something you
can’t possibly know, something unexampled in Europe since the
Middle Ages.’ I wish there were space here to repeat some of his
stories of matriarchal prerogative. But the main topic that
evening, and he presently came to it, was the Movement. Decay

had set in, he explained, because of that abiding disadvantage the
Muslims laboured under in India—dispersion. They had no
common intellectual background with which to counteract this
drawback, no common ideology, no common language. Syed
Ahmad’s aim was to give them these. He began by founding an
educational centre: viz, the College at Aligarh which later grew
into the Muslim University of which Ross Masood at that moment
was Vice-Chancellor. The College played from the beginning a
dual role; it put young men through a degree course as any other
college might, but it also awakened a missionary enthusiasm in
their breasts, and soon the Aligarh Movement was represented in
every Province and in the major Native States. Cultural institutes
were opened in every town of consequence to propagate the
doctrine of the new ‘school’ and encourage the study of the Urdu
language, and a respectable press was subventioned to cater for a
countrywide Muslim readership. Beyond any question it was the
Aligarh man going forth in his thousands over the next fifty years
who lifted Indian Islam out of the slough of despond.
But remember, the Aligarh man’s battle was for the survival
of Islam in India. He had no wish to say good-bye to her. Such an
idea never entered his head: after all there had been no hint of
such an issue in Syed Amad Khan’s writings or in the pattern of
his personal attitudes. I can imagine a studious young Aligarh
man early in the century, before the Great War, tackling Acton’s
Lectures, and coming upon the dictum that ‘the one pervading evil
of democracy is the tyranny of the majority’. I think he marks this
in the margin, that is all, and reads on—on the look-out for
something not quite so academic, something with an application
to his own homeland.
5.
1940
And so it would be until well after the apogee of the Aligarh
Movement, until well through the period of Muslim League
ascendancy. In fact until 1940. Not until that year did the
agonizing alternative of a separate state commend itself to the
Indo-Muslims. At a Lahore session the League, claiming to speak
for the eighty millions in the community, then for the first time
formulated a demand for ‘Independent States’ in ‘the North
western and Eastern zones of India’.
The League decided to follow up this epoch-making Resolution
with an open-air meeting in the capital which Jinnah would
address, and applied to me for the use of the Delhi Municipal

Gardens. These, flanking the historic Chandni Chowk but
protected on that side by very high, very massive, railings, lent
themsel ves, and were habitually put, to purposes of this sort. I
had lately allowed a Congress gathering on the same site and
could have no objection now. But I thought I might enquire what
the meeting was about. ‘About Nationalism’ the applicants
answered. ‘Not about your Lahore Resolution, then?’ I asked. ‘No.
Really more about safeguarding Islam, our cultural heritage, and
our Urdu language,’ they said. So that was it. Jinnah’s text would
be taken from the Epistle of Syed Ahmad Khan to the Muslims.
I put this on record just to remind myself and, it may be,
others, that at that stage (1940) the boundaries of an eventual
Pakistan were not even a subject of thought.
When Jinnah himself turned up, desiccated of person, elegantly
attired, a bit languid in conversation, but courtly, he had a request.
Could he be found an interpreter, a Delhi Muslim with a good
delivery? Like most men gifted with humour—and his, if
notice ably sardonic, could be relied on—he knew how to keep a
straight face. All went well. Everything the ‘Leader’, the Qaid i
Azam, said won thunderous applause. Especially—or so my friend
who had interpreted assured me—the sentence ‘There is not one
of you whose heart will not swell with pride as I speak of that
priceless inheritance of ours, the Urdu tongue’.
Nobody in the audience considered it incongruous that Jinnah
had to say this in English.
The Aligarh man had striven hard, he had accomplished much.
But two formidable obstacles he could not overcome. The first was
the dispersion on which Ross Masood dwelt in talk with me; and
the second, chase away the thought as they might, was that the
hold of the language wishfully termed ‘national’ was weak where
the Muslims were numerically strong and strong where they were
numerically weak. And who can say, even now, which of these two
bedevilled their progress towards nationhood the more?
8
THE MAGISTRATE
The portrait that follows is a self-portrait, and self-portraits have a

habit of flattering the sitter. But I had no option. ‘The Head of the
District’: Kipling drummed this home enough, was a man who
ruled alone. He had no chance to watch his opposite number
somewhere else. For him there was no such place as somewhere
else. The District was all. What wonder, then, if I can see no warts
as I regard my image in the mirror?
1.
ZILA SAHIB
Lord Macaulay in that famous essay on Warren Hastings reminds
the reader that an Englishman’s performance in Britain’s asiatic
empire is to be gauged with reference to the setting. You do not
‘compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe who,
before he could bake a single loaf had to make his plough and his
harrow, his fences and his scarecrows, his sickle and his flail, his
mill and his oven’. The Indian Civil Service magistrate did not
behave like a London magistrate; he did much that would
astonish and quite a lot that would shock the latter. But the latter,
had he been dropped from the sky upon Bahraich or Agra or
Allahabad or Delhi and told to get on with it, would have suffered
a chameleonic change and adapted his style to the environment.
Just as I, supposing I could have inhabited the skin of a
stipendiary at home, must soon have conformed to the custom of
entering the courtroom not only punctually but decently clothed,
and without either my flywhisk or my face-towel.
I should explain that the strangely behaved person under the
lens throughout this chapter is not any magistrate but the
magistrate: he is this as far as the eye can reach and as far as
thought need travel. Anything up to five or six of his principal
assistants will be magistrates too, sharing his own competence to
sentence to imprisonment for two years; to a fine not exceeding
122 THE MAGISTRATE
two thousand rupees; to whipping. But he himself is a great deal

higher, and a great deal mightier, than they. His official
designation, ‘The Ruler of the Zila’ (District), is not a misnomer.
And the unsophisticated will hit the nail even more truly on the
head, calling him—listen to them attentively—‘Zila Sahib’: Mister
District, as it were.
Now this Mister District did plenty of things which the public
conscience of the English would not have tolerated in their island
home. Let me give an instance. A magistrate, you might be
forgiven for supposing, was there to punish for some crime,
misdemeanour, peccadillo or frolic—and to rest content with that.
But this one was actually empowered under a sufficiently
shocking section of the Criminal Procedure Code to have at you
before you had raised a finger towards doing anything at all. Your
protest, if you made one, that you were not meditating anything
reprehensible was a waste of breath. Before you knew where you
were, he would pass an order absolute at once and issued ex parte
requiring you to do this or refrain from that. And if you ignored him
—well, you were ‘in’ for a month.
However, wait to hear it from my angle. From the hour I
assumed charge of my District I became answerable for the
maintenance of law and order in it, and if there were a flare-up
that was my personal failure. I ought to have known who would be
likely to start it, over what, and when. I ought to have been there
in the street beforehand, ready for him. This handcuffed hooligan
in front of me at the minute, I told him weeks ago I was not
pleased with him: ‘not a bit pleased’, those were my very words.
Half my time, quite half, I was doing things right outside the
competence of a’beak’; things, moreover, incompatible with a
beak’s functions. I had to supervise the casework of assistants
some of whom exercised magisterial powers on paper identical
with my own. Every so often I would visit the District Jail, and
spend an hour or two among the under-trial prisoners to satisfy
myself that their appearances in court were not too slow, or too
frequent. I would study, question, perhaps modify before
confirming them, the arrangements the Superintendent of Police
submitted to me on the eve of every religious festival in the
calendar. Oh, those processions! Muslims bent on damage to
pipal trees, Hindus at their noisiest when passing mosques. There
is one due shortly—there will be a grand old argument about the
route it shall take. I have already decided what route it shall take.
Any fool could stop a riot, I used to tell myself, not everyone could
anticipate it. Anticipation was the secret. Anticipation as in
music: move to the note of the next chord before this one is
properly sounded. But my ear could be faulty, and then instead of

a harmonious passage I got a bloody uproar. Only one thing to do
in that case—I had to be, had to be, more bloody than anybody
else.
A section of the Criminal Procedure Code enabled me to call on
the Army, if my Police were worsted. Mr A.Sabonadière (none
could discover what the ‘A’ stood for) whose lectures on Indian
Law I attended for three terms before I went out, had fluted when
we came to this: ‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to use it,’ and he
had even committed this piece of optimism to print in his
published commentary on the Code. ‘The occasions,’ he wrote,
‘when military force has to be used on account of civil
disturbances are rare.’ Now Sabonadière had been a Sessions
Judge in the United Provinces before 1914 and spoke with
authority—but from the experience of one side of a watershed. The
Great War was that watershed. On my side of it certain
headstreams contributed to a battling, riotous confusion of
currents of which he had no notion.
Obviously it depended on where the Government chose to place
you. You would not face much turmoil in the hill country of
Garhwal: or have to quell a communal riot from a chair in the
Secretariat. Whereas a posting to a district containing one of the
teeming cities of Upper India rendered such a prospect well nigh
certain. I was not quite thirty when I asked for a battalion to stand
by. That, of course, fell far short of a cry for help—my police had
not been strained to breaking point. I was merely of the fear they
might. But they came out on top. So I was several years older
before I had to resort to that section of the law concerning which
the gentle lecturer had spoken comfortable words. Under that
section it was for me to say whether the civil force at my disposal
was indeed proving unequal to its task. If that was my view, I had
to direct the Officer Commanding the troops to do what I wanted
done. And amid the shouting, the sweat, the blood, the total tumult
of the scene, very often the darkness too, it could be a job to put
this over to him. Legally he was himself to decide the degree of
strength to exert: how many platoons to throw in, how many
rounds to fire, and so on. But in practice I found military
commanders only too anxious to co-operate on ways and means
as well as on ends.
There is no chronological order in these pages, and I leap
from that early anxious moment in Allahabad to a much later
incident. The British Raj was preparing—no, not preparing, there
were no preparations—our Raj was on the verge of bowing itself
out, and communal hatred was surfacing and bubbling as never
124 THE MAGISTRATE
before. I am back in my familiar Agra, an Agra held dear through

seventeen years by now. If anxiety was more apparent among the
Hindus than among the Muslims, this was not without reason, for
the large butcher community had been abroad with their knives.
Their erstwhile leader Shaykh Ajmeri, a Falstaffian personality
who had kept faith with me on certain tense occasions in the past
was no more, and things threatened to get out of hand. I had
therefore one battalion of Indian infantry, the Rajputana Rifles, in
the heart of the city and a second battalion was in reserve in
cantonments ready to move in to its support or to its relief, as
need dictated. Things were bad, as I say. However, I had seen
worse in my time.
After two sleepless nights in the Kotwali, or Central Police
Station, I thought I might get to my house again. The curfew was
being respected and only at lengthening intervals would a shot or
two ring out. They would resume, of course, for a bit, but not—if I
knew the form—with gusto. At least there was this about
communal feeling: in the bazaar it was not chronic. After each
roughand-tumble you packed it up and put it away. It was in
better society, where it might never come to a fight, that you never
quite put your feeling aside. Be that as it may, it was a let-up now
in which to snatch some rest. I made a last round in my jeep
accompanied by an orderly, dodging like a taxi-driver down the
side streets I knew so well. Nothing untoward except for a poor
wretch, dead, mutilated, in the gutter flanking a bye-lane. He was
so scraggy as to be below the walls of the channel, and I might
easily not have noticed him. We lifted him and laid him across the
flat bonnet, our jackets under him so that he should not slide
about. ‘Musalman’, my Muslim orderly muttered savagely…
By midnight I was peeling off my soiled clothes and sluicing
myself down in cold water. There was no hot at that hour. Anyhow,
provided my face and hands were clean what did the odd
reddishbrown stain matter for a while? I thought of putting on the
gramophone: ‘Santa Lucia’, ‘O rest in the Lord’, or something. I
had those. But I was too weary for anything more than a stiff
whisky. I flopped onto my bed. The air coming in from the garden
was sweet, and nothing but an occasional rumble in the distance
told of the city’s unease. Kalloo, as always at such times, had run
the telephone extension-wire all along the floor from the vestibule
where the instrument normally stood, and it was beside me now.
At 2.30a.m. it rang.
‘Prime Minister this end. Am I speaking to the District
Magistrate?’
‘Yes, Prime Minister.’
‘It’s bad with you, isn’t it?’

‘Has been, but is getting better, I’m pretty sure.’
‘That is not what people are sayig.’
‘What people?’ I snapped. ‘Hindus, rich Hindus afraid of being
looted.’
‘No, not only they’. There was a pause and I could hear his
laboured breathing. He was in poor health as everyone knew. I
waited for him to go on. ‘I really feel you ought to go the whole hog,’
he continued.
‘Meaning by that?’ I asked.
‘I can send you a British regiment. I don’t think the Indian
troops you have will do. I shall arrange it.’
‘No, Sir, I do not want your British soldiers. My Indians are
doing fine.’
There came another and longer pause. Having been away from
the United Provinces these last seven years I had had no dealings
with Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant. But he had once dropped in on
me to my astonishment, where I happened to be on tour in
Bahraich. Congress leaders did not pay courtesy calls on officials,
so what was he after? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He had chatted
for ten minutes, mentioned that a cousin of his had been on my
staff at Allahabad once (a good man, too), and enquired whether I
took to the Bahraich log. ‘I’m glad you do, they are just like the
villagers where I come from,’ he had said. And then, ‘Well, I must
be going.’ That chat recurred to me now, and perhaps it did to him.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘You are the judge.’
I lay awake reflecting how preposterous that call had been: a
declared disciple of Gandhi urging me to step up my violence, a
Congressman who wanted to see the backs of the English
deploring the trust I placed in Indians. Then through my shut
eyes I saw that triple row of corpses in the Kotwali, aligned by the
feet, bare feet mostly, the shoes having been kicked away; but six
or seven pairs in ammunition boots, Police issue. Certain of those
bodies were there through my doing. Oh, my involvement was
professional, not emotional. I was neither a Hindu going the whole
hog nor a Muslim putting more beef into it. No, that quip was
cheap, unprofessional. I would take it back. The perfume from the
garden was reaching me now, and soon there would be a glimmer
in the sky and the crowing of a cockerel somewhere. I could not
understand why there were slow tears trickling down my cheek
towards the pillow, since I was not emotionally involved.
It was my lot, my apprenticeship in more junior posts barely
over, to be put in charge of three districts in succession which
centred on great cities. There is thus some risk in this chapter of
126 THE MAGISTRATE
my emphasis falling too heavily upon these. The District

Magistrate was a district man by definition: countryman,
therefore, quite as much as townee. I have just named Bahraich, I
see, but not in its own right. It will make for balance if I bring it
into focus with a sample of the demands likely to be made on the
Zila Sahib in such a place.
Bahraich lies against the limits of Upper India; it marches with
Nepal. Follow the glades of its northern tahsil and you will be in
and out, in and out, of British territory. There were forest
firebreaks that ran straight as an avenue, climbing gradually into
the Nepalese tarai, and on your evening stroll you could see
panthers crossing these at right angles in stately promenade. I can
picture them now. But try as I may I cannot picture the inside of
my courtroom in the miniature town of Bahraich that was my
headquarters —I was so rarely there. Court is not a room; it is
where the Magistrate takes up the case.
On the date I am thinking of, February 1937, I was camping at
Katarnian, which is up beyond Nanpara; right on the border of
Nepal, that is. I was attempting to narrow the gap between two
local factions; cheerful types, they were, but wedded to the
principle of unilateral action. Because the brass-tipped
quarterstaff or lāthi which cultivators carry could be an ugly
weapon in a fracas, I ‘apprehended’ to quote my Code, ‘danger to
human life’. That adjective ‘human’ in the wording of the law I
have always regarded as a testimony, eloquent and touching, to
India’s attitude: you have to make plain as you need not in the
west, that it is only one amongst the plural manifestations of life
to which you are referring. But I must not digress. I had come
from camp on my elephant and then sent her back, hoping to walk
the two miles home for the sake of the exercise. A small folding
table and a canvas-backed chair told the parties where the
alfresco proceedings were to be held. My heavy Springfield leaning
against the table excited no interest. Why should it? If a London
stipendiary enters the court building with an umbrella on a cloudy
day it is no subject of comment. Everybody in Katarnian knew
there had been a tiger hereabouts this last week, marauding from
Nepal. Big too, for some had seen him and others had measured
him from the pug marks.
Those concerned were seated on the ground in two
wellseparated groups except for the spokesman of the one side
who was standing at the table. We had been at it for the better
part of an hour when a panting villager interrupts, reporting a kill
close by: ‘come quick, he sleeps.’ Before the man could gabble out
more, my champion at the table stretches forward and seizes my
rifle. The rest are on their feet in an instant and, the groups
coalescing now, off we move in single file behind our guide. And no
talking—this is a silent matter.
We had to walk about half a mile. Then ‘Here is the track he’s
been using,’ breathed our informant in my ear. There was no
doubt of it. My lot henceforward was to be cast in cities, but I had
already had more than my fair share of Tigerland: Mirzapur first,
the jungles of the Doon afterwards, and now, this last winter,
Bahraich. The broken twig, bent grasses, a flattened tussock and
even the faintest imprint of an outsize paw where the earth was soft
enough —it was text-book stuff.
‘Here’s a tree will do,’ whispered my spokesman of the court.
‘Yes, it’s okay,’ (thīk, bahut thīk) an opponent assented softly.
Gracious, they had thought of that too! There was my
collapsible table being hoisted aloft and wedged steady with a
couple of these lāthis of theirs where the branches forked twelve
feet above ground. Useless at games as a boy, I had been good at
gym. By standing on someone’s shoulders, I got noiselessly onto
my perch. Then grasping the muzzle of the rifle which someone
else was holding up as high as he could, I swung the thing up
beside me.
I knew what to expect next: eerie silence, a bad quarter of an
hour; then distant staccato cries, the clapping of hands, and the
bang and biff and bang of the bamboo against the tree trunks;
louder, louder and nearer, nearer as the ring closed. He would
come out unhurriedly but peeved and on the verge of anger,
looking right and looking left, without the very slightest deviation
from the path he had made his own.
When I had done what they had looked to me to do, which was
to kill the killer, and slid down from my tree, the amateur
beaters hugged me in turn and afterwards hugged one another.
Then we all trooped back to the starting-place, noisily elated. For
stock, not mine individually but everyone’s, had risen under the
pressure of a shared adventure. I told them to sit this time in a
semi-circle in front of my chair. They obeyed absent-mindedly,
going on with their animated chatter. My ‘Silence in the Court!’
was rewarded by an abrupt compliance, instantly neutralized by
giggles.
‘Can’t you boys get back to it: or what? Let the spokesman of
the second party step forward.’
One of them rose reluctantly, shuffled towards me, cleared his
throat lengthily and without inhibition.
‘Excuse me, Your Worship, at yours—in Blighty, I mean—do you
have many tigers?’
128 THE MAGISTRATE
Not always was the scene so idyllic. Quite often court was a
physical endurance test. In a packed room in June when the
thermometer on the wall showed 120° plus, I would now and then
prop my chin on the nib of my pen during arguments—and hope
that my fist concealing it might simply reinforce an impression of
judicial poise. And in Agra once—it was when one of Congress’s
more pedestrian anti-government campaigns was trudging along—
my head was swimming and my eye-balls hurt; signs of rocketing
temperature we all of us knew so well. I forget the particular
charge, but a patriotic mob, hired at two annas a head, was
yelling slogans outside so that the poor Police Prosecutor was
obviously going to have difficulty in making himself heard. When I
was taking my seat a few minutes earlier, the Court Reader, a
fatherly old boy, sensing that I was in high fever, had leaned
forward and laid the back of his hand on my brow. And now, as
soon as the Congressman counsel for the defence (or ‘Justification’,
as he called it) entered and assumed his place, he bent over the
bar and said something against the din. Counsel immediately rose
and left. The chanting ceased. Counsel returned. ‘Scum!’ he
muttered audibly. The proceedings then opened and were rapidly
concluded in hushed tones, the sarcasms and histrionics of
advocacy being given a miss that day.
Kipling, as the cub assistant-editor of the Lahore Civil and
Military Gazette, has written how one summer’s day when he was
counting on a holiday ‘the Sind Punjab and Delhi railway needs
must derail a train and slay thirteen coolies’ so that he ‘had to
ride two miles in the sun over to the court, and report’ and ‘was
there for four hours’ in a room ‘crowded with natives’. I doubt if it
could have occurred to an I.C.S. Magistrate to record so modest a
feat. Two miles on a horse, if you please, and four hours in court—
and once in a blue moon at that!
To all of us running our districts it was of cardinal importance
that the bully should not get away with it, and the lesson of our
experience was that a scrupulous regard for British law tended to
let that happen. To more than one judge it must on occasion have
appeared that my concern was to secure a conviction at any price.
To me it would seem—probably on the morrow of some such
occasion—that judges as a class, but especially High Court judges
straight from home, had not the remotest interest in making the
culprit pay. The result could be a certain tension between the
magistracy and the judicature—as this little snapshot selected
from several in my private album will illustrate.
It was in Allahabad. The principal witness in a nasty downtown
brawl involving grievous hurt was a High Court Messenger. He
had been ‘got at’ during the investigation, I knew for sure, and the
investigating Police Officer had brought him before me now, as he
was naive enough to tell me, by the illegal expedient of waylaying
him on his way to the High Court and bundling him into a tonga.
My clock showed only minutes to go at the fag end of a long
afternoon and the case was called only to be adjourned.
Then tomorrow morning—punctually, so you can get away?’
‘Can’t come. Mister Justice Harries needs me.’ Then,
impressively and taking us all in with a disdainful glance:
‘Needs me.’
‘Very well. Monday next, same hour.’
‘He will need me then also.’
The man was wearing his resplendent scarf with its great
embossed badge of brass.
‘Must you fix your sash whenever you take duty?’
‘Always.’
‘Strip him of his belt’
Sharp on ten the following Monday he was there, waving a large
envelope. I affected not to notice this until he was called to the
box, when I asked for it to be passed up.
‘I do not know by what right,’ wrote Harries, ‘you have deprived
this Messenger of his Badge but I know that without it he is
as nothing among his fellows and has not dared to show up for duty
since. Please return it to him.’
I tossed the letter ostentatiously into my waste paper basket.
‘Take the oath.’
He did so. Then I added: ‘Before the Prosecutor puts his
questions, listen to me. You will get your sash back as you leave
the box on condition that you reply—properly.’
It was a scandalous direction from a Magistrate. I was not
reminding the witness he was on oath. I was telling him—and on
pain of continuing to endure the disgrace I had planned for him to
speak out in the sense I wanted. Which he did. I convicted and my
sentence was upheld by the Court of Session. To the relief of the
neighbourhood and my own peace of mind a dangerous
blackguard was put behind bars for two years.
Every bazaar in every town in India had its bully like that one in
Allahabad who went behind bars a paragraph back, and every
rural area had its gang robbers, its dacoits. If therefore—and this
is no supposition—up and down the country there were ‘Zila
Sahibs’ corresponding to my portrait ‘out for a conviction’ and
flouting some of the cherished principles on which British justice
is founded (not to mention scoring off the best legal brains in the
spirit of odious schoolboys) why was the jail population so low?
130 THE MAGISTRATE
Let me quote a figure which should give us in England today to

reflect. The prison population of our Indian Empire in 1938 was
122,000; as compared with a prison population in the United
Kingdom at the present time of 64,800. You can argue that
Indians are immeasurably less criminally inclined than
Englishmen, and this may be a quite tenable position. But I
believe we must seek the explanation elsewhere: I mean in the
paternalist ethos of my generation which is now dead as the dodo.
Remember to be gentle with the underdog, my first and best
teacher would say to me, quoting Virgil, in those early months of
Mirzapur, and to wear down, war down, the arrogant: et debellare
superbos. And I was very quickly to discover that in India the
humble and the down-trodden were the many, and that these
were too poor to do much wrong, let the old Adam prompt them as
he might. The others, then, should be my target, on them must I
align my sights. The scales of Justice would need tipping against
the wrong-doer, and as for the bandage on her eyes—oh, not in
India! Not in my District anyhow.
To be sure, the jails in my day had to cope with a quite
separate intake, swollen to overflowing or dwindling to vanishing
point at a signal from the high command of the Congress Party. I
am not saying the Militant could not belong to the ranks of the
Arrogant. Too often, to the distress of the leaders, he did. He,
however, was not the worry. The worry for the prison
administration was the socially secure among the political
offenders: to make it worse, there were delicately nurtured ladies
amongst them: Mrs Sarojini Naidu; Nehru’s wife Shrimati Kamala;
and his sister Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit if I can cite three who at
one time or another, each in her own undeniably captivating way,
added to my cares. I can remember Jawaharlal Nehru’s arrest in
1930 and how, a Magistrate as yet on a leading rein, I went to the
Naini Central jail a few days later to see how he was settling in. This
was only the first of many such visits to his quarters, so I do not
depend on a fleeting impression. By the time his library had been
moved in, his chosen pieces of furniture, and his personal odds
and ends, he was more comfortable materially than were we who
had arrested him. To those who recall India, perhaps also those
who have merely managed to digest my chapter on Hinduism, this
will come as no surprise. India does not practise, does not believe
in, social equality. And therefore the Jail Administration had to
make very special pro vision indeed for such of the cream of
Society as chose the path of Disobedience.
Even at that date I had met Jawaharlal once—at the house of a
common friend. I had met his father, Motilal, too. Pandit Motilal
Nehru was a gentleman of the most exquisite courtesy, ‘so much

more polished than his son’, certain old-world members of the
Allahabad élite would let you know sotto voce; versed in the rules
of sitting down and standing up, as the Persianized Urdu had it; he
would not loll or drape himself on a chair.
Understandably when I encountered Jawaharlal now in the
Central Jail our exchanges were stiff and few, nor did they alter in
the succeeding weeks. Then I left Allahabad for the next and final
stage of my apprenticeship, and we did not meet again for about
five years.
He had once more been in prison. This time in the healthier
mountain climate of Almora; and I was once more in Allahabad,
not, this time, a pupil magistrate but the Magistrate. His wife
Kamala was meanwhile in a sanatorium at Badenweiler in the
Black Forest of Germany. I think it was at the beginning of
September 1935 that news came of a worsening in her condition.
Nehru was instantly released on compassionate grounds, but to
his anguish was unable to obtain a seat on the next KLM flight. It
was KLM alone which served that part of India in those days and,
the small Fokker machines carrying but fourteen (was it?) persons,
flights were habitually booked up weeks and weeks ahead. The
burden of my paragraphs so far has been that the District
Magistrate’s authority, instead of being sharply defined, trailed
away at the outer edges into a fluid haze. It was normal that
Nehru should have turned to me to get him on that plane; normal
for me to know that I could. And in assuring him that I would, I
was being no more than logical, as I told him. The Government of
India had pardoned him so that he might reach Shrimati Kamala’s
side in time. He could have travelled in the aisle, but the slight
additional weight was unacceptable in those pioneer days of Civil
Aviation: you had even to be weighed with your standard-size
suitcase provided by KLM. That was off. No, better to detain the
steward on the tarmac and whisk him away home as my guest. He
could have the run of the house, the entrée to the Club and a pass
to the Cinema. He would love it. The Captain would jib, but he
would hesitate to tangle with his gendarme in Upper India—there
was all that valuable property lying around. And since passengers
were grounded for dinner, bed and breakfast in smart hotels en
route, could they really have anything to complain about? Half-an-
hour it would take me, the whole thing. These heroics, however,
were cut short. In the list of those intending to join the flight at
Allahabad was the name of an American, a teacher at the Forman
Christian College. But, alas, a particularly disagreeable person I
had found him. Dr. Sam Higginbottom would be the man for this
132 THE MAGISTRATE
job—for what job would old Sam not be the man! This great
missionary, Principal of the Naini Agricultural College, must know
the wouldbe passenger for a certainty. When I had got through on
the telephone he said at once: ‘I promise you, Hubert, he will
stand down.’
Fifteen minutes before take-off Nehru came on the line, a catch
in his voice, to thank me and to say good-bye. Not the Nehru now
of the political arena, not the Nehru convinced of the unassailable
virtue of his own opinions, but an unaffected, grateful, emotional
man. And I could only say ‘God go with you.’
It did not establish any tie between us, absurd to suggest such a
thing; it was no more than one of those flimsy threads that take
the strain, hold for a moment—and are unlikely ever to tauten
again. Our memories of that September day might easily have
lapsed had not chance stepped in to jog them. Years later—it was
much after Independence—Pandit Nehru asked my brother to be
his doctor, and whenever in London, where the Commonwealth
Prime Ministers’ Conference used to bring him periodically and
where there might be other visits as well, he would turn up at 26
Weymouth Street. At the initial rendez-vous, the consultation
over, he gave his celebrated performance, on the centre of our
Persian rug, of the Shirsasan. In Sanskrit this means ‘Head
Posture’. To achieve it, the amateur Yogi dropped to the floor,
placed his palms on the ground beside his head and seemingly
just waited for his body and legs to rise up slowly and straighten
in the air. When he was the right way up again, he made some
casual remark about Yoga. Then, to Horace, ‘Do you know India
at all?’ ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘or only what my brother tells me.’
‘Then perhaps he has told you,’ Nehru went on, ‘that when he was
in Allahabad years ago…’
The political leaders were not consigned to the ordinary District
Jails but to one or other of the dozen Central Jails located up and
down the country. The latter being primarily designed for longterm
convicts were subdivided into barrack areas, had their carpet
factories or the apparatus of other small industries, their
vegetable gardens, and their recreation yard; and were staffed by a
picked personnel under a governor, designated Superintendent,
who would be a colonel in the Indian Medical Service. Thus only
the Magistrate having one of these Central Jails within his
jurisdic-tion would be concerned with détenus of national
standing. At Allahabad (more precisely at Naini just across the
river), as I have said, there was a Central Jail, and Agra had one
likewise. And so did Delhi. In Agra it was that I came to know a
slight, soft-spoken socialist of exactly my own age with whom an
occasional interview was invariably rewarding. Jaya Prakash

Narayan his name was, and if I spell it here that is because he is
in the world news as I draft this very page. He is back in prison
with only a change in jailer. This time the daughter of the
politician I was picturing a few minutes ago is playing that rôle;
who in September 1935 had been a schoolgirl called Indira Nehru
at Bex in Switzerland. Plus ça change…
At a hub of prison administration, then, those incarcerated in
the Central Jail and the District Jail combined made up an entire
cross-section of the country’s convict class. At any given moment
there were bound to be several in both jails whose names and
faces and records I knew. They would have come to my notice in a
variety of ways. A release on compassionate grounds such as
Nehru’s was rare; but remissions of long sentences for one reason
or another were a matter of routine, and I presided over a
committee consisting of the Superintendent and three non-official
Visitors to consider individual claims. Or again some short-term
rustic from one of my villages might have gone beyond the limits
of what India describes meaningfully as a ‘verbal discussion’ with
a fellow convict. And so on.
Not every prisoner lef t by the door wherein he went, and I do
not mean by this that some climbed out over the wall. On the
contrary, it does not cease to astonish me as I look back that I,
who was by the accident of my postings as familiar as any of my
coevals with prison affairs by the time I had finished, did not have
to deal with a single case of escape. I put this down to two very
Indian responses: loyalty on the part of the prison personnel and a
propensity to conform to a regime on the part of the convicts. I can
see myself following a warder. He is nonchalantly swinging a
bunch of enormous clanking keys on a metal hoop. Into cell after
cell he leads me, for there were half-a-dozen in that particular gang
of dacoits who had perpetrated their pillage and their murder in
concert. The barred door would not even be reclosed when we
entered—it was all in the day’s work to this simple man, alone
usually, always unarmed, always—did not the facts prove it?—
incorrupt.
Not every prisoner left by the main gate, I was saying. Hugh
Bomford had prepared me for this in Mirzapur. On my very first
visit to the local jail, he had made me sit down and share the
prisoners’ dinner with them. They were in for minor offences, were
thoroughly enjoying, as it seemed to me, this short carefree
interlude in more comfortable surroundings than they were used
to—and seated on the ground among them I had passed a pleasant
half hour. When I got back, I boasted, I fear; and was quietly told
134 THE MAGISTRATE
that not all my jail half-hours might be as pleasant. I learned this

within a year or two. Every so often a prisoner went out of a
Central Jail by a side entrance, his penalty paid. The crooked
arrangement of his neck where the two pieces no longer fitted
showed how. Half-an-hour before, the Superintendent would have
looked at me, and I would have looked at my watch. A nod to the
hangman, and the trap-door on which a hooded figure was
standing would have dropped. I had to go down the ramp, then, of
the mound on which the scaffold had been erected and into a
narrow side-passage ending just beneath the small square space
now open to the dawn sky. They pulled his hood off, the
Superintendent, torch in hand, threw a beam of light on his face,
certified his life to be extinct. I would put my name to a document
in which not only the place and the date but the fatal hour had
been entered already.
2.
KING EMPEROR VERSUS MOHAN
In one of the volumes of Indian Law Reports, Allahabad series, a
half page disposes of the case K.E. versus Mohan, section 302 of
the Penal Code. It is unlikely to be of interest to anyone in the legal
profession and surely no one else reads this forbidding literature.
On a reference to the High Court it was held by a Bench of two
Judges that the offence of murder had been proved inasmuch as
the accused, although acting under provocation, had committed it
in the full possession of his faculties and after mature reflexion.
The sentence of death at which the Court of Sessions had arrived
was accordingly confirmed.
No opportunity for fireworks or obiter dicta; facts, too, run of the
mill; few reports could be as flat.
Nonetheless there had been a feature which as a magistrate I
would have thought merited a remark: the despatch with which
the proceedings from arrest to gallows were conducted established
something of a record in the legal history of British India (and a
fortiori in that of the United Kingdom).
There was a reason why I should ride Ginger, my chestnut, to
the polo-ground that Friday morning and knock a ball about. It
was no ordinary thing for four civilian players to be in the same
place at the same time, as was the case in Agra at that winter’s
end of which I write, and we were taking on the King’s Own Light
Infantry on Monday. On the other hand there was a reason why I
should ride Shireen through the City. I made it my weekly habit to
do this provided I was not absent in Camp and, Saturday being
tiresomely booked by something else, here was my week running

out. No, Sunday must do for knocking a ball about and reining
back.
I was heading for home and had come through Belanganj, when
my attention was caught by a knot of wayfarers outside a
doorstep. A gesturing beldame was getting no reaction except
uncomprehending frowns. Any incident whatever was up my
street on these morning rides. I urged Shireen forward,
dismounted, threw my reins to one of the by-standers, and took
the old woman by the shoulders.
‘It’s at Mohan’s,’ she wailed. ‘Upstairs.’
I swung her round, shoved her through the entrance in front of
us and aided her up a steep flight to the first floor. Nobody about.
‘Up again,’ she said.
We were not in a wealthy quarter but neither was it squalid, and
the houses, although shabby, were tall and airy. There would be
three or four storeys, and the staircases connecting them narrow
and very nearly sheer. The occupants were shop-keepers’
assistants, I took it, with a sprinkling of modest clerks, perhaps.
We were on the second floor now.
‘Up again,’ she said. And still there was nobody about.
The door on the third floor landing stood ajar and opened onto
an ante-room, bare of furniture. An aperture facing us was
curtained.
‘There,’ she said, pointing a skinny forefinger.
I drew aside a coarse cloth and went in.
On a bed set in the centre of the room lay a naked girl. Her brow
framed by tumbling coils of hair, her closed eyelids and slightly
parted lips—surely those spoke of a tranquil sleep. But beginning
from the collar-bone parallel red gashes descended to the breasts
and continued in staccato jabs down either side to the hips. Or
rather to where, slashed in a deep criss-cross the walls of her
womb curled back to reveal a tiny crouched figure, perfectly
outlined within. On the floor under one edge of the bedstead was a
child who looked about three. She sat in a pool of blood, playing
with a doll and talking contentedly to herself. The ante-room had
filled, I could sense it, but I had not been followed further; Indians
do not hem in the dead. I picked up the happy child from the
scarlet puddle and carried her to the aperture, from where a pair
of bangled arms stretched out to take her. I walked to the window
and gazed down on fifty upturned faces. There was Shireen,
patiently held, on the far side of the road, hindquarters towards
me. Funny, I had never thought how like a fiddle a horse would
look viewed from a height.
136 THE MAGISTRATE
‘Listen, one of you,’ I shouted, cupping my hands, ‘fetch the

policeman from the Belanganj crossing. Hurry!’ It was only three
hundred yards away. I rummaged in a chest by the wall and found
what I wanted, a sheet. I spread it over the girl. ‘What do I do
next?’ I wondered. ‘Take my helmet off for one thing.’ That curtain
was straining and bulging but still they held back. In a minute the
click of nailed boots, and in came the constable from point duty.
He brought his heels together with a crash in the quiet room.
‘Huzūr!’ he saluted.
‘You know me?’
‘Yes, Sir.’ I had ridden past his crossing often enough.
‘Run to the station,’ I ordered, ‘good marks for speed. Tell
whoever is in charge to be here quick-as-quick. Jaldi-Jaldi.’
I went back to the bedside now, lifted the covering. Pointlessly I
began counting the stab-wounds. In Hindostani; aloud. You have
to swot up your numerals from one to a hundred because they are
all different. I could hear my voice. I got to ‘twenty seven’, ‘twenty
eight’, then ‘twenty nine’, then stopped. Once—and that had been
in Agra too—once under the straw on the floor of a stable I had
picked up a pair of ears, just where a sly informer had told me I
would find them. Gently I pulled back the girl’s hair from over her
ears. They were intact, beautiful. As intact as the small, straight
nose. That was a wonder, too. If only men were animals you would
know what they would do. I looked intently at her face. No, no
pain in the expression of the mouth, no contortion at all. No death
even as yet. I heard my own voice again…‘And death’s pale flag is
not advanced there’. I had been given that for iambics. Half the
I.C.S. had been given that for iambics. The finest bits of
Shakespeare, why, I knew them by heart only because I had been
made to put them into Greek and Latin verse. Had that been the
best preparation, years and years of it, for what I was doing now?
I did not know the answer.
The shrill note of a bicycle bell, much over-worked it sounded,
interrupted my thoughts. It could not be the Sub-Inspector so
quickly, but it was. Somebody nearby with a telephone, it turned
out, had rung him at the station and, pedalling hard, he had met
his traffic man half-way. A clatter outside and he is in the room,
handcuffs dangling from his left wrist. The breathless constable
was at his heels. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Note the name Mohan and then
question an old dame who must be somewhere around still. But
first, and you’ll explain it to your sepoy here, I want word put
through to my house. I want my car sent with a syce.’
I waited till the policeman had grasped the message and gone.
‘Now let’s look for the burhiya and see what she can tell us.’
Ten or fifteen minutes later I left the Sub-inspector scribbling in

his notebook and went down the stairs and out A crowd
had collected, for people had seen the handcuffs; and the rumour
of a murder had circulated, I did not doubt. Of course inside the
tall house the womenfolk had known it all along, but their men
had gone off to work; and so they had retreated behind doors on
their own landings. How else to account for that hush, that
emptiness?
I picked my way across the road to where Shireen was. Then
saw, standing apart on that side of the thoroughfare and gazing at
the house from which I had emerged, a lightly-built, rather
faircomplexioned citizen, quite young. By citizen I intend that he
was of the city: dark pill-box style hat set straight: a collarless
shirt fastened at the neck by a brass stud, European waistcoat
but no jacket, ankle-length dhoti and black English shoes. Very
neat, very clean also, but hardly of distinctive appearance, I would
have said. Would have said only to gainsay it, for his eyes, not a
doubt of it, were trying to catch mine—and there was a plea, more
than a plea, an entreaty in them.
‘Are you Mohan?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Sir,’ he said simply.
The lumbering Buick saloon was drawing up and a syce hopped
out to attend to Shireen. ‘We’re going home now,’ I told my new
acquaintance. ‘I’ll drive,’ I added, ‘so sit beside me.’
‘Agra man?’ I enquired, for something to say.
His background, it seemed, was not local; he came of a Muttra
family, had married into a Muttra family. But a friendly
recommendation had secured him a place here in Agra with Seth-
somethingChand, Bazzaz, cloth merchant, of Belanganj. His
hands, when I glanced at them resting on his lap, were small, well-
shaped, the nails carefully pared. A literate man evidently, and
perhaps even up to keeping the books for his employer. He had not
talked more, his eyes were fixed on the road. It was mine that left
it now and then. That thin moustache was trim and—surely I
could not be mistaken, he had shaved or been shaved that
morning.
The sentry smartened to the ‘present’ as we swung in at my
gates, and when we pulled up under the porch Kalloo appeared at
the double, right hand flattened inwards against turban in the
approved salaam. It had been simple to estimate how much longer
I should be, and the mechanism of my bachelor household had
been set in motion appropriately: bhishti trotting under the weight
of two cans of hot water towards the side-door of my bathroom;
second syce hovering to help me off with my boots; cook in a
138 THE MAGISTRATE
position to time the scrambled eggs and bacon. It was a

mechanism not to be thrown out, or visibly affected in the
slightest, by an unanticipated load. Word should go to the guard
house, I told Kalloo, as also to the orderlies, to the mali and the
garden coolies, that the stranger I had brought was in custody. A
charpoy was to be placed under a tree on the lawn for him, a
cushion on it. He would want drinking water immediately and
some food later. I took Mohan to the charpoy and instructed him
to lie there until I roused him. On leaving him, I met the second
syce crossing the grass in our direction with an eight-foot length
of rope. I fluttered my hand back and fore in reproof, and he
halted, a foolish smile betraying his embarrassment The rope
would be used soon enough.
I was sure that in a couple of hours I should be listening to a
confession. I could almost hear Mohan’s resigned reply to my
carefully phrased warning. ‘Oh, I understand all right. It’s hanging
for me.’
Why, then—unless to provide material for a self-gratifying story
—had I not handed him over to the police instantly? Hadn’t
everything pointed to a confession from the very start? It had. But
India was not England. In India no statement made by the
accused to a police officer could be used in evidence against him.
And my unsought situation that morning was a rare one—rare at
least in modern times—of a magistrate able to record the
statement of a murderer who has not yet been in police detention
at all. A statement volunteered, that is, in a sufficiently pure sense
of the word.
I have come to the rim of our present preoccupation with this
affair: it was a stock conjugal drama leading to a stock
catastrophe. And no doubt two sets, two hearths, of old-fashioned
parents in Muttra would maintain to their dying day that it had
all occurred simply because the safeguards implicit in the joint-
family system of the Hindus had been absent; a system under
which, in houses of their respectability at any rate, the young wife
would have been protected from approach, the young husband
given no grounds for jealousy.
Even at the time I had more or less come by this stage to the
end of my connexion with the case. For my furlough was due
shortly, and before the proceedings in the Court of Sessions were
over I had gone from India. So I would never set eyes on Mohan
again, and I breathed a prayer of thankfulness that him anyhow I
would not fetch from a cell as the dawn crept through his barred
window, not watch ten minutes later gyrating slowly at the end of
a hempen cord.
3.
A BACKWARD GLANCE
Experience, they say, teaches, and if my years as Magistrate had
their lesson for me it is this: Nowhere in the world could one hope
to observe a concentration of human souls more obedient to
Christ’s injunction to render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar’s than the population of the average Indian District under
the British Raj. Evidently the remoter the District and the simpler
its folk, the more poignant the expression of that obedience; but it
was there in the major and more sophisticated centres as well.
Herein lies the explanation of the repeated failures of the
Disobedience Movement to disrupt society. And not only in my
Mirzapur or my Bahraich but in the bigger places the corollary of
the injunction would be audible: ‘and the things which are
Caesar’s include his responsibility for our welfare and his duty to
bring the errant to book’.
Bring to book, notice…not make better. That was the concern of
some finer ethos than Caesar’s: Hinduism perhaps, or else Islam.
And meantime the Zila Sahib was there to see that the flimsy
fabric of civil order enabling men to till the soil or open a shop
should hold together.
140
9
ABOUT PRINCES
1.
THEIR CHAMBER
We were in touch with the Princes; for between them and
ourselves there flowed a two-way traffic of rights and obligations.
But with the subjects of the Princes we had no contact; each
Prince being an autocrat in his subordinate realm. His absolutism
to be sure might be tempered, and was, but tempered by usages
and traditions inseparable from and implicit in the ancient notion
of Raj. Lower down, under the heading of ‘A seventeen-gun
Prince’, I have introduced Dholpur, and my picture is not only of a
Native State in India; it is of India in a native state.
As a result of this curious relationship, we had driven and
maintained a sort of lane between the Princely States and our
Provinces. Where it ran could be known from any handy atlas;
States were yellow on the map and Provinces were pink. Pink
signified the three-fifths of India where we were directly dealing
with the inhabitants, nearly three hundred million of them; and
yellow the remaining two-fifths supporting about ninety million
souls whose welfare was not, save in the last resort, our
responsibility but that of their Rulers.
It was a lane which nobody was supposed to cross. Perhaps I
should say had been a lane nobody was supposed to cross. For
the Great War had changed everyone’s perspective; and the
MontaguChelmsford Report, which came out shortly after it and
established the principle of responsible government in ‘British’
India, was candid enough to warn the Princes that the nationalism
we were sponsoring on our side of the lane must affect, and might
govern, the future on theirs. Let them be wise in time, and ensure
that in the new order of things they would have their subjects
behind them. ‘Hopes and aspirations,’ declared the Report in a
more graphic image than is customary in such documents, ‘hopes
142 ABOUT PRINCES
and aspirations may overleap frontier lines like sparks across a

street/
But the curious relationship not only shut off princely India from
the areas of our direct control: it militated against the least lateral
movement between States themselves. The Prince looked upwards
to the Paramount Power and downwards upon his own subjects:
what occasion had he to look sideways? In the preceding chapter I
tried to recapture the feel of The District, and I think I said I was
barely conscious of other Englishmen in parallel positions in
authority somewhere else; the more ‘Indian’ I became in my
methods the less I needed to believe in somewhere else. And after
all, I was only Indian in a chameleonic way; whereas the Prince
was innately so. To me at any rate it is not difficult to appreciate his
sense of isolation from other States over which others ruled.
No, you could not prevent sparks flying across the street. What
you could do was to get together and reduce the accumulation of
inflammable material that lay about in heaps and upon which
those sparks might alight. With the object of catching up on
events, therefore, a Chamber of Princes had been inaugurated by
Royal Proclamation in 1921 as an assembly permitting the Rulers
to take counsel in concert for the protection of their own interests.
This used to meet annually in its own Hall of Debate in the
Council House at New Delhi, and if I say something of its
composition it is not to burden the memory with figures that have
long since lost their relevance, but to illustrate the central theme
of my chapter: which is, that the Indian Princes ranged from
glittering potentates at one end of the scale to colourless
hereditary landowners of quite modest condition at the other.
Since there were between five and six hundred States to consider,
it was a ticklish business composing that Chamber. In the end, a
dynastic salute of not less than eleven guns having been accepted
as the basic qualification, 108 Princes took their seats in their
own right; and an additional 12 entered as the elected
representatives of 127 other Rulers next in order of importance.
Under the cupola, Princes now sat side by side who had never
exchanged a nod of recognition in their lives; and of the ‘globe-
trotters’ among them who had once earned Curzon’s cutting
criticism, certain decided that a pied-à-terre in the capital would
prove more rewarding in the long run than a grand house in Park
Lane.
2.
THREE ON THE FRONT PAGE
In the England of my boyhood ‘Ranji’ was a name to conjure uith.
In fact this name, not of course the whole mouthful of it ‘Maharaja
Jam Sahib Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji of Nawanagar’, but
‘Ranji’ for short, was worshipped by vastly more people in England
than in India itself where his hold was only over half a million
subjects, if that. For he was the Prince of Cricket, the batsman of
the age, teacher (not the pupil, mind) of C.B.Fry, constantly
knocking up two hundred runs and more. He was a Prince,
besides, had we but known it, who really did seem to arrive at the
fusion of his two worlds. In first-class cricket, in his beautiful
country house at Slough, in Ireland where he had a salmon river,
and at the Front during the Great War—for he was of the race of
Rajputs—he was in his element. But also, and no less
conspicuously, he was at home in Nawanagar, the smallest details
of whose administration he had at his finger-tips and where he
would go unattended about the villages to confer with headmen
and listen to grievances. Here, admittedly, I am depending entirely
on what those who knew him could tell me. But knowing my
informants was something, and I cannot doubt that the Ranji who
did famously as a cricketer did famously as a Prince. Not
unexpectedly, then, did the Chamber welcome him as its
Chancellor, for all that Nawanagar was hardly of the first or even
second weight; and nowhere near, say, Baroda or Gwalior or
Jammu-Kashmir—let alone Hyderabad or Mysore—in standing.
Cricket, since I have used that hinge, was the recreation of
several of Ranji’s peers, I might add, and from one at least of them
present homage must not be withheld. I mean the Maharaja who
played in gold-embroidered slippers and flowing robes, and
invariably celebrated his birthday with a match at which, no less
invariably, he made as many runs as his years of life.
But perhaps a worthier competitor with Ranji, if it comes to a
showy innings, was his fellow Rajput and contemporary the
Maharaja of Bikaner. He fought in China, in France, in Egypt, and
his commanding looks and doughty attributes brought the full
flavour of mediaeval chivalry into the world councils of the day:
into the Imperial War Conference of 1917, into the Peace
Conference of 1918, into many a session of the League of Nations,
and into the Round Table Conference. I used to hear these two
Princes freely described as leading statesmen and it may be that
we were too ready to award laurels to Princes simply in the hope
of demolishing the myth that Native Rulers were by definition
144 ABOUT PRINCES
dissipated sots. But this said, we surely have to give those who
deserve it their due in whatever walk they proved themselves. I
think for example, of Bhopal who always went after tiger on foot
and with a .270 because, as he maintained, a rifle of heavier
calibre rendered the contest uneven. I think of Shri Man Singh of
Jaipur who practised and practised his polo until his handicap
was 7. And so it is with the ‘statesmen’ Princes we are discussing.
To me the wonder was that they, and a handful like them,
achieved as much as they did; that Ranji was by no means
satisfied by cricket, nor Bikaner by those legendary sand-grouse
shoots of his that drove us to dub him King of Bikaner by the
Grouse of God. Perhaps a verbal image can rescue us: they and
their runners-up by the time they reached full manhood were
clothed in the armour of experience. In the nature of the case, a
young Prince of lineage was born with one foot in affairs of state.
He might of course withdraw it—many did. But also he might, to
please a grandmother or impress a Viceroy, pull the other after
him; and then, almost without knowing it, become engrossed in
what he was doing. As Erasmus said, what you pursue shapes
you: Studia abeunt in mores.
However that may be, Ranji and Bikaner became world figures.
Were there others? One must not, I think, expect the Rulers of the
really sizable principalities such as Hyderabad and Mysore to
compete successfully, for these made a practice of handing the
helm to the best available Indian talent in the sub-continent. Nor
in this place will I name the Prince who was known more widely
abroad than any of them. I treat the Agha Khan separately
because the anomaly of his position—to be explained when I come
to it— makes it impossible to regard him as on a par with the rest.
Everything considered I would pick on Alwar to complete my
trio. My choice of a Ruler who misruled a State hardly the size of a
decent District and who is nowadays remembered, if at all, for his
fiendish defects and not for his qualities may appear surprising.
However, I have here on my side a serene observer of men and
affairs; one who, if polite to a fault, as all of us who have
memories of him will agree, was the least fulsome of men:
H.A.L.Fisher, no less. Temporarily deserting the academic grove
for politics, Fisher had been invited to assist in the passage of the
‘Montford’ Reforms through the House of Commons and had been
brought into close association with Alwar at a stage when this
Prince was to all appearances about to play a leading role in his
country’s fortunes. This comparatively young Indian (he was in his
middle thirties) startled political London by his platform oratory
and his scintillating conversation. He attended meetings, he
arranged intimate dinners for Lloyd George, it might be; or

F.E.Smith another night; or H.G.Wells; or Fisher himself; and so
on. And this is what Fisher said of Alwar—it is surely worthy of
record. He said he was one of the outstanding speakers of his age,
he said that not Bryce himself could have been more intelligent.
Alas, Alwar’s was a strange case, a positively Stevensonian
Strange Case: a Prince that would do good thwarted by a
Maharaja in whom evil was present. And the Maharaja it was that
prevailed. First the provoked populace rose in revolt: and then the
very nobles rebelled against him. The Paramount Power stepped in
and removed him from his throne.
3.
A SEVENTEEN-GUN PRINCE
‘Chameli, a…a…a…!’
‘Jasmine, come, come, come,’ I repeated it after him.
Too loud,’ he said. ‘Try again, almost under your breath. Her
hearing is miraculous.’ This time she came, halting at every step
and staring hard, came right up to me and nibbled at the chapati
in my hand until she had finished it. Then, as though galvanized,
wheeled round and galloped noiselessly away. Noiselessly, for the
sambar or Indian deer not only walks and trots but gallops without
sound.
Funny, but the hinds with fawns had been so much less shy
than Chameli, had queued up, then advanced singly, each pulling
up at intervals and stamping to summon her young to her side,
and seeming to know that she must not crowd but await her
proper turn.
‘How long has this taken you?’ I asked.
‘Oh, ages now,’ my host replied, ‘ages. Ever since I gave up
shikar. You see, we’re dealing with the most timid creature the
jungle holds. Those hinds you saw, they know me and answer to
their name. They were fawns alongside their dams for the first
couple of years…’
We turned and walked away in the direction of the lake. How
very unlike a Jat my companion is, I thought to myself. The Jat is
sturdy, obstinate, homo rusticus himself; not gentle,
reserved, refined. Yet Jai Deo must be Jat to the core, otherwise
he could not have been where he was. For Dholpur had been
created two centuries before by an exclusively Jat insurrection
against the fanatical Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, and was a ‘Jat’
State, one of two in all India. It was a small principality of Eastern
Rajputana touching the Agra District of the United Provinces; but
146 ABOUT PRINCES
territory and standing were not always linked in princely

precedence and Jai Deo, more formally His Highness the Maharaja
Rana, was honoured by a personal salute of seventeen guns.
We came to a little landing-stage, roughly knocked together,
where a smart motor-boat was moored. He had to show me this
because it was a new toy. When we had cast off, he accelerated
towards what I took to be the opposite shore. In fact we were
heading along a neck of water which led into the body of the lake.
Gaining this, he put on still more speed. I could see two or three
punts, obviously disused shooting punts, ahead of us and as we
drew level with these their occupants stood up and bowed very
low. They were soon reseated with a bump as our wash went
under the shallow bottoms. His ‘civil service’ he told me, in
attendance. Yes, it was brand new, this launch, delivered from
Bombay only a few days ago. ‘Let’s do it again.’ We circled and,
throttle wide as it would go, raced past the bobbing punts a
second time. Again the civil service rose to the occasion and again
subsided in sudden disequilibrium. He slowed down, then shut off
the engine so as to glide to our mooring. He had calculated it
nicely.
‘Shall we go indoors?’ he said.
The house to which we now made our way was not dignified
with the name of palace, that I remember, nor did it resemble one.
It was a Victorian mansion constructed of the fine-grained red
sandstone that was, and long had been, quarried in abundance
from the low ranges of hills lying towards and extending into the
United Provinces—and of which, of course, Fatehpur Sikri,
Akbar’s capital, had been built. I knew those desolate hills. Agra
itself was only thirty-five miles off, and once I had ridden the
distance out to, or very nearly to, the Dholpur border. I have never
forgotten that ride because on a section of it, for the only time in
my experience, wolves went with me. A couple would lope parallel,
two hundred yards away, for a mile or so, then fall back; after
which another couple would yield to the same curiosity, for I
suppose it was that, and escort me for a further stretch. But until
the day I am describing I had never crossed into the State of
Dholpur or even met its Ruler. I was staying the week-end, I was
the only guest and this visit was to prove the first of three. I thus
have a reasonably vivid recollection of a certain sort of Native
Prince. I do not suggest he was typical. On the contrary before this
chapter is out I hope to have shown there was no stereotype for
Indian Princes.
I cannot remember in detail the dinner that night, or dinner on
any subsequent night: the meal must have been without ceremony
and without significance. I fancy this somewhat secluded man

attached no value to the table and I merely recall, and that dimly,
the quiet Maharaja Rana opposite me (I am sure we were face to
face) in achkan and turban, toying with the dishes.
Much clearer to me is his study to which we went afterwards for
coffee. It was a sensible Waring and Gillow décor, leather
upholstered armchairs, fitted bookshelves, a serviceable writing
desk on which stood a silver-framed photograph, signed, of King
George V. I commented casually on this. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘though I’m
against such things as shooting now, I was keen at one time, and
the equerries included me in the parties His Majesty liked so
much at Sandringham. I went there through London.’ That
‘through’ was a rather Jat way of putting it. ‘But I believe,’ he
went on, ‘what I preferred even then to killing birds was visiting the
farms and pheasantries, going round the kennels and stables.
Shall we sit by the fire?’ He went to stir it and throw a log on it.
While he did so, I glanced at his shelves: the novels of Scott, the
collected works of Tennyson, of Wordsworth; that bible of
imperialism, Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883), and of course
Lyall’s British Dominion in India. All of them books of his father’s
day, the books a youth at one of the Chiefs’ Colleges—his, I think
had been the Mayo College at Ajmer—was expected to treasure
and perhaps to read. For his father, mindful of Curzon’s strictures
on the princes at the turn of the century, had vowed no son of his
should join ‘the horde of frivolous absentees’, and had followed the
Viceroy’s advice in educating his boys in India instead of abroad.
His Highness was now forty-four, a widower as I understood who
had not yet remarried: and neither then nor later on was I to meet
or catch a glimpse of anyone of the opposite sex under that roof.
Dholpur, then, on the eastern fringe of Rajputana was
preponderantly peopled by those sturdy Jats who have entered my
pages more than once. Among the Hindus of northern India none
had stronger claims to be the backbone of the peasant, just as
the Rajputs were of the military, structure. They had been there
nobody knew how long. Were they, as some authorities insisted, of
Scythian origin? So, obviously, if one had theories to test as to the
ancient body politic north of the Vindhyas, Dholpur was an ideal
place to begin. There were Jat villages galore in British India,
plenty in the Agra District which I had left that very morning;
superficially many a village in the Khairagarh Tahsil under my
charge was indistinguishable from the villages on the Dholpur
State side of the boundary. But beneath the surface there were
differences. In Dholpur the erosions of modern history had not
occurred. To start with, you jumped back two hundred years and
148 ABOUT PRINCES
antedated the social and political changes deriving from the

British presence. Then, you jumped back much further and
antedated the Muslim Conquest. Today there was only one Muslim
in the place (do not take me up on this), and he lay in a tomb within
the fortified Sarai which Akbar had put in the little town. You
could even argue plausibly that the village communities to which
the Maharaja Rana is proposing to conduct me next morning were
not unlike those ‘miniature republics’ on which Megasthenes the
Greek had reported. They enjoyed a degree of self-government
unthinkable in ‘British India’. You had in effect a Raj on the
‘native’ pattern, which merely collected the revenue from a host of
tiny oligarchies, each of them administered by its hereditary
headman, its Council of Five, and its Gam balahi best translated
as ‘O.C Untouchables’. The state police was rudimentary; the
criminal court (enforcing our British Indian law) relatively idle.
Chastisement, summary and condign, was the prerogative of the
Five.
I felt I was in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land that week-end. Dholpur, I say
it again, was an ideal place; being a small community of
likeminded cultivators in which a middle caste set the tone. Ideal—
but only viable in the twentieth century under the aegis of a
greater Raj than its own which guaranteed its immunity from
attack, gave it a branch railway from Agra, a telegraph connexion
with the outside world, and supplied such few functionaries as
were required.
I have hoped, by recording my debt to this unassuming
Seventeen-Gun-Salute Ruler, to dispel the notion fostered by
Hollywood and the international press of the day that the Princes
were one and all addicted to the gratification of disreputable
whims. In truth, many of their Order—though not, one is bound to
concede, a sizable majority—were comparable with the landed
aristocracy of Europe at its very best; and certain, the chosen few
admittedly, exhibited, as did Jai Deo of Dholpur, my Jat among
Jats, a total empathy with their subjects and a total disregard of
social renown.
4.
TWO MORE PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY
It was quite usual for officers in the Indian Civil Service to be
loaned to Native States for the overhaul of some specific
department of the Ruler’s administration. I tumbled to this during
my very first weeks at Mirzapur, for my Collector had recently
returned to the United Provinces from Rewa, one of the Central
India States, after several years of absence. I was too bewildered

by my immediate surroundings to be curious about conditions on
soil that was not British, nor was my teacher, wisely, inclined to
be informative. All I remember hearing about Rewa from him was
that the Maharaja had a single ambition, ignoble as it seemed to
me, viz., to bag a thousand tigers—and had got into the five
hundreds. ‘And if you want to know more about the States (this
without noticeable enthusiasm) you had better get yourself into
the Political.’ ‘Political.’ An extraordinary use of the word, I found
it. But it dated, like so much of our jargon, from Company days.
In the beginning, the English at Fort William were largely heedless
of the internal affairs of Bengal: the only branch of politics they
dabbled in was negotiation with the native princes. And thus
‘political’ became synonymous with ‘diplomatic’—and it remained
so till the end. Reverting to more modern times, then, it was the
Political Department of the Government of India that took charge
of the standing relations between the Princes and the Paramount
Power. In the sequel my own service was destined to be lived out
in ‘British India’ in the narrower meaning; and therefore my
contacts with Princes were chance—or if not quite chance, then the
next thing to it. I knew the ruler of Dholpur because his State
happened to adjoin my Agra District; two others I came to know
through the routine of my duties at Bahraich and Delhi
respectively. I did make an official visit to Hyderabad, the premier
State, but after India’s independence; so it is not even a postscript
in this place, because the curious relationship I am endeavouring
to document had been ruptured by that time.
I came to know the Kapurthala family simply because the
Maharaja had the status of landowner in the Bahraich District.
The property formed part of a grant made to his ancestor in
recognition of loyalty at the moment of the Mutiny of 1857 and
was superintended, amateurishly, by one of His Highness’s five
sons. Kapurthala was a Sikh State (though you would not guess
this from the shaven chins of the Maharaja and the sons) situated
near Jullunder in the Punjab, and of small consequence. Yet—and
it was often the case— the ruling house of this tiny territory
affected the manners and received the treatment of royalty in
London and in Paris. The Maharaja having succeeded his father
as a child had no doubt been a spoilt one; and as a young man he
incurred Curzon’s intense displeasure for secretly wedding the
daughter of a European balloonist who was giving performances in
his State. The biographies filed in the Political Department
contained a more discreet allusion to this episode: ‘at one time’
the entry read, ‘morganatically married to a Spanish lady’. Any
150 ABOUT PRINCES
how the alliance lasted long enough to account for the arresting
good looks of at least two of the five sons—the Maharaja Kumar I
knew at Bahraich had an Ivor Novello profile—and it no doubt
contributed to the distinctly continental flavour of their company.
The Maharaja, I was to find, spoke French almost as often as
English, en famille. Because the sons after public school in
England had gone to Paris or else Vienna, none of them
corresponded to Curzon’s idea of a properly brought up Indian
Prince, but of the ‘Bahraich’ Maharaja Kumar it could at any rate
be claimed he had kept within the particular traces over which his
father had kicked. The young Rani was of the most suitable Sikh
descent, and also—here again an item to which the observant
Curzon was never insensible—strikingly ornamental. In sari of
royal blue chiffon trimmed with red brocade and wearing her ruby
and diamond bracelets and pendant earrings to match she crosses
the intervening years in an instant. She presides at one of her
small dinner parties—six servants in their navy and silver liveries
behind our six chairs—and, a credit to the French and English
governesses who had trained her, is steering the talk as a hostess
should. I can be pardoned for comparing that soirée with its
conversational ripples and eddies to another, a few years later,
which she did not grace. This was arranged impromptu in the
Maharaja’s white-and-gold train standing at the side platform at
Delhi station from where, in three hours, it would be shunted and
hitched to the night express travelling north. His Highness, at the
head of the longitudinal table in the dining saloon is in oriental
dress; evening achkan, that is, and of course turbaned as
always. He is being heavily pater familias with three of his sons:
the Maharaja Kumar of my Bahraich days; and Captain Amarjit
Singh; and a third son, I forget which. He tended to glare at the
best of times and this involuntary habit gave him a positively
fierce aspect now in the hard luminosity of the arc-lamps pouring
in from outside and overcoming the shaded and diffused glow
within. The short whippy cane he invariably carried lay alongside
his plate and you waited for him to rap one of his sons over the
knuckles with it. All three of them, so bouncing and cocksure on
their own, kept their eyes lowered and said ‘yes, father’, ‘no,
father’ while the two table servants came and went silently. The
five of us inside the luxury car were walled by the thickness of
glass from five hundred outside. Along the opposite edge of the
platform was drawn up a local, packed as Indian trains are
packed; bare elbows, bare feet, scores and scores of them,
protruded from the carriage windows. And between us and that
train, waiting for the next, were rows of sleeping forms muffled
from top to toe like corpses in shrouds; and, interspersing them,

blanketed huddles of men, women and children, jabbering,
drowsing or yawning noisily. Threading a passage through this
patient acre of humanity went the bhishti, ‘the man from
paradise’, bringing water to the thirsty, the insistent sweet-meat
vendor with his tray, the beggar proffering his bowl and plangently
proclaiming his right to alms. The world over we are rich travellers
and poor travellers, this is a truism. It is simply that in India the
contrast between us is more blatant than elsewhere. Or perhaps
‘blatant’ is wrong. In India the contrast does not even register.
That night in the railway station where grandeur and misery were
fellow passengers, neither had eyes for the other. The two servants
in blue and silver uniform had not pulled down the blinds. No
need; nobody would look out and nobody would look in. Except
absent-mindedly.
It was a casual link, again, that I had with Udaipur. I had no work
there, no authority, and had not earned the hospitality of an hour
let alone the days I spent in the Guest Annexe on Lake Pichola.
Since the institution of the Chamber, the Maharana had wanted
some lodging in the capital and the unpretentious Udaipur House
on Rajpur Road which answered this need was a hundred yards
from where I lived as Deputy Commissioner. When the Chamber
was about to open, or in Horse Show Week, or on the date of the
Garden Party or some other vice-regal reception, I would
observe him arriving from the station in a rather incongruous
motorcade. Two or three shabby cars conveying a picturesque
retinue would be heading it, and be followed by a not less worn-out
vehicle. In the centre of the back seat of which, alone and rigidly
upright, his eyes fixed straight before him—for in Delhi he had no
reverences to acknowledge—his hands clasping the hilt of a carved
ceremonial sword, would be seen the unchallenged Lord of All
Rajputs who claimed descent from the very Sun in the Sky.
Presently I learned, and it seemed significant, that none in fact
called him by those high-sounding titles; to his barons and to his
people, and indeed to British officials, he was the Bapji, ‘Father
dear’. And if his pose was rigid as I remarked, that was because
he was partially paralysed and compelled to sit thus stiffly in all
his public appearances. But a flexible mind more than
compensated for an unbending body and rendered the Ruler of
one of the most traditionally feudal of States one of the most
unaffected of men. I discovered this for myself through a small
incident involving a sentry. Princes generally liked to have a
sentinel posted outside their residences and these sepoys
sometimes forgot that in British India their status was that of
152 ABOUT PRINCES
door-keepers not praetorian guards. I could remember how at

Allahabad once, where a pious Raja had rented a house close to my
own for the period of the Magh Mela, I had heard a commotion
and gone across to find one such guardsman shot dead in the
sentry-box with his own rifle. He had pointed it at a couple of
inquisitive and probably jeering Muslims of the town who had
twisted it back on him and the thing had gone off. This time it was
nothing so serious: merely an altercation between the
Udaipurwala and some local idlers. I took along a Police Inspector
with me, a Delhi Muslim, to attend to the details. A decorative
aide-de-camp wearing a close-fitting pugaree, a beard trimmed
and parted in the Rajput style, and a richly ornamented sword,
showed us straight in. And during the next twenty minutes four
persons of unequal station in life were treating each other as
equals. My Inspector was in the seventh heaven. ‘What a grand
man, Sir!’ he said excitedly, as we came away. And then, ‘speaks
chaste Urdu also.’ The quaint turn was not inconsequent. I had
heard it so often on the lips of those born within sound of the
Muezzin’s call from the Great Mosque that I knew it for what it
was: a formula of unstinted praise.
Boatmen of the Prince’s barge were rowing us from the lake-side
Palace out to the islands, and presently we could look behind us
LBI—F* and take in the architectural luxuriance of Udaipur rising
sheer out of the waters: cupolas, octagonal towers, loggias, bays,
open and closed galleries, pillars and stairways. In the interior of
the Palace there had been dazzling coloured mosaics to admire
and lobby after lobby to walk through. There was a solitary
anachronism that I could notice: a tiny gold-plated train,
locomotive and coaches, to run round the table in the central
dining hall. The Tsar it was who set this fashion, I believe. In
Russia in 1932 I had seen a similar one among the imperial relics
at Leningrad, and I dare say this toy is on show to tourists today
among the relics of fallen royalty in Udaipur. Otherwise it was self-
consciously on old ways that Udaipur stood, in old attitudes that
the dynasty still expressed itself. There was a certain latticed
window, for example, in one of the apartments of which much was
made. It was the frame to a tale so redolent of olden days that I shall
retell it as it was told to me. Most likely a government guide
recites it to visiting groups now in the very words of the baron who
acted as my cicerone. From that window you could see across to
where the lake narrowed towards a valley in the enclosing hills,
and long ago the young Maharani had sat at it with bated breath
uncertain what to hope for and what to fear. Her lord had made a
drunken wager with a dancing-girl that she would not walk the
width of the lake at that point on a tight-rope: the prize of success

to be the half of his kingdom. The girl had chosen the steady light
of evening as the hour of the ordeal; and the hour, purpling and
gilding the hill slopes, had come. My baron’s ancestors knew that
the Maharana, being a Rajput if a toper, would not break his word
should the wager be won, and to save the State from ruin they
arranged that the rope should be twitched at the vital moment. The
Maharani at the latticed window could see the assembled crowd
and just make out the speck moving across space. She had, at
that distance, to imagine the shriek and the splash when these
came, but the shudder that ran through the spectators was hers
as much as theirs.
That drama had been enacted two centuries back. Yet, as my
baron knew and I knew, it could be matched in the present: at the
very date of my stay in Udaipur there were Indian Princes
somewhere or other forfeiting their thrones for dancing-girls.
Nowhere in the India of my memory was the continuity with
days of yore so palpable as here. Not all States were old—many,
indeed, were of the day before yesterday—but Udaipur was very
old. It had been founded twelve hundred years earlier, and
that was why its Maharana was Chief of Rajput Chiefs, why his
Thakurs, barons, had pedigrees five feet long. In the streets I did
not notice a single suit of European cut; I saw handsome, tightly
turbaned heads and those trimmed parted beards everywhere;
processions of Rebeccas, each with a couple of pots, one upon the
other, balanced on her head; usually an elephant or two; always
horsemen girt with ornate swords. Udaipur had been like that for
centuries and centuries. It had held itself proudly aloof from the
Delhi of the Mughals, and was, you could not help feeling it, aloof
from Delhi still. And as for Bombay and Calcutta, they had not
been heard of in Udaipur.
5.
THE PRINCE WHO WAS PONTIFF
You saw an astonishing variety of headdress in every street of
every Indian city, yet you might look in vain for an ordinary
clothcap. Or so I would have contended until slipping in by a side
entrance a certain February morning on my way back from
Cutcherry I noticed one hanging on the hatstand in the outer hall.
I could catch voices from the drawing-room, a halting dialogue in
Hindustani between Kalloo and somebody else, but not what was
being said. I went through.
154 ABOUT PRINCES
The Agha Khan got up nimbly from an armchair, beaming

broadly beneath surprised looking eyebrows that had not greyed
with his hair.
‘I only came to drop a card,’ he began, holding my hand as he
spoke, ‘but your bearer told me you’d be back in a few minutes, so
I waited.’
I had not counted on his visit, but I had certainly half expected
it. The English papers lately had reported his intention, now the
War was over, to tour the scattered territories where his followers
were settled, starting from his Sect’s headquarters; that is, from
India, and more exactly, from Bombay. And some days ago, or
possibly weeks now, the thirteen-year-old Sadruddin, his younger
son, had been brought to Agra and placed in a family I was
acquainted with. It had not cost me an effort to see the boy and
enquire how he was doing. I am recording all this in order to dispel
any idea that the progress of a prominent Prince, whose every
move in smart society was copy in the West, would be heralded by
a flourish of trumpets among us in India. In India he was the
Pontiff of a Sect. He was other things as well, I admit: he was
Protector Emeritus of Muslim India—he had laid the foundation
stone of the League in the old days and had powerfully buttressed
the walls of Aligarh; he was still salaamed as a man is apt to be
who is thought to have the ear of those in high places. But in the
last resort it was on his sacerdotal office that his credit reposed—
and this was only exercised in respect of a minute and heterodox
fraction of India’s Muslim people called the Ismailis. The gossip
columnists of Europe and America could never discover quite who
those were—and understandably. Even on the scene you had to
possess an enquiring mind if you would place them. In my
chapter about the IndoMuslims I steered almost clear of Islam as
a religion on the ground that it was not specifically Indian. That
consideration holds good here, and I shall only say enough of the
Ismailis to account for their treating India as their principal home
and for their spiritual allegiance to an Indian Prince.
It is a chequered story. Within thirty years of Muhammad’s
death his Community of Believers had become involved in a civil
war resulting in the Sects which divide Islam to this day: the
Sunnis who adhered to the Community’s ‘Custom’ (Sunna) of
acknowledging successful leadership; and the Shi’ites, a minority
‘Party’ (Shi’a) who protested the sole legitimacy of sultans—Imams
as they designated them—belonging to the house of Ali, the
Prophet’s son-in-law. Then, in the eighth century, a schism
occurred within the ‘Party’ itself, when a faction rejected one Musa
al Kazim as seventh Imam in favour of his elder brother Ismail. The
Ismailis, so named from their devotion to this person, are thus an

extreme wing of the Protestant minority in Islam.
Now, these Ismailis presently spread westwards and established
a dynasty in Egypt, and it was there that a dispute over the
Succession split them into two sub-groups. Once again the claims
of a second son, Musta’li, were pitted against those of an elder son,
Nizar. Worsted in this quarrel, the ‘Nizaris’ willy nilly withdrew
from Egypt, and set up in Persia under their leader Hasan Sabbah.
Thanks to the Crusades, we are here treading on more familiar
ground, for this ferocious character is none other than the Old
Man of the Mountain of our story books and Marco Polo’s
narrative, who terrorized the Middle East with his Assassins from
Alamut, the ‘Eagle’s Nest’, his rockfastness in the Elburz.
But the day came when Alamut fell to the Mongols. Once again
the Nizaris went on trek, and after centuries of trickling
migrations through Afghanistan and the slopes of the Pamirs
towards Hunza and Gilgit—leaving everywhere they went a
sprinkling of converts —fetched up on the West coast of India.
Where their spiritual successors, Hindus by blood, mercantile by
leaning, today constitute under the name of Khojas the nucleus of
the Agha Khan’s following. And meanwhile the Musta’lis, ousted in
their own turn from Egypt, were wending their way slowly east via
the Yemen towards the same destination to end up in Gujarat,
where modern India knows those converted to their confession as
Bohras, which is Traders’. In neither of these thriving business
communities were numbers anything but small; I used to hear the
Bohras put at 150,000 and the Khojas at about twice that figure.
The peasants of the Sect tilling their terraced little fields on the
mountainside way up beyond Chitral were evidently very much
fewer still. So I doubt if the Indian Ismailis greatly exceeded half-a-
million. No, the numeric weight of the Sect, although not its
central office, lay outside India, whether in strung-out settlements
along the converging lines of migration mentioned above or in
East Africa where unremitting missionary endeavour in modern
times had carried the original Nizari message as far afield as Lake
Tanganyika.
India, then, had come to be the base of the Ismailis, but how in
heaven’s name had an ‘Indian Prince’ come to be their pontiff? The
story belongs to the annals of the British Raj. Not much more than
a hundred years had elapsed since the then Imam of the Sect, a
person descended from Ali by his wife Fatima who was daughter
of the Prophet, came into political conflict with the Shah. He fled
the country and sought our protection in India. To transfer one’s
whole family and entourage at sudden notice from the region of
156 ABOUT PRINCES
Qum to Bombay cannot have been easy in the year 1838, and one
thinks it could hardly have been accomplished at all without that
chain of Ismaili communities which the earlier émigrés had
forged. The fact that this newest émigré was actually able to render
valuable services to the British Army in Afghanistan on his way
proved the existence and the worth of devoted disciples along the
route. And it was of course this aspect of the matter that
impressed us. It was not long before the refugee was officially
designated His Highness Agha Khan I.
My visitor, then, was Agha Khan III. Now in his late sixties, he
had been very young and the darling of his mother, when his
father died. So the years of his pontificate had been long; and
because of the Great War and the political changes in India
which followed it, eventful. What I remarked of certain of the other
Princes applied to him; immersed in his unearned authority he
had become proficient in the art of exerting it; heading delegations,
attending conferences, speaking for the Princes as a body,
notwithstanding that most of them were Hindus. Above all he had
been voicing the aspirations of the Muslims of India as a whole.
Anomalies in the position of the Indian Prince who had no
thimbleful of Indian blood in his veins and no square yard of
Indian State territory were glaring, and here was one more: he
championed the very people for whom his redoubtable forerunner,
the Old Man of the Mountain, reserved the Assassin’s blade in this
world, fire and brimstone in the next. Nehru—and it came rather
richly from a Pandit who did not object to a beef-steak—called him
a heretic publicly, and heretic undeniably he was. But the
Muslims in general slurred over that—and after all it was their
business, not the Pandit’s. I remember sometimes a wry smile,
certainly, and a murmured ‘not strictly regular’, but that was
about the sum of it. Jinnah himself, I would be reminded, Jinnah
the architect of the Muslim nation-to-be was a Shi’ite if (heavily
accented in the speaker’s voice) anything, and therefore ‘heretical’.
So where did you stop? The fact was that the Agha Khan was
tolerant of other people’s tenets—to be which, most cultivated
Indo-Muslims would tell you, is not such a bad mode of
approaching God.
It followed that under such an urbane successor to the Master of
Alamut doctrinal differences within the Sect were hardly likely to
arouse the old passions; and, anyhow, eight hundred years
crowned by material security in a common Newfoundland had
apparently gone far towards healing the breach. In the India we
knew, it was unthinkable that Khojas and Bohras should be flying
at each other’s throats.
‘Then why depart so quickly, Your Highness?’ I trotted this out

in Persian—it was a standard phrase—and felt a tinge of
disappointment when it seemed not to register. We sat down. He
resumed, bland as before. They would be staying two or three
days at the Cecil Hotel, his wife the Begum (who was French), a
companiongoverness, and himself; sight-seeing really and all very
private. Only one small ceremony was planned in Agra for, as I
would know, the Ismailis hereabouts were very few. The Begum (I
believe I have this right) had never been in India before, and so of
course there had to be the Taj Mahal—by moonlight, too, unless
he was mistaken. And could we fit in a talk? About the way things
were going. Suddenly he grew grave: ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear!’
He got up again, and again I noticed how spry he was for his
age. We had settled for dinner the following evening. ‘En petit
comité, though, if that suits,’ he had stipulated, ‘the Begum has
hardly any English yet.’
We went towards the great porch where I now saw a borrowed
car to be waiting. My departing guest had easily the longest
attested genealogy on the face of the earth, and protocol very likely
provides for the ceremonious rendering of his jewelled fillet to the
personage thus exalted. I fetched his old tweed cap, and I infer I
did the correct thing. For he took it, bowing solemnly over it and
saying: ‘May your hand not pain you.’ He said it in Persian (how
else could it be said?).
The descendant of the last of the Grand Masters of Alamut was,
it will be seen, a genial man. To the outer world he was also a man
whose private performance and public office appeared to offer a
most startling contrast: a pontiff whose see, so far from being holy,
was frequently of the earth, earthy; was even of the turf, turfy.
That world knew an Agha Khan captured by the camera in the
paddocks of British racecourses; knew an Agha Khan whose
embonpoint was weighed and balanced in the scales against gold
or silver or maybe humbler coinage donated by his votaries, an
Agha Khan toasting Miss France at a fashionable dîner de gala in
Cannes; a flamboyant Agha Khan, verging on the loud, spot-
lighted a trifle too much. But the Ismailis, whose affair it was, did
not mind; their Leader, being in the succession, was sinless.
Certain Ismailis, shown a photograph of the Agha Khan in the act
of raising his glass, would answer that the picture might be a
fake, or the cup not contain wine, or that, containing wine, this
was transmuted in essence before passing his lips. But most
Ismailis would not bother to defend a position held against all
comers these eleven or twelve hundred years. They would simply
158 ABOUT PRINCES
smile rather disarmingly at you, and hand the piece of paper

back.
At Buckingham Palace Indian Princes used to expect the guard
to turn out as they entered the gates. I had forgotten this item,
and so my sentries were caught napping when the guests passed
through mine. It was still not so very long since the Press had
conferred on Mademoiselle Yvette Labrousse the title of the
loveliest woman in Europe or since the Agha Khan had given her
that of his Begum— the third in sequence, for he did not
subscribe to polygamy. Report of her beauty, then, had preceded
her, but one was not prepared for this to be statuesque. A very
young woman had walked like a Greek goddess, nobody could
miss it, straight into the part of consort to a religious leader. I
must be very careful not to convey a wrong impression here.
Wavelets of hilarity rippled the surface of the evening I am
describing. The Agha Khan had been held up on the Riviera
through the war years till the Liberation of France, and I had to
hear the ruses he and the Begum employed to keep the famous
diamonds from the Germans —but was left to guess whether
those flashing in the light of my very ordinary chandelier were
real. The Prince of the Turf volunteered, I remember, the detail
that versed as he was in the ritual of ‘saddling up’ he had never
actually been in the saddle in his life—if you excepted his
childhood with his donkey on the sands at Johu outside Bombay.
The thought took him back, evidently, to the age of ease and
elegance. ‘Three weeks ago we had a free-for-all scrimmage for our
places in a rickety, draughty, noisy cylinder. And when I think of
the comfort of my cabin with its brass bedstead on the old P & O
at the turn of the century!’
But under this sort of thing deeper currents were running, and
you felt them. The Begum had made her submission to Islam, and
I hear the Agha Khan reciting a Qasida of Qa’ani in praise of the
Creator; while she listens with rapt attention, nodding now and
again as he helps her out with a French translation. The Derby at
that minute did not matter a scrap to him, it had never mattered
to her. I doubt if she ever learned whether it was Blenheim or
Mahmoud that had brought it off in ‘36.
My next and last meeting with him was to be in England and if
this falls strictly outside my picture the fraction that protrudes
beyond the frame is of a piece with my canvas. It was a golden
June in I forget which year—it was certainly after he had won the
Derby with My Love. He was in the foyer of the Ritz to which, as
the world knew, he was no stranger. And he was wearing properly
pressed white flannels with a tweed jacket that matched, not a
doubt of it, the old cap. He was going to Whitechapel, to the Mile
End Road, where—although the world did not know this—he was
no stranger either. From a ship that had just docked they had
brought an Indian in a bad way to the London Hospital, some sort
of Indian anyhow, an ‘Ismaili’. So the Agha Khan was going to sit
at the bedside. My doctor brother who went with him to the ward
told me about it afterwards. ‘You remember about that Indian the
other day?’ he said. ‘Well, he set out on his journey with absolute
serenity.’
160
10
DELHI
1.
THE ETERNAL CITY
Delhi is Far Away, is Seven Cities, has a Palace that is Paradise.
The three old sayings are probably no longer on people’s lips as
they were even within my memory, but I do not doubt they can
still be heard in the patter of the professional guides. They are
convenient pegs on which to hang the tale of India’s capital, so I will
use them now.
‘Delhi is still far away’ was a proverb rather like the Latin dictum
about Corinth which it does not fall to every man’s lot to reach.
The thought was not of spatial distance—how could it be?
Militarily, economically, in terms of tourism, Delhi has always
been on the map, the very reverse of remote and anything but
inaccessible. Herein, on the contrary, was the key to its destiny.
To Delhi, as to that other Eternal City—both history and
prehistory confirm it—all roads led. It stood at the exit of a corridor
running from the northwest passes between the Himalayan range
and the Rajputana desert, a corridor which as soon as it has
gained the Jumna valley opens into the Gangetic plain towards
the east and on Central India towards the south. From Delhi the
conqueror, the merchant, the curious traveller could push on
without impasse to the Bay of Bengal; or, if he preferred, turn
south to the Deccan, Maharashtra, Gujarat—and retrace his steps
just as easily whenever he wished. Archaeological discovery and
the persuasive, if not entirely conclusive, voice of traditional
literature combine to demonstrate Delhi’s perennial pull. The
archaeologists assure us that its story goes right back to the
Indus Valley Civilization, which is to say that it dates from the
middle of the third millennium B.C. And coming to the Epic
period, which present-day scholars would place around 900 B.C.,
there is circumstantial evidence to be gathered from the
162 DELHI
Mahabharat. We had a chance to see in my sixth chapter that the

matchless Bhagavad Gita or ‘Lord’s Song’, that sort of Sermon
inserted in the body of the great epic was sparked off at a ‘Zero
hour’ fixed for a decisive battle to be joined precisely hereabouts.
Indeed modern scholarship does not hesitate to picture Arjun and
his brothers holding their court in their palaces on the mound of
the Purana Qila—or ‘Old Fort’ as your taxi driver will translate it
for you today—and racing their war chariots for fun or practice on
the level ground between there and the War Memorial Arch! For
beneath that very mound (it has always tempted me to christen
the Bhagavad Gita the Hindu Sermon on the Mound) is the debris
of the dust of Indraprastha. Then, too, we know that our city was
a famous enough capital by the age of Alexander, and though it
was apparently no more than a provincial one both under the
Mauryas —Asoka’s imperial capital being Pataliputra, which is
Patna—and under a whole series of successor dynasties, its star
was going to rise again. I mean under Prithvi Raj. We are drawing
near in our dates to the advent of the Muslims, to whose early
incursions I alluded in my seventh chapter. Prithvi Raj fell in the
field in 1191 opposing the advance of Muhammad of Ghur; and
Delhi, having lost its fighting raja, now endured the loss of its
temples as well; and became the capital of rulers who set about
building mosques. Mosques to the greater glory of God—and
palaces to their own; on sites that might be shifted (but never very
far) in one direction or another at the will of each fresh occupant of
the throne. A brandnew Delhi resulted from every successive
move, calculated to outshine but not to eclipse the old. First the
Qutb site around the limits of the former Lalkot; then that of
Tughlakabad; then the area called Jahanpanah or ‘The Refuge of
the World’; then the fortress palace of Firozabad; then Humayun’s
city adjoining the already mentioned Purana Qila; and finally the
Grand Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad. That adds up to Seven,
but more remarkable than the diversity this numeral suggests was
the stubborn identity it never quite destroyed.
The third of the old sayings is actually an echo of a Persian
inscription that is to be seen in the Palace, now called the Fort;
more precisely in the pavilion of white marble, within which is the
hall of exquisite and lavish beauty where Private Audience used to
be given. It reads like this—‘If there be a paradise on the face of the
earth it is here, it is here, oh! it is here’.
Strictly, that sentence is the boast of the Palace as such, but
by extension it is the boast of the Mughal capital at its zenith; of
the city, namely, of Shahjahan, seventh in the list we drew up
above. In this city the Palace was the citadel from which all else
radiated, on which all else converged. Immediately around it the

household troops were encamped; then, on the line of the present
Lothian Road, the patchwork of bazaars commenced. And driving
a broad swath through these ran the central avenue known as
Chandni Chowk, ‘Silver Street’, silver as the moon, the richest
thoroughfare in the world, saturated with history and not seldom
soaked in blood. Half way up it, in fact, and opening onto the
market lane, the Dariba, is the Gate called Bloody to this very
day. I will have to return to it in another chapter and recount how
that Gate in 1942 lived up to its name. But bear a little now to the
south if I am getting my points of the compass correct, and after a
short distance two very tall, very slender minarets, then three
white marble domes and, presently, a magnificent flight of stone
steps will come into view. We are confronting the Jama Masjid,
Delhi’s cathedral mosque, the greatest in all India. Shahjahan was
‘Shah of the World’ and this was his ‘Abad’, his Abode, where he
mounted his Peacock Throne in the year King Charles mounted the
scaffold. It supported, the historians reckon, two million
inhabitants, and was thus a city without example in its day.
Before I can report the Delhi I knew, a significant gap waits to
be closed. If the place, as I have been arguing, was ‘indicated’ from
the start, why were we ourselves so slow in making it the capital
of our Indian Empire? Admittedly, when Shahjahan’s city arose in
a dazzling magnificence that became the talk and the envy of
London and Paris—this is the stage I had arrived at above—we
had no more than, say, a score of factories in the land and about
ninety employees; we were still petitioning the Emperor for coastal
settlements, we were hat in hand. Admittedly, when we did get to
Delhi as a military power in 1803 we were still ‘John’ Company,
and the currency continued to be struck in the name of the
pathetic, blind Shah Alam whose realm, said the mocking jingle,
stretched from Delhi to Palam (where the Airport is). Admittedly,
until the very date of the Mutiny which was to dislodge him, old
Bahadur Shah, vague in mind, soothed by the optimistic
prophecies of his holy men, was King; on whom it was polite to
pay a courtesy call. But granting such earlier impediments, why
that time-lag from 1858 till 1912?
The answer is that following its siege and capture—for
these were the price of mutiny—Delhi had suffered a collapse that
was not less nervous than physical. The most populous areas had
been demolished by the cannonade; mosques and palaces, if
standing at all, were scarred façades. The King had been tried and
packed off to Rangoon for the remainder of his days; the social
élite had largely emigrated to Hyderabad in the Deccan. The
164 DELHI
British, unready to forgive the wholesale extermination of their

compatriots in the Daryaganj quarter of the town and a fiendish
massacre of captive English women and children in the Hall of
Public Audience of the Palace, had been bent on taking it out of the
Muslims; especially the Muslims. Let those who wanted to stay on
in the now devastated Delhi do so—and dream about their past. I
cannot f orget a particular family, ci-devant well connected, but
long since retired within itself, which used to invite me to its
modest home in Deputy Ganj, that suburb for whose layout
considerably before the upheaval of 1857 a Deputy Commissioner
—thus an official in whose footsteps I was walking with the delay
of one century had earned lasting credit. Grandmother Zubeida
Begum, usually visible on these occasions, was they told me,
ninety-three and had lived in the Palace as a girl, and—I am able
to testify to this preferred the quaint Persian idiom of the phantom
Court to the Urdu speech of everyday life. A willing listener at the
tea-table of these surviving links with Mughal India, I could not
help reflecting how absurdly ‘out of it’ the historian is in his
college rooms or at a favourite desk in the India Office Library.
And on the other hand how disgracefully casual the clod-hopping
Collector I was could show himself in the society to which he, as
nobody else in the whole wide world, had the entrée. After a few
minutes, out would come a loose folder of old photographs, yellow
and curling at the edges. Most were portraits of great uncles
paternal or maternal; direct descendants one and all, I would be
assured, of Tamerlane himself. But several, taken out-of-doors,
documented the horror of the bombardment of a sector of the city
towards the Jama Masjid. These puzzled me the first time I saw
them. Fops and dilettanti, fainéants save in the harem and the
chase, how could anyone in that set have even known what a
camera was in 1857? Or knowing, been adroit enough to use so
cumbersome an apparatus in the confusion of the calamity,
exposing the plate when still wet—for that was the collodion
process—and developing it straightaway after exposure? Long-
lashed Mu’azzam, thirteen and just coming in from school, chimed
in with an explanation. The Eurasian we had in our service took
those,’ he volunteered. ‘Some Wilkins,’ he added, naming him. It
was just plausible, I imagine. Not a Sahib. Not, that is, accepted
by those who lived in siyle in Civil Lines beyond Kashmir Gate and
might be watched almost any evening, escorting mem-log in
taffetas and crinolines as they drove in barouches and buggies to
their parties and balls. No, a subordinate with a sing-song
intonation who carried a tripod on his shoulder in lieu of a rifle
during the emergency. Some Wilkins. This, or some other
resourceful man like him, had been present in the streets of Delhi
with his camera when the lamp of the Mughals flickered and went
out. One of his ‘stills’ has stuck in my memory. The Mosque is
there, ill-focussed to be sure, in the background; while in the
foreground there are blurs leaning inward from the left, and
grotesquely elongated shapes suggesting, but no more than
suggesting, human beings, are streaking away from them towards
the right bottom corner. ‘Look’, the boy prattled on, fingering these
blurs and these shapes as doubtless his parents and the parents
of his parents had done down the years, ‘look on the toppling
walls of our houses, look at us fleeing for our lives.’ ‘And what,’ his
father would ask me despondently at these sessions, ‘are we to do
with those lives now that we have escaped with them?’ What
indeed, except to draw pitiful pensions on the last Saturday of the
month from my Treasury or to hope that little Mu’azzam would be
selected when a bit older for a junior clerkship in my gift? Iqbal,
that most admirably articulate voice of the Indo-Muslims in the
twentieth century, has given expression to the melancholy of my
hosts and all their class. I think of this couplet, much quoted,
from his Bang-i-Dira (Song of the Highway) which I recall with ease
but cannot render worthily:
‘Paint in all the colours, let me picture their array;

Sadden me with stories, let me weep the vanished day.’
I must not lose my thread. I was saying that Delhi’s black record
in the Indian Mutiny rankled with us badly. For a long while we
gave scant encouragement to the town’s twin needs, which were
therapy of soul and recovery of physical vigour. And although as
time went on we relented, a whole generation had elapsed by
then; so that it was only in Curzon’s viceroyalty that things really
began to look up for Delhi. The Durbar he pressed for and held
shortly after King Edward’s accession, the Coronation Durbar of
1903 (exactly one hundred years therefore after the Company’s
troops had ‘taken’ Delhi) was to be a demonstration to all India of
her unity. Now a Durbar in Muslim India like the ancient Sabha of
her Hindu kings, was a royal audience granted at the palace, and
the palace was located at the seat of government. Could Curzon, a
stickler for etiquette, have ignored the implication? The published
records do not support me, but I believe the ‘03 Durbar to have
been an open hint—and the following eight years to have been
years of expectancy. The blessing urbi et orbi is pronounced in
Rome. Calcutta, the quondam village near the mouth of the
Hoogli, had given us our foothold in Bengal, had rapidly become
166 DELHI
the convenient fulcrum across which to lay the levers which would
heave our position up to its present level. But it was, all said and
done, an upstart among cities. It was not the eternal city. Delhi
was.
I shake my head consequently when I read in the standard
books of the ‘utter surprise to all’ caused by the announcement
George V made to the people of Delhi at the Durbar of 1911. And,
as it happens, I can weigh against the official histories what
several Civilians, men thirty years older than myself, who were
responsible for the local arrangements, have told me. The
Emperor of India would be coming here to hold Durbar in the vast
amphitheatre where tented canopies, graded platforms and a
throne surmounted by a golden dome were already being raised by
a horde of workmen; the entire lay-out being commanded from a
vantage point on rising ground nicknamed ‘Tamasha Terrace’ by
the locals. His Majesty would be recognized by the crown on his
head. And on the morrow of all this, you could count on it, he would
show himself to his subjects exactly as Shahjahan had done from
the royal balcony which gives on the level stretch between the east
wall of the Fort and the river Jumna. In the Indian cliché it was the
Wheel of the Days that had come full circle. It was no surprise
then (this is my version) when the Emperor on the elevated dais
rose and in a resonant tone proclaimed the transference of the
capital to Delhi. And twenty-four hours afterwards (again as
confidently foreseen) in a gesture as dear to Hindu as to Muslim
sentiment ‘showed himself to the people of his chosen city.
If we would honour the practice of Delhi’s rajas and sultans as I
traced it in the preamble of this chapter, we were not released from
a further step. Next day but one the Sovereign took this when he
laid the foundation of the New Capital ‘which’ he declared ‘will
arise from where we now stand’. These last four words of his
were not fulfilled to the letter in the face of subsequent technical
advice, and some have fastened on this detail to bolster their
theory that the whole business was thought up on the spur of the
moment. The statement went the rounds, was even repeated in
the House of Commons, that in the flurry and the scurry of the
decision an old tombstone had been made to serve at the
ceremony! In actual fact the stones used were from a mason’s yard
off the Chandni Chowk, and had been carefully selected by my
predecessor-in-office of the day.
The apathy, and this is undeniable, of the crowd which had
watched the state entry into Delhi on the day of H.M.’s arrival has
similarly assisted the argument of total surprise. Improperly. Of
course the event fell flat; the King had not been fittingly salaamed
for the very good reason that he had not been recognized. All
Delhi had assumed that the King Emperor must enter its gates on
the back of an elephant—and where was the elephant? I am quite
sure the Deputy Commissioner was not consulted: even in my
Bahraich, on some little occasion we celebrated there, I recall as
Deputy Commissioner being told I must not head the procession
on horseback, that would be infra-dig. So how in Indian eyes
could a man in a white helmet and riding a charger with half-a-
dozen others around him in white helmets and riding chargers, be
the King Emperor?
The Indian is good for a flutter on almost anything going. Among
the litigants milling about outside my Cutcherry building near
Kashmir Gate, shopkeepers from Sabzimandi or Paharganj or
Sadar Bazar, cultivators in from Mahrauli perhaps or the Gurgaon
border, or f rom Shahdara across the Jumna, as of ten as not it
would be on the outcome of their case, but it would certainly be on
something. Therefore I shall persist in maintaining that half Delhi
made a little money that Durbar morning on what it took to be a
pretty safe bet. The aroma of stateliness was in the air.
2.
DELHI RECONNOITRED
My mother had written in one of her letters asking if the Vicereine
was still setting off each morning for New Delhi in flat-heeled
shoes and carrying an attaché case and a thermos. The allusion
was lost on me. At the date, I was entering my second winter out
from home and the custom was to round up the young Civilians of
the Province who had done twelve months in the country into a
sort of Seminar and put them through a course of lectures
planned as a reasoned résumé of the duties they had been picking
up from their Collectors in their respective Districts and already,
to a limited extent, discharging on their own. I am not sure that
the Class was of the slightest value in terms of training;
nevertheless it allowed us something that would not come again:
life in the company of our own batch, kindred spirits almost
without exception, with just enough in the way of shared
experience to enable us to swap stories, just enough of us for polo
in the afternoons three times a week. A carefree cold-season then,
and in the tonic air of Moradabad with the distant snow-capped
mountains as a back-drop. Christmas was at hand when my
mother’s letter came, a break therefore was promised, and—well,
I’d not set eyes on Delhi yet, so why not now? I might not have
another chance for goodness knows how long. If ever…if ever.
168 DELHI
There was that proverb, wasn’t there? So off to Delhi I went, a

lonely sightseer with a guide-book in his pocket.
A great deal had taken place there quickly: New Delhi had been
built; five square miles of it, a kind of Washington, a kind of
Canberra—and yet quite different from either. It was the newest
city on the face of the globe and mother’s query, obscure as it was
to the profane crowd of which I formed part, was only the littlest
bit ‘dated’. Until just a short while previously the Viceroy had been
residing in a Lodge, a mansion dignified enough but deficient in
the amenities we all of us regard as minimal nowadays, beyond
the Ridge in (if the expression be intelligible) the modern Old
Delhi; and ‘Her Ex.’, a Spartan wife, could until very lately indeed
have been seen making her way daily to what was to become the
Viceroy’s House situated six miles off. New Delhi, although largely
occupied by the late ‘twenties, was not formally opened until
1930. For centuries and centuries, as I have explained already,
there had been at any given stage both a New and an Old Delhi:
‘new’ meaning precisely what it said; and ‘old’ indicating, if with
much less precision, what had until yesterday been popularly
designated ‘new’. We have seen how the sumptuous city of
Shahjahan converging on the Fort, which was the Imperial Palace,
was New Delhi once. And obviously the ‘Civil Lines’ and all that
area round about the Kashmir Gate was a New Delhi to the British
who, soldiers and civilians, were stationed there up to and long
after the Mutiny, and to whom ‘Old Delhi’ for all practical
purposes signified Shahjahanabad.
Just one more word on this. Those famous Daniell prints which
have conjured up the Delhi monuments for stay-at-homes and
evoked them for ‘Sahibs’ ever since the French Revolution until
now—I saw some on sale quite recently in Dover—were chiefly of
sites near the Delhi that was old in 1789. I do not have to trust to
memory: on the wall of my room where I write hangs an aquatint
‘Drawn and engraved by Thos. & Wm. Daniell entitled “A Baolee
near the Old City of Delhi”’. A baolee—seemingly there was no call
to interpret this to fashionable Londoners—is in Hindi an
immense masonry well, rectangular, with a broad staircase down
to the water, and with landing steps and capacious chambers in
the flanking walls. Intensely Hindu therefore, redolent of pre-
Muslim India—and nowhere near the Delhi called ‘Old’ in my
time.
3.
TO THE PROVINCE THAT WAS A DISTRICT
Since that reconnoitre of mine a decade has slid past. Hatless,
weary from the dusty, jolting route, I am at the wheel of my Buick
outside a certain house on the sloping approach to the Ridge,
waiting for somebody to come out. An oil-painting of that house is
in front of me while I am writing this, so whenever I wish I can see
the drive as it curves between flower-beds towards the verandah.
At the gateway I can make out one of my sentries, smart in khaki
and red, who seems to be chatting idly with a cultivator, and I’m
sure that often used to happen when I was not looking. And if I
cannot see, I can visualize, standing at that very same spot,
dressed very like that cultivator but minus the turban—Gandhi.
His rickety Ford has broken down exactly opposite my entrance
and the amiable Pyarelal, his private secretary, has run in to seek
assistance. But that story is for a later page.
I am waiting for somebody to come out.
A raw-boned giant does so, without animation. A Jat, as I can tell
at a glance. He is wearing a scarlet redingote, ankle-length, loose
fitting but held at the waist by a wide decorative sash. His great
gaunt fingers, raised to an incipient yawn, sketch instead the
barest outline of a salute.
‘His Honour is not at home,’ he says. Then airily, ‘No harm if you
come back next week.’
This was Delhi, not Mirzapur or Bahraich, not the ‘Bogley
Wallah’ of fiction where a white face was the object of unfeigned
and gaping astonishment. Europeans were everywhere—
often enough there would be one in the anteroom at this very
address, waiting his turn for an interview. And another thing. How
could the incoming Chief Magistrate of Delhi Province, the
President ex officio of the Delhi Municipal Council be at the wheel
of a car, and hatless too?
The term ‘Delhi Province’ has slipped in unbidden. I must
clarify. Delhi Province was not a province like the others. It stood
to those—without pressing this comparison too hard—as
Washington D.C. stands to the United States of America. Nor, if a
District in its administrative anatomy, was it a district quite like
the others (four hundred or so, let us recall) composing British
India. Qua ‘Zila’ it was tiny, a quarter of what you would expect;
and easily the half of its small population was urban. But qua
Imperial Capital, of course, its cachet was palpable and
unmatched.
170 DELHI
I had arrived straight from leave, my second visit home in ten

years of service, and had nothing with me but a suit-case. My
things, my naukar-chākar or ‘domestics’ (save for my bearer Kalloo
and my Gurkha chauffeur tittering on the back seat), my horses,
were following by train from the United Provinces. I knew Austin
Layard to be married; I could not know that he would be so
courteous to his bachelor successor as to vacate the residence in
advance after despatching his household effects by rail to his own
Province of origin, and to install himself with his wife and two
daughters in the Cecil Hotel down the road, from where they could
perform the round of farewells. Nor was he for his part to guess
what my dispositions would be. There was always a curiously
nonchalant attitude to housing amongst the servants of the Raj
which amazed the newcomer from England or the visitor of foreign
nationality. One such observer aptly suggested a tin bath-tub as
the emblem of Indo-British society—flanked, as supporters, by a
bhishti bowed under a goatskin and a sweeper emptying a crude
commode. I have said, or anyhow hinted, that those insignia were
appropriate to the Viceroy’s Lodge itself on the other side of the
Ridge in the Delhi of my mother’s recollection. But I must be
honest: the residence outside which I had turned up with so little
formality, my home for the coming years, situated on the hither
slope of the Ridge as you approach it from Qudsia Gardens, is one
of those in which from time to time may be heard a hygienic rush
of water.
And of a piece with that easy-going acceptance of early
Victorian standards of sanitation in each succeeding home, went a
calm contemplation of the stresses foreseeable in each succeeding
job. In retrospect this strikes me as strange, at the time it never
did. Frequently you did not so much as meet your predecessor;
and I do not recall telling a successor what he would have on his
plate—or his asking my advice. There was no hand over of the
charge in any practical sense: the code of official behaviour did
not provide for this. Perhaps it was for the best; after all we were
only behaving in the manner the Viceroys themselves—so far as I
have gathered from reasonably pure sources of information—were
inclined to do.
Delhi I was saying was a Province coterminous with a District,
but a District sui generis. In districts up and down the sub-
continent the I.C.S. officer would be darting out from
headquarters into the tahsils all the year round, and in winter
would stay out under canvas for months at a stretch. In Delhi,
wherever I went I would be back by nightfall: nor, nine times out of
ten, would my destination have been a village; it would have been
that other and very new City in which the central bureaucracy
dwelt in spiritual detachment and social aloofness from the India
it governed. In twelve minutes from my own front gate I could find
myself bowling along a stately boulevard 150 feet wide, lined with
three rows of trees and climbing gently to the acropolis of a
colossal planned area that measured five square miles and was
larger, thus, than the Washington D.C. to which I have likened it.
If I remember aright, New Delhi supported about 65,000 souls;
these in such few and such homogeneous layers that the
population might be shown diagrammatically as a flat triangle; at
the apex the Viceroy and his household; then my brother Civilians
in the Secretariat plus the sedentary Soldiers of G.H.Q., together
with the wives and families of this combined group; then the
clerical personnel of the various departments and of course their
families too; and finally the shopkeepers and the domestic
servants to cater for those named.
A city dedicated to its important self must of its nature ooze
selfimportance, and in New Delhi you could not but sense the
distance at which India was being kept. Nonetheless, in so far as
it was a component of an Indian District New Delhi could be
brought down to Indian earth with a bump, for every district was
in bloodrelationship with every other district. In this particular
one I was as much the ‘Zila Sahib’ as I had been in, say, the idyllic
Bahraich— even if I would hardly be so addressed hereabouts
unless perhaps in fun. Of course the bureaucrats and their
entourage were relatively law-abiding, not given to communal
fights; and, solid by definition, they had nothing to gain from
demonstrations of their solidarity in the streets. I would
sometimes rein up in my rides on the Ridge and gaze across to
New Delhi. Whether the principal buildings were classic or Indian
in architecture, or these two hyphenated, I could never entirely
make up my mind. But the residential area on the lower
approach, nestling there under neat foliage, oh, that was pure
Garden City with nothing oriental about it. The mark of the Indian
city is variety; the mark of this one was uniformity: a congenial
company of highly professional bureaucrats lived there engaged in
the same occupations, exhibiting the same tastes. No, they were
not unruly; but they made up for it, as I quickly learned, by their
miscellaneous wants. They wanted a gunlicence or a civil
marriage, or a passport or redress for the punch on the nose a
tonga-wallah had given some Madrasi clerk in the office - and they
turned to me. I was a commissioner for oaths and—this happened
once when a plane crashed at New Delhi Airport—a coroner. I
might be able to trace their lost dog; or recommend an area where
172 DELHI
a day’s shooting might be had—and of course go out myself and

fix things with the natives in advance. But I could be tiresome, too.
Drive your car recklessly (and the temptation was great) along
those straight vistas, and you would see: my police would report
you and I would not go out myself; I would let you take your
chance before an extremely junior magistrate over there; my sole
concern with the proceedings being to ensure that you did not awe
him by your rank.
For it was an awesome society, recollect, this of the New Delhi
bureaucrats, awesome and influential. You really did know the
Home Secretary, you did not have to pretend to the policeman.
You could even tell yourself—and you were not far wrong—that
the Viceroy himself was one of you, he too was a top official.
Surrounded he might be by more than regal pomp and
circumstance in a great palace, but he spent most of his time at
departmental business just as you did.
4.
APROPOS OF VICEROYS AND VICEREINES
I am coming here to what I meant when I implied that my District
was not quite so idyllic as Bahraich. What is a still
youngish magistrate—I was not quite thirty-seven—to do when the
wives of the European Sergeants of Police crowd into his room and
tearfully beseech him to require the Viceroy to observe the speed
limit? The provincial capitals of Upper India, and a few of the
larger cities such as Allahabad or Cawnpore, would usually have
one or two Sergeants in Police Lines. These men were invariably
recruited from British units completing their stint in India,
noncommissioned officers finishing their seven years in the Army
who, having met the ‘domiciled’ girl of their choice, had decided to
stay. They were invaluable in the rifle range and, when from
cavalry regiments, in the riding school. Now in Delhi their number
was considerably larger, for we used them not merely for training
in Lines but as motor cycle escorts for the Viceroy on his routine
outings. Ceremonial progress in the State Carriage was gentle,
being controlled by the trotting horses of the Bodyguard, but the
career of the everyday Rolls Royce was not supposed to be
hampered by its outriders. And of late His Excellency had been
inclined to scorch. Not long ago a Sergeant had come off his
machine at one of those round points on the central Mall;
however, he had been none too competent, I had gathered. But
now here was another victim, a very bad tumble this time with
injuries. And had I not myself tightened the traffic regulations in
New Delhi, and come down on all who defied them? It was true.
Those smiling prospects that tempted the motorist were
treacherous. The diagonal approaches on either side of the
arterial roads, which were a feature of the lay-out, were screened
by verdure; from them a bullock cart might lurch inconsequently
into the fairway, its driver sound asleep. ‘Can’t you do something,
Sir, and we at our wits’ end?’ It was not one of those perplexities
in which a compromise offers itself. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I can.’ The
promise kept me awake half that night—and in the event proved
unimaginably easy to fulfil.
My mother had died while I was yet at Bahraich and it saddened
me now that I could not report such stories to cap that one of hers
I have mentioned. They would have brought her a glow of pleasure
(particularly since I had been at pains in each case to cast myself
as the hero). Here are two more anecdotes of the Viceregal milieu:
like the one I have just recounted they go down on paper no w, I
believe, for the first time. Before the War but when the horizon
was growing inky black with the menace of Armageddon, Dr
Schacht, Minister (or more accurately ex-Minister at the date) of
Economy in the Reich, paid a visit to India; as a tourist to the best
of my recollection, but too much water has gone over the dam for
the declared purpose of his being in our midst to matter in the
slightest. I knew the Vicereine had a much prized lady’s maid of
Austrian nationality to whom she felt peculiarly drawn. There was
a German maid-servant at Buckingham Palace itself at the time—
and I do not doubt more than one of Hitler’s generals had English
governesses in their homes teaching their children. All that.
Nonetheless it was clear that a conflict between private inclination
and public duty would develop sooner or later. It did so with
suddenness. It must have been either near the beginning or at the
end of the summer season that Denys Kilburn, who was Delhi’s
chief of police, had this tit-bit for me.
‘What do you think of this, Hubert? Someone has the notion that
friend Hjalmar and the Austrian Mädchen may have had a
rendezvous in Simla. In a tea-shop.’
‘Good Lord! But “notion”, “may”…Everybody, every European
goes out to tea in a hill station and to the same tea-shop because
there is only one in the place. Sounds liks I.B. (Intelligence
Bureau) stuff to me.’
‘It is.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’m in two minds. Each was being shadowed…yet a tête-à-tête…
I really don’t know. But doubt falls on the girl from now on, that’s
certain.’
174 DELHI
Denys was right. The only certainty was the doubt.

‘Has Her Ex. been told?’
‘Not yet, but will be. And I hope I don’t have to be present.’
‘What a hope! You won’t be let off, not if I can help it.’
I could not have done without Denys either then or at any time
in the Delhi days. Winchester and the Grenadier Guards had not
perhaps left their conventional imprint on the eccentric bachelor
and social recluse. With a wit that was a joy to his syces and the
sweeper, he could be devastatingly sharp with the toffs of
bureaucracy, and, to be candid, the latter were not always
appreciative of this monk whose use of the rapier was so ready
and so superb. When it came to their wives, however—and these,
if a meiosis be allowed, counted in New Delhi—there were few who
did not consider his company, supposing them clever enough to
have secured it, less than delectable. We did not talk of a ‘push-
over’ in those distant years but that is exactly what it was going to
be. I could sit back and watch it happen.
‘Best to try it out on Ruby Hill (Her Excellency’s secretary),’ I
suggested, ‘and win a potential ally in limine.’ In limine—that is
rather the way Denys and I did talk, I’m afraid.
The little drama (for it merits the name) was acted out as I felt
confident it would be; a scene of understandable incredulity; a
scene of touching loyalty; a scene of resigned acceptance; and
each in such rapid sequence as to bring the bothersome business
to a quick close.
On an earlier page I suggested that you can predict what an
animal, so-called wild, will do in a given situation. My second
anecdote does not belie this proposition, it is simply that we did
not grasp the situation to which the animal was responsive. On
the outer side of Viceroy’s House the confines of New Delhi are
quickly reached: almost in a minute you are on the edge of a
rather drab landscape intersected by a few nullahs, dotted by a
few patches of scrub. Not all, not much of India is Tigerland as
you might infer from reading the romantic novelists, and here the
cover was just rewarding enough to satisfy the occasional jackal.
My astonishment was therefore great to get news, khabar in our
jargon, one winter’s morning that a patrol circling somewhere at
the back of Viceroy’s House at daybreak had been hailed by a
peasant shouting ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ The man’s name and village had
been taken, and I decided to question him myself. When I arrived
at the place I found a fellow cultivator of his had also sighted the
tiger, but my interrogation of the pair bore no fruit. In Mirzapur,
in Bahraich, the cultivators would have known what to notice and
hence what to tell me: was it the sinuous glide of the long tail
when both limbs on either side move almost in unison, or was it

the deliberate prowl in quest for food? Signs were there, perhaps,
of a dust bath taken in the powdered soil of a cart track, signs of
scratched up soil not quite concealing the tarry, viscid dung?
Restive movements of the beasts in village so-and-so, and the
staring fear in their eyes? Of these and such things, nothing. For
to all that belongs to the forest, men hereabouts were strangers.
‘Have you missed any cattle—or a goat, perchance?’
‘No, Sahib.’
‘How do you know it was a tiger?’
‘By its stripes.’
‘Where was it going?’
‘Following the bed of that nullah.’
‘Let’s do the same.’
Alas, no pug marks.
‘How far did you keep it in view?’
‘As far as the Viceroy’s House.’
‘Went in, I suppose,’ I said unkindly.
This we cannot tell you true.’ I can hear their simple Hindi now.
When I got back I gave a ring to H.E.’s Military Secretary.
‘Here’s something for a sticky dinner party. You’ve a tiger
crouching behind your back wall—if he is not already having a
drink at one of those fountains in the Mughal Garden.’
We hung up laughingly, and I was not prepared for it when M.S.
rang me back in twenty minutes. It had crossed my mind that the
tiger might possibly have escaped from a cage…and yet that was
improbable too. Many rajas kept private menageries but they did
not travel around with them. Or could it have come south from
the Siwalik Hills? In the year I spent at Dehra Dun as Assistant
Superintendent I had heard of tiger crossing from the jungle into
that low range. But what could have induced it to trek —I had laid
my ruler to the wall map—another ninety miles via Saharanpur
and Muzaffarnagar to this unpromising larder? Wherever he’s
from, I thought, the poor creature must eventually provide food for
himself—or for carrion crows. And either way my people would
report. I could leave it to them.
But here now was H.E. ‘extremely intrigued’ and ‘remarking
half-jokingly’, M.S. said, that he would love to go down as the
Viceroy who bagged a tiger from his study window; and ‘impatient
of further word’ from me.
I would have to move f ast. I ordered a party of Mounted Police
to proceed there, to search the hollows and the brushwood, to
miss no scrap of natural or man-made cover. We drew a blank.
But next morning—twenty-four hours, therefore, from the alert—a
176 DELHI
villager came across the prints of paws; not far, either, from the
‘House’. I have perhaps not mentioned that my motor-car’s
number plate in Delhi was D.I.; this absolved me as Zila Sahib
from practising what I preached as Chief Magistrate, and I was
very quickly examining those ‘pugs’, and—having had my gentle
tick-off—letting the Viceroy see them for himself. They were on the
gradient down into a depression where the surface, being
sheltered from the noon sun, was not so hard baked; they were
badly defined but each compensated somewhat for the
imperfection of the others. Lord Linlithgow had a habit of
supporting his chin with his fist and turning his shoulders as well
as his head when he addressed you.
‘Smallish, I’d say. Might tape nearer 8ft. than 9ft.’
‘Tigress possibly,’ I contributed, ‘or if a male, then immature.’
But where was the kill? I could not help scanning the sky for
vultures. By the third or fourth morning—although in my
experience it takes a good deal longer than that for an
incapacitated tiger to starve —I began to think we could call it a
day. And not without a distinct sense of relief by then, for I did
not want an anti-climax. Shankar, the cartoonist of the Congress-
backed Hindustan Times, had been cruel to H.E. latterly, and
certain of my callers, old style gentlemen representing their Wards
on the Municipal Council, would emphasize that this sort of thing
was most ‘unseemly’ in Indian eyes. I can refresh my memory
because Shankar had presented me with a bound collection of his
work and I have it on my desk as I write. I did not (and do not)
consider his caricatures to have been guilty of bad taste by the
laxer standards of the West; this gifted and, when you met him,
quite charming man was doing with remarkable flair what his
employers paid him to do. Nonetheless there came back to me one
of the illustrations in the copy of Tartarin de Tarascon we had had
at home; it was of the kind a child looks at and remembers his
whole life through. But now it was not Alphonse Daudet’s
celebrated chasseur tarasconnais, girt with accoutrements, that I
saw trying conclusions with the emaciated toothless cringing waif
from a bankrupt circus nearby. It was a Viceroy plastered with
plaques, a robed Proconsul responsible for the continent
supporting our British Indian subjects in their hundreds of
millions, who was aiming point blank at a mangy little black-and-
yellow barred cat on the doorstep of his home.
It ended there. Never a second glimpse of the Tiger of New Delhi;
never a kill; never a carcase for the vultures to peck at and
disembowel; nothing. Only, I fear, a twinge of disappointment in a
Viceroy’s breast.
5.
HOME OF THE VICEROYS
The inconsequent trail has led to the doorstep of the home of the
Viceroys. Lutyens had planned the entire lay-out of India’s new
capital, as L’Enfant before him had planned his on the banks of
the Potomac, but he had not himself been responsible for
everything that had risen upon the site. The design of certain of
the central buildings—such as the two Secretariat blocks flanking
the processional way and also the Council House where the
Legislative Assembly and the Native Rulers would sit—had been
entrusted to his colleague, Sir Herbert Baker. But the Palace was
his own conception and execution, and is fit to rank as the
supreme achievement of this prince of architects. It has had its
hostile critics; but having looked at it very nearly daily for seven
consecutive years I can only conclude that these are hard to
please. To me it seems that a classic severity of outline receives its
salutary reproof in a richness of detail: that if you complain that
the effect is too Italian or too something else for the environment,
what about all those Jalis or perforated screens, those Chhajjas or
jutting masonry lips that cheat the sun, those Chhatris or
umbrellas that by tradition were held above royal heads—
architectural features surely as Indian as can be?
That I was slow to reach this judgment will be seen in a minute,
and even today I have lingering reserves about Herbert Baker’s
contribution. But when I recall the broad boulevards that link so
happily this New Delhi of ours with the Delhis that others before
us had built and abandoned, and especially the grand prospect
called Kingsway that ties the Viceroy’s House to the Purana Qila,
then all is forgiven. We have to do here, I believe, with something
that ranks among the most romantic of our imperial projects.
Throughout the decade which ended in 1930 when New Delhi was
‘opened’, three thousand or so masons would be shaping red
sandstone from the quarries of Dholpur, raising a city with the
very freestone of which Agra and Fatehpur Sikri and
Shahjahanabad had been built, a city worthy to succeed those.
And does it not ennoble the endeavour that we built what we knew
we would surrender?
‘Do you live in New Delhi or Old Delhi?’ My neighbour at table
had opened with the dead-end gambit I was learning to dread.
‘Old Delhi thank God!’ I replied. I had been looking forward to
spending the afternoon differently; at home; in Old Delhi. I ought
instead to have felt sympathy with my hosts whose social
obligations were so immeasurably more burdensome than my own.
178 DELHI
They were compelled to give two official dinner parties a week and
two official luncheons, and those dinners might easily run to
eighty or ninety covers. Such larger parties would be held in the
Banqueting Hall and preceded by an elaborate ceremony: you
would all be lined up in two rows facing each other; curtains
would at a signal be opened at the end of the room to reveal the
Viceroy and Vicereine standing side by side; the National Anthem
would be played by the band in the adjoining apartment; and
Their Excellencies then stepped forward to meet their guests. And
of course there would have been a seating plan on an easel in the
vestibule, and an A.D.C. posted alongside it whose duty it was to
ensure in advance that you could get yourself to your proper place
without a pilot.
Lutyens had restored great and historic castles in his time and
understood that the grandeur of palaces should not stop at the
portals but penetrate and pervade the interior. The Banqueting
Hall, the Throne beneath the Dome, the Ballroom with its
chandeliers and ornate ceiling—wherever you turned was evidence
of his minute attention to the décor. He had even, you felt, allowed
in imagination for those who would complete it—the colourful
army, resplendent in their turbans and skirted red coats, now
padding barefoot over these thick carpets and glistening floors or
sitting cross-legged and silent at intervals along the passages.
Today’s was a small lunch, mid-way between an official and a
family occasion. I ought to have felt honoured, not grumpy, what
was the matter with me?
‘Actually I knew you lived in Old Delhi,’ my neighbour resumed.
‘That is why they put me next to you. I want to go there.’
I looked at him more closely. His manner was somehow impish
and he was very old—by the standards we had in the Raj. The
Finance Member, now, across the table—what was he? Fifty,
fiftyone? And H.E., I suppose about that too. But my interlocutor
could give the seniors in that company fifteen or twenty years. He
had by this time torn the back off his menu card; his pencil was
poised and by the tilt of his head, he was evidently about to record
the profile of the rather formidable memsahib seated opposite.
‘Well, quite easily arranged. Name your day and hour. I’m not
like the slaves over here anchored to office from 10.30 to 4.30.’
Meanwhile he was advancing by lightning strokes with his
mischievous likeness, and I curse myself that it did not occur to me
to bespeak it there and then in exchange for a conducted tour of
Shahjahan’s City. Only then did it even occur to me to squint at
the place card of this elderly jester:
‘Sir Edwin Lutyens.’
Well, well, I thought, a model of how not to address a man who

has built a city—thanking God I didn’t live in it. Had I only known
it, I could have taken comfort in what he himself had once said of
Simla. When he lifted up his eyes unto the hills what came to him
was not help but shock. ‘If I was told the monkeys had built it,’ he
had exclaimed, ‘then one could only say: what wonderful monkeys
—they must be shot in case they do it again.’
But to return to our lunch. I found myself confessing that what
I disliked about New Delhi boiled down to its newness—which,
given time, would take care of itself. ‘Ah, but would not all kinds
of horrid accretions spoil it, though, one day?’ he mused.
‘But there is one thing more,’ I hammered away at it. ‘Nobody
has had any yesterday here or looks forward to any tomorrow
here. You can be a Delhi-wallah, you can’t be a New Delhi-wallah.’
I was being more ponderous than the occasion warranted, but
happily he cut me short.
‘You know why I’m here? No? Then I’ll tell you. To inspect the
recent vandalism committed in these halls, and vet the work of
restoration. It was outrageous what she did, that woman,
outrageous. She had no right.’ He was alluding to the previous
Vicereine who had made tasteless additions to his designs in the
State rooms.
‘But my mind is now at rest,’ he sighed contentedly. Indeed he
was already revolving in it a little dedication for a memento in the
shape of a glass goblet he intended presenting to his hostess. The
latter delicately forbore from bruiting it abroad at the time, but the
family has since released it. So perhaps I can be pardoned for
citing it:
To Her Excellency
The Marchioness Linlithgow
Whose Presence dignifies
Whose sovereign touch repairs the wounds
Inflicted by mistaken zeal upon
The Viceroy’s House at Delhi.
and this was signed
‘By him who has most reason to be grateful.’

180 DELHI
6.
MY DELHI
But let me get back, as I did every evening when I had been out,
to that Delhi I preferred to think of as mine. If I had drawn up a
balance sheet of my situation it would have read like this. On the
debit side: no camping, that would be the prime sacrifice; no
pigsticking on Sunday mornings as, say, at Agra; no ‘station’ polo
either; instead, the chairmanship of sundry committees handling
matters on which I felt absurdly ill-qualified to give sane
guidance, such as that of the Zenana Hospital for Women or that
of the Orphanage. But then my entries would have moved across
to the right, where there was much compensation for loss.
I was as free as I had been in any of my Districts for the
excellent reason that I was still in one. In a Chief Commissioner’s
Province under the Home Department of the Government of India
I was no more subject to controls than in the major Province from
which I had come. To miss this is to miss the flavour of the I.C.S.
in the Districts. Five or six miles away in the Secretariat I might
have had finicky bosses telling me what to do—worse, telling me
what not to do. I might have had on my desk that delicious
circular which reminded every superintendent of a department
that it was his duty to note on the file all the reasons for opposing
what was put forward. And, further, I relied on a picked Indian
staff: there being no provincial cadre, my officers came on loan
from elsewhere (in practice, because of the language consideration
from the Punjab or else the United Provinces) and were, as I say,
picked.
Now this Delhi I am describing was also in its turn two
territories for purposes of administration: the old and the less old:
the former being the Municipality over whose council I presided in
the Town Hall (I shall come to that lower down); and the latter,
known as the Notified Area, comprising the Civil Lines which the
British had laid out and occupied while yet a Mughal King sat on
the Delhi throne. Since I was President of the Notified Area
Committee too, I had an excuse perhaps for prefixing the
possessive ‘my’ to the Delhi which was other than the new imperial
capital. Turn left from my entrance and you went through the
Kashmir Gate to the Cutcherry; which housed my huge antiquated
court-room with its quiet gallery behind, from whose windows
stretched an uninterrupted view to the Jumna. Continue on your
way, and you would soon find yourself in front of the Red Fort on
which the whole of Shahjahan’s city, as I have described it above,
converged. Or if instead of turning left from my door posts you
went straight up the incline, you were on the Ridge in two

minutes, where once upon a time Kings had gone a-hunting. The
black partridge called there even now; I would often hear him on
my morning rides. A tantrack went along the crest, winding in and
out among the boulders and the scrub between Hindu Rao’s
House and Flagstaff Tower and other sites associated with the
Mutiny. And if I passed the emplacements, still visible, of the
batteries that had bombarded the Mughal City, I must drop on
Cavalry Lines (Delhi University today) where my own horses were
probably the last to be seen and certainly the last to be stabled.
Committee-work, I was saying, took up much time. But some of
it, at least, was sheer enjoyment: I was concerned, for instance,
with the All India Cattle Show and the annual Delhi Horse Show;
while the Hardinge Library Committee, whose President I was,
opened doors of quite another sort which must otherwise have
remained closed to me. The variety and intrinsic interest of these
calls, then, compensated for the lack of touring under canvas that
was so central a feature of normal district life. But I must come to
my principal committee which was the council of the Delhi
municipality. On taking up my office I believe I would have placed
this item without much hesitation in the left-hand column. I grew
to place it unhesitatingly over to the right. I will try to explain
why. In the field of local self-government India had for quite a
period now been ridden on a loose rein, and the big cities I had
known were administered by their own elected representatives
sitting under an elected chairman. In this particular, as in so
much besides, we managed differently in Delhi. I think I am
correct in asserting that nowhere else in all India did an I.C.S.
man combine the functions of chief magistrate and mayor. In
theory I might have to arrest, try and imprison all my councillors!
In practice my anxiety in that direction was negligible; the
occasional scuffle on the floor of the House provoked by the heat of
debate invariably ended without bodily hurt or lasting
indignation. I did indeed more than once have to ask f or a strong
detachment of mounted police to cordon off the Town Hall, but
that was to hold back organized gatherings of would-be intruders
and not to coerce the councillors. On the contrary the last thing
the latter wanted was uproar—they wanted their oratory to be
heard. The D.M.C. was a deliberative assembly; the seating in the
unusually fine chamber, its furnishings, its rules of procedure
were those of parliament anywhere, and those whom the Wards
had chosen saw and fancied themselves as parliamentarians. It
was the easier for them to do this in that their speeches were
reported not simply in the vernacular press of Upper India but in
182 DELHI
such national newspapers as The Statesman and the Hindustan

Times. This rather exaggerated spot-lighting of our proceedings,
while it unquestionably raised our tone and improved our style,
encouraged a disproportionate output of words. A member
representing a predominantly Muslim quarter was expected by his
constituents to perorate, before sitting down, on the abiding
iniquities of Hindu tyranny, a Congress-minded member felt
compelled, irrespective of the question tabled, to end with a gibe
at the Government and something even nastier about the Muslim
League. The President of course was empowered to control
extravagances of the sort, but the President was also there to take
the sense of the House…and this manifestly was how the House
wanted it. If I remember my Roman History, the Senate always
humoured the Elder Cato: whatever the motion, Carthage had to
be destroyed. Nor, to be candid, once I had got the hang of them
and slipped into the mood of them, would I have missed these
fulldress debates for worlds. The Delhi men spoke the King’s Urdu
still—and the language of the D.M.C. was Urdu (here at any rate
was something above the mêlée, the priceless patrimony of
Muslims and Hindus equally) and it was an illuminating
experience to listen, and, with the passage of the years, to
appreciate or at all events begin to appreciate how the more
accomplished among our speakers—an Asaf Ali, say, of the
Congress or a Harish Chandra of the Hindu Mahasabha (I
deliberately select two who exhibited the extremes of political and
religious fervour)—handled this instrument at their common
command. Where else but in the Delhi Town Hall would I have
had the chance?
Here, then, was compensation for the more homely garrulity of
elders at the Chawpal of some village in a rural District. And
precisely as I might on my winter tours in such a setting have
accompanied the headman ‘to look at the spot’ (that was the
invariable demand in the countryside) where something had gone
wrong or, alternatively, it was feared might go wrong, so nowadays
I would visit the particular Ward in the borough, the member at my
side as cicerone, and a pack of his closest supporters hemming us
in, all talking at once. I will not pretend that excursions of the
kind taught me much about the gullies and the bazaars of Delhi
that I might not have picked up just as quickly and less
laboriously with my own officers for tutors. But I do insist that I
enjoyed a special relationship with the city councillors
which derived from my status as Mayor. Not a few of the
councillors were openly hostile to British rule: one, the Asaf Ali
mentioned above, was actually a member of the Congress Working
Committee; another, Shankar Lal was a mill-owner worshipping

both Mammon and the Mahatma; and a third, Deshbandhu
Gupta, was editor of a virulent vernacular daily called Tej; and so
forth. Yet I was in and out of their homes on occasion, would
receive their Christmas greetings, their polite and even friendly
letters.
So all in all, I could be forgiven for telling myself that the
plusses in Delhi outweighed the minusses.
184
11
WHEN WAR CAME
To convey the part played by India in the Second World War is as

much beyond my purpose as it would be beyond my power. I shall
only paint my own small picture of the Delhi I knew during those
years.
But because a picture takes its meaning from what lies outside
its f rame let me just consider where India stood in our Empire—
for her position had been gradually altering—when war came.
Counting from the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms about which,
as I have told on an earlier page, Dr. G.P.Gooch had done his best
to enlighten me at a week-end house-party, it was now twenty
years. The Reforms had aimed at the progressive realization of
responsible government in India as an integral part of the Empire,
and the Act embodying them had provided for a review of progress
in a decade. The Nationalists let out an indignant cry at such slow
going, and to appease them the review was in the event
undertaken rather sooner. It went by the name of the Simon
Report, after the distinguished parliamentarian who presided over
the Commission which drew it up. It was acknowledged to be
masterly and before very long consigned to a dusty shelf in the
library of British political science. I remember two things
connected with that Report: being told by Malcolm Hailey, the
Governor of my province, that I ought to read it; being told a little
later, by a Hindu politician who had been in contact with Simon,
that no Indian could meet him without disliking him. Founded on
a single and accidental meeting years afterwards in England my
own impression was of handsome unsmiling features and a most
searching dark-eyed glance; of a cold man. I think I saw what my
Indian interlocutor had meant, but to be fair there is no evidence
that Simon disliked those who disliked him. Maurice Baring hit
him off in this clerihew:
Sir John Simon

Is not like Timon;
186 WHEN WAR CAME
Timon hated mankind,

Simon doesn’t mind.
I skip the details of what came next: two Round Table Conferences
assembled in London and dispersed; a specific pledge to work
towards Dominion Status for India was given; and then, a peak in
an undulating landscape, the 1935 Act was passed. This
contemplated an initial stage of practical autonomy in the
Provinces which would henceforward have cabinet ministers
responsible to elected assemblies; and, as a second and
culminating stage, a Federal Government composed of the
representatives of ‘British’ India and ‘Princely’ Indiacon jointly.
The joker in this pack was not hidden: the Governor General in
Council would retain the portfolios of Defence and External Affairs.
Churchill denounced the whole thing as ‘a gigantic quilt of
jumbled crochet work, a monstrous monument of shame built by
pygmies’. Others, and these included the Viceroy charged with its
implementation, thought it a brave attempt to lead India to
independence as a united country within the imperial fold.
Now the initial or ‘provincial’ part of the Act had been brought
into effect more or less smoothly; and a Congress which at the
first blush condemned it as a ‘Charter of Slavery’ had up on
reflexion decided to play—and gone forward to win the elections in
six or seven out of India’s eleven provinces. But the alluring
rainbow of Federation receded. The Congress Party was to boggle
at the withholding of those two key departments of Defence and
External Affairs; the Muslims were to grow from now on
increasingly apprehensive of Hindu majority rule; the Princes were
to cling to their prerogative—which was to dress by the right and
stand smartly to attention—without budging. So far as stage two of
the Act was concerned the prospect was not simply bleak, it was
blank.
To the nationalists, Defence was a portfolio which ought to be
theirs; to the man in the bazaar or village it was not a subject of
discussion, nor of thought even. But if you did ask about it, and
well you might as the spectre of war drew closer and closer, what
was the answer? In 1939 the Indian Army numbered about 150,
000 and there were besides something like 50,000 British troops
in the country. During the previous twenty years, which were ones
of mounting political fever, we had in fact been steadily reducing
the armed forces, and this was not so paradoxical as it might
appear. The Indian Army, we must remember, was successfully
insulated from all taint of politics, and to reinforce the civil arm in
policing the subcontinent its strength was adequate. Defence,
however, was another matter. Could we be happy, on the basis of

the figures just cited, in assuring our Indian subjects that they
might sleep secure in their beds each night because the Union
Jack would flutter at the masthead as usual when the sun was
up? It was not merely that this army was smaller than it had been
in 1914; this army had no armoured divisions and no up-to-date
weapons such as sub-machine guns and anti-tank guns. This
army had virtually no air support. It was not merely that we were
bluffing the Indians —we had bluffed ourselves. I am sure I was
among those who would have rounded on any doleful Jeremiah
who had dared to insinuate that there was no longer any such
thing as The Thin Red Line holding our Empire together.
But had the accent perhaps moved from red coats to blue
jackets? Not a bit of it. I believe I am correct in stating that with
twelve months or so between us and Armageddon the Admiral
commanding-in-chief responsible for India’s maritime frontiers
and for the safety of the intense shipping in and out of ports of
which Bombay and Calcutta were only the greatest, had no
minesweepers, no shore batteries, no searchlights.
Today this is all so incredible that one is shy of putting it on
paper for fear that memory has played a mischievous trick. It
seems worth while, then, quoting one item of the kind for which a
document happens to be in front of me and will speak. In July
1939 the Government of India received a request from the Chiefs
of Staff in London for the loan of India’s Anti-Aircraft Battery.
‘Loan’ is lovely in the context: the image you form is of a pair of
rather stiff ladies, grand but on their uppers, the one getting
impressive invitations but with no tiara and the other with the
tiara but no invitations. The Viceroy’s reply to the Secretary of
State was:
‘We shall, I feel certain, come under sufficiently heavy

criticism here if the emergency finds us with one A.A. Battery
only. If it finds us with none, the position would be difficult to
a degree.’
Lord Linlithgow when he entered public life had not deprived the
world of a dramatist.
But then to dramatize was not the function of a Viceroy, and
particularly of this one who had been brought so uncomfortably
close to the Indian realities of 1939. His style, admittedly, was not
to everybody’s liking. It was not to Mr Attlee’s. The Leader of the
Opposition repeatedly taxed him in the Commons with his lack of
‘imaginative insight’. One rejoinder to that accusation I heard in
188 WHEN WAR CAME
Delhi, too far from Westminster unfortunately to be audible to

Attlee, came from an unaccustomed quarter. G.D.Birla, the
millionaire industrialist and financial backer of the Congress, was
not a Delhi man, but he had a mansion in the new imperial
capital and I would come across him occasionally—and find him,
incidentally, one of the easiest of all the enemies of the British Raj
to discuss politics with. I can hear him speaking of the members of
the choir of which Attlee was at that time chorus master—and I
think he had met a good number of them in London—and saying:
‘I am glad we have Linlithgow as Viceroy rather than Attlee or any
of that Labour lot’ And of course you could hardly visualize Attlee
buying a large horse in England in preparation for his high office
and taking it to the zoo in Regent’s Park to accustom it to
elephants. Or, arrived in India, putting on a white helmet and a
black frock coat to receive the Royal Salute astride this swaggering
creature. Or, indeed, leading the way to the dinner-table at
Viceroy’s House to the rousing strains of ‘The Roast Beef of Old
England’.
In any event, whether on the target or going wide, the shots from
the Labour Opposition in the House of Commons were from
popguns. The criticism, fair or unfair, was conventional and only
amounted to this, that the Viceroy ought to be getting on with
Federation faster. Churchill’s private opposition was far more
dangerous: his wish was to stymie the whole plan. The Princes, as
I said, were supposed to accede to the Federation, and there was
he with his chin well down into his wing collar warning them
against it. ‘I should be ready,’ he growled, ‘to take on my own
shoulders the responsibility of persuading them to stand out of it’
By 1939 it was clear that the Princes had been alerted. Blame was
later laid on Linlithgow for failing to press ahead while the going
was good. But if the reasons I have set out are accepted, it never
was good. Be that as it may, there was something else now to
attend to, more urgent than Federation.
1.
SEPTEMBER 1939
In recounting that little episode of the Tiger of New Delhi in my last
chapter I mentioned that the Viceroy suffered from immobility of
the neck muscles. I omitted to explain that this disability was the
legacy of polio in boyhood. It was of course a gift to Shankar the
cartoonist, and none was more ready to laugh at the result than
the victim. Portrayed once with two outsize chins, Lord Linlithgow
protested in a personal message to the artist that he was wrong:
he had three, he said, not two. As I turn the pages of the collection
of cartoons which is at my elbow at this minute, I think I know
which one was the cause of the merriment. It was all good-
humoured; but it was less than fair to treat, as did too many, this
muscular inflexibility as the outward and visible sign of a
corresponding moral attribute. His mind could, on the contrary,
be flexible—immeasurably more so, for instance, than that of his
principal military adviser, Cassels. The Commander-in-Chief was
a cavalry general brought up to scan the North-West Frontier for
Russians, and unwilling to turn about and face South-East from
where with remarkable prescience Linlithgow foresaw the attack
on India would be delivered. It was the experts who were
unbending. All he could do as Viceroy was to hang on to those
eight A.A. guns.
You would suppose therefore that by the time September came
he stood in little need of lessons from anybody concerning the
realities of 1939. This was not however the view of the Editor of
the English-owned Statesman, a troublesome character named
Moore, who fustigating him for carrying out the social programme
as though nothing had gone wrong, wrote of ‘Lord Linlithgow’s
laboured continuance of apparently unrelished opulences’. I think
the immediate issue was a Garden Party at the fag-end of the
Simla season which most people had rashly assumed would be
automatically ‘off’, only to be sharply set right in the matter. To
have your presence courteously requested in copperplate on stiff
goldcrested paper was to be summoned. Denys Kilburn could
claim to speak with some authority on the point, and since his
experience forms part of the life we led I will digress to relate it.
Finding such invitations irksome, he had begun to ignore them;
and was reprimanded one fine day for his absence. His spies
informed him how the check was kept: guests had to bring their
cards and surrender them to an A.D.C. at the entrance who would
fling them into an urn, from which they would be retrieved
afterwards and compared with the list of those issued. Having in
his capacity as chief of police unrivalled influence on the viceregal
ground floor, Denys caused the vase to be shifted slightly nearer a
window; through which in future his orderly would be instructed
to toss the necessary evidence of attendance into the receptacle.
But to resume. We might be, we were, at war; but grey toppers
and picture hats were de rigueur on that September afternoon.
And as Christmas approached, thoughts turned to the splendour
of the customary ceremonial at the races in Calcutta. The
Bodyguard entrained at Delhi as usual, a string of horse-boxes
hitched to the ‘Special’. As usual the Viceroy and Vicereine in a
190 WHEN WAR CAME
pageant more colourful than Royal Ascot itself drove in the State
landau behind the lancers resplendent in their scarlet and gold
down the course to the stands, bowing in response to the
acclamations of a crowd habituated as long as they and their
parents and their grandparents could remember to this annual
tamasha. The decision had not been lightly taken nor would it be
lightly rescinded. Here is His Excellency defending it:
I think there is probably a good deal of importance in

retaining even in times of stress such as these a sufficient
degree of public appearance to indicate that we have not
retired into our shell and sunk into the depths of depression.
The words, as always with him, were pedestrian, the heart from
which they were spoken, as always with him, was valiant. Dictated
by the place, which was India, and the time, which was the
historic winter of 1939/40, his attitude was psychologically sound
—or so it seems to me. He was putting a brave face on things. To
unroll the Broad Red Carpet just as before, implied that the Thin
Red Line was holding as it used to do. I can well recall Haji Rashid
Ahmad, the elected Vice-President of the Delhi Municipal Council,
coming to me at the Town Hall with half-a-dozen of the City
Fathers, Hindu and Muslim and including one Congressman in
the regulation homespun Khaddar, to applaud ‘your’
determination to carry on ‘regardless’. They were selfishly
interested, I do not deny: the first big social function of the cold
weather was in the offing and they were on the invitation list and
saw themselves setting out from their respective city wards for the
Viceroy’s Palace with suitable publicity. I concede, too, that a
couple of years later when confidence in our capacity to prevail
over our enemies had been shaken, certain of those stalwart
burgesses of Delhi were pondering Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s
thrust that the war would not be won by those who changed into
dinner jackets every evening. But that is to anticipate. India,
though exposed to the blast, was not yet feeling it. Without the least
sense of unfitness therefore, did I join the bright throng that
balanced tea-cups and manipulated its icecreams in the Mughal
Garden at the back of the Viceroy’s House at that first wartime
party in New Delhi.
If any of us had qualms, it was on a different score. On 3rd
September when the Viceroy proclaimed India to be at war with
Germany none of her sons had been taken into consultation in
advance. Nor, constitutionally, was there need to confer with a
soul. But some things are desirable without being necessary; and
since we had, as I said earlier, promised India her Dominion

status, here, surely, was a chance to treat her just for an hour
and just in this one respect as though she enjoyed it already:
striking, as it were, a note of a chord about to follow. At that stage
there would not have been a single leader averse from offering his
party’s support of England against the Nazis. But the way we had
done it, the war was our war, not India’s. Even as it was, we all but
had everyone with us. In an emotional interview with the Viceroy,
the very next day, or perhaps it was on the 5th, Gandhi dwelt on
the war, regarding it, he said, with an English heart. As he
conjured up Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament in
charred smoking ruins, he broke down and wept. But then came
the weighing up of the pros and cons: after a few weeks’ hesitation
the Congress ministries resigned. It meant that their fight, instead
of being against our enemies, would be against our rule.
However let us not be too mealy-mouthed about this. Materially
it would not have made a pennyworth of difference to the war
effort if the Congress, India’s governing class on probation, had
decided to support it. Materially I dare say it would, on the
contrary, have hampered us. When political experiment is in the
air, you accept a lower standard of efficiency; but now we could
return to the worship of the gods we had forsaken. There was
indeed to be a blot on our escutcheon during the war years. I
mean the appalling Bengal Famine of the winter 1942/43. You
could not get away from it, this was due to administrative failure
not crop failure. But wait, was it not inescapably significant that it
occurred precisely in one of the two or three provinces—the so-
called nonCongress provinces—where ministers had contrived a
curious pattern of give-and-take alliances between competing
groups in order to adhere to office and the enjoyment of the
patronage that went with power? Upon the whole, those years
witnessed the last spectacular performance of the pure
bureaucracy in which there was no dividing line between policy
and administration; of a machine driven by some hundreds of
Englishmen and serviced by a million or so Indians whose loyalty
no words of mine are fit to describe; a performance in which the
teeming multitude acquiesced, unmoved by the alarms and
excursions of war but haunted by the abiding dread of a shortage
of the simple necessities of their lives; of grain, of cloth, of
kerosene, of sugar. By the time it took its curtain and bowed itself
out, this bureaucracy had raised the biggest non-conscript army
the world had ever seen, and rendered a mediaeval India self-
supporting in an impressive gamut of supplies that ranged from
192 WHEN WAR CAME
precision tools to floating docks; rendered a mediaeval India that

much better equipped to face her future as an independent State.
2.
MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS
The first thought that occurred to me, as to many others in the
Service, was to get into uniform, and since lucidity deserts one at
such crises it appeared to me that my claims were exceptional
enough to override the general rule that none of the I.C.S. would
be allowed to join up. I had no wife, my parents were not living, I
was (if only by a few weeks) nearer thirty than forty and for the
past ten years had spent most of my waking hours observing, and
often enough marvelling at, the behaviour of Jats, Rajputs,
Punjabi Musulmans and, thanks to my time in the Doon, the men
from the hills, martial races all. I had shot at Bisley in my teens,
had even, armed with sabre and lance, a trooper in the cavalry
unit of the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, trotted
alongside the 2nd Life Guards on manoeuvres at Lulworth Cove. I
had forgotten that this last testimonial might not carry great
weight: the 19th Lancers, the only regiment of the Indian Army
still mounted, had already been warned that their horses would
shortly be taken from them. But wait for my trump card:
languages. I was held to have both Urdu and Hindi, and could
aspire to interpret in these; and in French into the bargain if need
be. I saw myself therefore in well pressed khaki, sporting if not red
tabs then at least green ones on my lapels. At Whitehall had I
signed the Covenant, to Whitehall would I address my plea for
discharge. The reply, which I have in a tin box somewhere, was, in
the graphic expression of Upper India, ‘tooth-breaking’: I was to
mind my own business, a directive which my immediate controlling
authority had without doubt made perfectly clear to me already.
But one of us there was who would not take no for an answer:
or rather, knowing what the answer would be, did not ask. He had
been a protégé of mine on his first arrival in the country, having
been sent to me at Agra in 1937 for a spell of training. He was
very nearly the last of a breed, therefore. I had found him a young
man of endearing qualities with a love of argument which he
would carry to the length where you could only say: ‘Oh! Ian, I
give up.’ His surname was Bowman, he was a Scot but his soft
voice had— peculiarly noticeable this, in India—a transatlantic
cadence. I had not been his superior many days before I
discovered where he had acquired his highly developed technique
of controversy—and his accent. His father had occupied the Chair
of Moral Philosophy at one of the Canadian universities, I think

Toronto, and his own upbringing had been there. Well, then, when
war came I was not surprised to be treated as a confidant. He was
going to try the Admiral in Bombay, as I gathered, there being a
decent chance of his acceptance by the Indian Navy. I must have
misunderstood, for what Ian does, taking a few days casual leave,
is to travel third class to Pondicherry and join the French Foreign
Legion. Hauled back in the nick of time, it was to me that he was
brought en route for Simla, there to be judged. The destination
suggests that we were in the summer of 1940 by then. Anyhow,
my instructions were to take him off the train at Delhi—trains
were beginning to run slow and late in India as in England by that
date—and place him on another, if not the same day then the
next, for Kalka where the line stopped at the foothills. I still
remember walking impatiently up and down the platform looking
along the stretch of metals every now and again with crinkled
eyes. At last! Ian got out with a plain clothes man on either side of
him, and I was glad for the sake of the Raj that I was the sole
witness to the surely unprecedented spectacle of an I.C.S.
magistrate in custody. To embarrass the custodians as little as
possible, Bowman had chatted about everything except his own
predicament during the interminable sleepless hours of the
journey ‘up country’; and they supposed him, as I learned on
taking one of them aside, to be what his blond colouring and fresh
complexion might well suggest, a German youth; or if not an enemy
alien then a Tommy on the run from his regiment. The police
officers were to go off and get some rest, since another wakeful
night was ahead of them, and report to me at 8p.m. At the lunch
table we spent a pleasant hour talking deliberate banalities, and
then I got up to go. ‘I’ll see you at tea,’ I said, adding, without
meaning it seriously, ‘promise not to do a bunk.’ ‘I cannot promise,’
replied Ian in that soft voice, looking at me steadily. I called out to
my stenographer and told him to cancel my engagement. I saw it
was 2p.m. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘for six hours, Ian, I just sit here and
twiddle my thumbs while you tire the sun with talking and drive
him down the sky.’
When asked later on, as I knew I would be, for an opinion, I
recommended his release before he caused us real trouble. He
would disobey the rules from now on, sulk, do no work. The
unsatisfactory undergraduate (which he rather resembled) can be
sent down by his college: with Ian you had no sanction—he ached
to be sent down. Authority relented, and off he went to the war
and fought the Japanese. When peace came he sought me out,
neither Soldier nor Civilian now, and we were able to disagree
194 WHEN WAR CAME
thoroughly and enjoyably about things in general in a final session

before our ways separated for ever.
There was no governing class in India—the I.C.S. monopolized
the role of such a class. But had we perhaps encouraged the
emergence at least of army families up and down the provinces; of
families, that is, whose sons could in the normal course look
forward to a military career? No, we had not. Of the ‘martial races’
of India we never stopped talking, but these only guaranteed the
supply of Sepoys, as everybody knows. The mistake was to our
discredit and, as we had begun to realize rather tardily, to our
grave disadvantage. We sought to rectify it by founding the Indian
Military Academy at Dehra Dun, but that was not till 1932. When
war broke out there were about 1,000 Indian Officers in the Army,
not more, and the task suddenly presented itself of increasing this
number to the extent demanded by land forces likely to be
multiplied by— who could guess by how many? The need was so
immediate that young men from the Dominions were being
commissioned, and I need not say how galling that was to the
overwhelmingly large section of upper middle-class society which
had studiously kept aloof from political agitation. But soon
Emergency Commission Selection Boards were set up in each
Province. In the case of Delhi the members were: a former Vice-
Chancellor of Delhi University; the Chief of Police; a representative
of General Headquarters; and myself as Chairman. And I had
powers to co-opt either a Hindu or a Muslim gentleman at my
discretion. Formal directions, expressed in brisk military
phraseology, informed us how, when and where to submit the
names of selected candidates; the qualities demanded and their
relative grading being, if I remember, left to us. We drew up a
standard interrogatory of our own, but members were free to
depart from it. Above all things we bore in mind that the average
young man in front of us would have been born to middle-class
parents in that part of Upper India, if not in Delhi itself, and be a
stranger to many of the attitudes taken for granted in the West.
All went smoothly for a whole year and then we had wished on us
an Army Psychologist. This person upset our apple cart, but we
endured him for a while. Until at one sitting he put the candidate,
an obviously promising type, the question ‘Are you married?’: and
the youth was. He then asked ‘Are you happily married?’ I could
stand it no longer and barked ‘Question overruled!’ And then to
Denys ‘Would you put another, please.’ Denys asked, What would
you do if you saw a tiger walk in through one of those doors?’ ‘Run
out quick through the other,’ the answer came pat. Everybody
except the peeved Psychologist applauded. Bravo, Shabash! And I
wrote against the lad’s name ‘Selected.’ After this I received an

incorrectly addressed letter from H.Q. intimating that the Army
Psychologist, an Officer acquainted with methods of selection
whose suitability was beyond dispute, had reported unfavourably
on my Board’s way of doing things. Would I please in future be
guided by the advice of the specialist. All my members (except the
Headquarters representative who, though not concealing his
disgust, was junior to the signatory of the rocket) handed in their
resignations. Before my messenger could arrive at New Delhi to
deliver these, I had phoned to GHQ to someone I knew there saying
my Board would of course consent to serve on if the thorn were
removed from its flesh. For the next two sessions we got along
without psychology; and thereafter were given somebody nice and
amenable.
By the sort of procedure I have, I hope not too facetiously,
described, material was supplied for the making of some 15,000
Officers by the end of the war on top of the 1,000 we counted at
its outbreak. And in the same interval, this seems the place to
repeat it, the Indian Army which these young men officered
was expanded from well under 200,000 to about 2½ million; the
largest army, as I have already insisted, of which history has
record to be raised without conscription. Stung by this
achievement on our part, a Congress leader who was a true Anglo-
Indian according to my use of that term parodied the old Music
Hall song thus: ‘We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do, We’ve
got the ships and tumpty tum (I forget what he filled it out with)
we’ve got the mild Hindoo.’
Recruits in India of course came almost exclusively from the
villages, and since our rural population was of no great size
Delhi’s contribution was correspondingly small; albeit the quality,
typical of a Jat community like ours, was high. My Revenue
Assistant (my lieutenant, that is, for rural affairs, ‘Revenue’ as we
know, pertaining in India to land) assured our liaison with the full-
time recruiting officers, and I seldom came into it at all.
My only concern, a bit distant maybe, with recruitment came
about otherwise. Broadcasting was something very novel in those
days and the transmitting station in the capital itself, operated by
the government-organized All India Radio, was hardly three years
old when war broke out. However, in those three years an
important step had been taken. We were well situated for
experiment: we had the trained staff which most Provinces lacked
and the trial area we commanded was both compact and under
our noses. We could place community receivers at selected centres
and dash out with ease to observe how much of the given fare the
196 WHEN WAR CAME
villager was willing to stomach. Rustic audiences naturally had no

appetite for any but the lightest, most digestible food. We found
three minutes or five at the very most enough for an item, and
learned to alternate the grave with the gay: three minutes of
hygiene earned five of music. Delhi Province had in consequence
been chosen for an intensive course of rural lectures in the winter
of 1938–9. On to this ready-made scheme we now grafted regular
pep-talks on the war and occasional recruitment appeals; all of
which incidentally had a considerably wider reach than my own
jurisdiction, extending to such of the Punjab villages and those of
the U.P. as had been furnished with receiving sets by their
respective Rural Development departments. In the composition of
these programmes I had a share; and sometimes also in their
delivery.
I was not entirely a beginner in this second regard for I had
broadcast to an urban audience already. It had started with a
series entitled ‘Englishman Speaks’ and I have cause to remember
my first talk. The broadcasting house was a converted upper-
middleclass residence in Rajpur Road. I had read the script aloud
twice to my Chief Reader, and half-an-hour before the ordeal had
walked back and forth along the Ridge mouthing it with emphatic
movements of jaws and lips. For what reason I cannot think, the
room into which I was shown by the courteous Madrasi station-
director was pitch dark except for a spotlight that fell on a table. It
was also stifling and an electric fan whirred overhead. My chair, it
was explained—we were all rather naïve in those distant days—
was set square with a red bulb on the wall facing me: when the
light went on I was to begin, preferably without clearing my
throat; and when it went out I would be off the air. I heard the
door close behind me and was now alone. I laid my watch on the
table and waited. Duly the red light glowed and I got off to a decent
start. And then the light flickered and vanished. However, it came
back presently and I started all over again, hoping I was doing the
right thing. Worse was in store. My careful rehearsals had not
been under a ceiling fan and now my flimsies—I suppose my hand
was momentarily off them—were lifted from the table and blown
across the room. I had to get down on all fours to retrieve them. At
least they were stapled together and I managed to re-find my
place.
To our normal activities strange accretions were added as the
years followed on: A.R.P.; Civil Defence; the National War Front,
which was an organization of volunteers created to combat
defeatism; and Rationing. If we sometimes tackled these with less
than perfect efficiency, it should be chalked up in our favour that
we invariably found ourselves with less than the requisite amount

of straw for the making of our bricks. It would take too long to
enter into details, and indeed I doubt if I could remember them;
but salient incidents there are that still surface easily in my mind.
I see for instance my City Fathers in their tin hats and important
armbands, each in command of a contingent from his Ward, lining
up on parade in the grilling heat of high summer. We have been, if
the expression may be applied to, for the most part, ponderous
figures, on the tips of our toes this particular day.
Understandably, for the florid somewhat heavily built man in a
bush shirt walking at my side down the line is none other than
the brother of the KingEmperor. Then there were those three
splendid fire-engines we received at last from home, and the
arrival, greeted with relief, of three N.F.S. officers to lick into
shape our hastily expanded fire fighting units. It comes back to
me, too, that the Delhi firm of Grant Govan Bros., importers and
exporters, had generously placed their private four-seater
aeroplane at my disposal, and I can remember each time a Black
Out practice was announced I would fly overhead, piloted by one
of the said brothers, with Denys Kilburn and a European sergeant
behind us, to judge of its effectiveness.
But I am distorting the picture if I have conveyed that any of
this was central. Central remained the things upon which, war or
no war, the well-being of a District under the British Raj
depended, and I do not apologize for repeating myself: public
order, a swift justice, the prompt payment of taxes reasonably
assessed, the accurate maintenance of the land records to the end
that each man might be secure in the enjoyment of what was his.
Everywhere these were the dominating concern of the Magistrate
and Collector, and inasmuch as the Delhi I am describing was a
District they were mine. So the Delhi memories that cling are not
really to do with the war. Or if with the war, with the endemic
war.
There was that ‘between the cow and the pig’. It was no flippant
Britisher but an Indian elder statesman, the liberal leader Sir Tej
Bahadur Sapru, my genial guru of Allahabad days, who coined the
phrase. In Delhi as in every large city you had sporadic attacks of
communal violence; and you had running sores. One of the latter
was in the Chandni Chowk itself. A miniature enclosure it was,
where the weary wayfarer might relax on the flagstones beneath
an overarching tree. The Muslims treated the site as a mosque,
the Hindus as an ancient temple; but neither community had
seemingly made any effort to substantiate its claim in a court of
law. In the municipal books, and on the town maps, the spot was
198 WHEN WAR CAME
recorded now as ‘mandir’ which is temple, now as ‘masjid’ or

mosque; presumably in keeping with the persuasion of the clerk
concerned. There seemed a strong probability that it was neither.
Anyhow, a fakir would squat there every so often and be ejected
by outraged Hindus, a sadhu would replace him and fare no better
—and so it would go on. The individuals were hardly ever genuine
holy men, they were mostly scamps who were willing to risk what
was coming to them for the sake of instant perquisites in the shape
of alms. Today it was evidently the turn of the Muslim—you could
tell that as you walked along the Chowk by the ‘burqas’, the tent-
like garment with eye slits, worn by a proportion of those
queueing up to make their reverences to the ‘Saint’, and by the red
fez here and there; as also by the contrasting attire, trailing dhotis
perhaps, of the sullen spectators. We had put police on to regulate
the stream of traffic and a posse of constables was posted at the
entrance to the site. It had continued like this for about a week
when I noticed that the worshippers issuing from the Fatehpuri
Mosque at the end of the Chowk after prayers were tending to hang
about instead of dispersing normally; and that the Hindu by-
standers were of increasingly unsavoury appearance. The thing
was building up, not a doubt of it. I decided to kidnap the ‘Saint’.
But where to dump him? In Mirzapur, in Agra even, it would have
been simple, but in the whole of Delhi District there was not a
remote corner anywhere. However, my police inspectors were
Punjabis and knew the very place that would do; two of them
would pick him up—he was habitually in a drugged stupor by the
small hours—and whisk him away to the secret destination. A
little matter of etiquette however: my simple coup postulated the
acquiescence of another authority. A telephone call to Simla (it
was summer and they were all up there) would set that right.
Alas, it complicated everything. The message was relayed to the
Home Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, a finical man to
whom it appeared, or so I infer, that the Magistrate of Delhi was
about to commit an offence under section 365 of the Indian Penal
Code: to wit, kidnapping, punishable with imprisonment for a term
which may extend to seven years. I was to do no such thing, he
said. I had nobody but myself to blame. I ought to have known by
this time that in your own District you keep your counsels to
yourself. It is the first rule and I had broken it. To the chagrin of
my fellow conspirators I called the operation off: and stood aside
waiting, cursing myself at intervals out loud. Until a Hindu tough
armed with a knife and disguised in a Muslim woman’s burqa
stabbed the ‘Saint’. Enough time to count up to a hundred; and
there were corpses both in the Chandni Chowk and the adjacent
alleys, spread-eagled or hunched on the roadway, face downwards

or staring with sightless eyes into the summer sky. Some of the
dead had been professional bazaar bullies; but some had been
about their lawful occasions, and as I went among their bodies the
thought weighed on me that one at least of these Delhi-walas at
some time or other, perhaps at my Cutcherry at Kashmir Gate or
else here in the street, had very likely addressed me as his
‘Protector’.
Or, it might be, the war was against the elements. There were the
annual vagaries of the monsoon to battle with; this year it would
be feeble and the crops would be in jeopardy throughout a
country side scraping a subsistence from the soil; another year it
would be abundant, and our riverain villages would be inundated
and perhaps washed away. I am thinking of one year of that
second sort and of one day in that year. To warn people of the
approaching danger, we have had the mounted police careering up
and down the Jumna banks upstream from the railway viaduct
where the river is without flats and the cultivated fields reach
down almost to the water’s edge. We have assembled all the
country craft we can lay hold of, mustered all the boatmen, and
we have ropes dangling from the girders of the bridge with bamboo
poles fastened horizontally between them. I have one modest motor
boat that is powerless to chug against the swollen, eddying current.
I shall not describe the excitement and the exhaustion of those
vividly remembered hours. The point I want to make here is that
the War, the other war, was far from our minds at such moments.
3.
TAKING TIME OFF
We had to shoulder the burden of much extra work, it will have
been seen, and any prospect one might have had of home leave
was shelved sine die in that September of 1939. It would be close
on nine years before I caught sight of the cliffs of Dover again; but
free of family ties I was spared the anguish of most of my brother
officers. Many had wives in England who could not rejoin them,
many had wives in India who could not return home. To many
their children seemed in the wrong place; if in England they were
lost to their parents for an indefinite future, if in India how could
arrangements be made for their education through the critical
years ahead? Recreation was vital, more vital now than in peace.
For exercise most of us played tennis, and the standard indoor
pastime was bridge. Now at tennis I was a duffer who in all his
Indian career never found a bad enough player to give him a
200 WHEN WAR CAME
tolerable game. However, of physical exercise a District Officer

always had plenty. As to bridge I detested it. I had leisure
therefore to devote to something begun at Allahabad and pursued
at Agra: namely the plodding approach to the Mughal poets of the
eighteenth century, whose names are among the most honoured
on the bead-roll of Urdu literature. Shortly before war broke out I
had been gratified, but also alarmed, by an invitation to
contribute to a literary magazine published quarterly in Delhi
called Adeeb. In the several articles I wrote I drew heavily, I must
frankly acknowledge, on the Honorary Secretary of the Hardinge
Library both for ideas and their expression; and when my first
draft was completed and done out in the office on an Urdu-script
typewriter, I would always submit it to him for a last minute
‘vetting’ before it was faired. Not long afterwards I found myself
asked to be President of the Reception Committee of a Mushaira
and deliver the opening address. A mushaira in the golden age of
the Mughals had been a gathering at the house of some noble to
enable poets to recite their own lines. Since the noble was almost
by assumption a poet of sorts himself, these assemblies brought
professionals and amateurs together rather in the manner of the
literary salons and the musical evenings that graced the world of
wealth and fashion in the capitals of contemporary Europe. Nor
had the modern mushaira departed markedly from tradition: the
host might not be so noble nowadays, the poet not so highly
esteemed in society, the company not so limited in size, not so
select. But otherwise the conventions were jealously guarded.
That the gathering now announced had a reception committee and
was billed to take place in the Delhi Town Hall, merely meant that
the occasion was being stepped up the ladder from the rung of the
soirée to that of a publicly advertised event.
My committee drew up an invitation-list of poets and an
invitation-list of guests; and on top of this the City Fathers were
given tickets to distribute to suitable residents in the borough.
And we asked Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru—the liberal leader was noted
for his knowledge and love of the Urdu classics—to come up from
Allahabad and act as Chairman. It did not look as though there
would be an empty seat in the hall.
During the next five or six weeks every hour I could snatch from
work went into the preparation of that address. The content did
not bother me. I could begin by welcoming the bards, many of
whom would have come from distances; from Lucknow and the
United Provinces generally, from the Punjab, from a Native State
or two. I could then extol their language as the undivided
patrimony of Muslims and Hindus alike, and, an Englishman,
remind them that what happened to the older Standing Speech (so
it was termed) of Northern India when the Muslim conquerors
descended on Lahore and then, in a second wave, on Delhi was
happening to our own island’s language at that very juncture—for
the date as near as matters was 1066. Their resultant idiom, I
would insist, was, like our own, of peculiar vigour because able to
ring the changes on the two component elements in its make-up.
Having said this, I would simply illustrate with some pieces that
everyone would know and, I could be sure, applaud. But I was far
from confident of my ability to put it across. So I got my script
copied by a calligraphist in very black ink on sheets of ultra-stiff
paper and went through it time and again until I had it practically
by heart. I delivered it, they applauded. The press, including the
pro-Congress Tej was flattering and the next number of Adeeb
printed the speech in full. My audience, I concluded, had
obviously regarded my performance much as Dr Johnson regarded
a woman’s preaching: that is, like a dog walking on his hinder
legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at
all. I was therefore understandably astonished to be pressed by
the organizers to repeat my ‘act’ in the following year. I consented
but on the firm condition that this should not go on.
On my desk while I write this next paragraph lies the memento
of another extra-curriculum exercise in the Town Hall. It is a
volume of verse by Sarojini Naidu entitled ‘Scented Dust’. The war
was probably not yet out of its phoney phase when Mrs Naidu
called on me to assist in arranging a public meeting of Delhi
women whom she proposed to lecture on woman’s rightful place—
the exact words escape me—in India’s life today and tomorrow;
something like that anyhow. A theme as trite as could be at the
present, it was bold forty years back, and to respectable sections
of Delhi society undeniably disturbing. Sarojini Devi had quite
rightly guessed that my municipal councillors would be
unenthusiastic. Had I as their President, she wondered, so much
as set eyes on the wife of any one of them at our not infrequent
social reunions? And then the Secretary, Khan Bahadur Mumtaz
Hasan Qizilbash, such a perfect gentleman, was a conservative
Shi’a who believed there was only one place for a woman and that
was out of sight. So this very upper-class, now elderly but
extraordinarily energetic lady, bubbling with vivacity and visibly
squirming with humour, rattled on with a funny phrase for
everything and a nickname for everybody. Gandhi had just come
up to Delhi from Wardha or somewhere to see the Viceroy, and the
entourage—she was in it herself— had hired a whole third-class
coach for him. It costs a fortune to keep that old man in poverty,
202 WHEN WAR CAME
was her quip. The Mahatma was Mickey Mouse, and Lord
Linlithgow was I wish I could remember what.
But I had better introduce her. This Girton girl, President of
the Indian National Congress when I was still an undergraduate,
and Delegate to the Round Table Conference at London in 1931,
had entered the public domain after youthful excitements and
successes in the field of letters. She had attracted notice and been
‘taken up’. She had brought out a collection of poems called ‘The
Golden Threshold’ with a preface by Arthur Symons and another,
no less enchanting, called ‘The Bird of Time’ with an equally
apposite preface by Edmund Gosse; and—after a wide gap filled by
politics—this book I have mentioned as being my private souvenir
of the visit she paid me in Delhi. She was a model Anglo-Indian in
the sense I employ this term throughout my pages, and she takes
her place with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, and
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur in the trio—it was hardly more—of women
who shone brightly in the political firmament. All three leaned
heavily on the privilege to which they had been born, all three
captivated you—or that was my experience—by their ways, all
three were a perpetual nuisance to an imperial power which was
easy-going and upon the whole tolerant of their activities. If all
three were enemies of our rule, could we exactly blame them? If
all three were Anglicized to a degree which set them at a palpable
distance from all but a small fraction of their sisters, whose fault
was that but ours?
Whether under a different star Sarojini Devi, poetess, would
have developed her easy gift into a real talent nobody knows. To
remind myself of that gift I am turning some of her pages. Hear
and judge this for example:
What longer need hath she of loveliness,

Whom Death has parted from her lord’s caress?
Of glimmering robes like rainbow-tangled mist,
Of gleaming glass or jewels on her wrist,
Blossoms or fillet-pearls to deck her head,
Or jasmine garlands to adorn her bed?
Evidently she knew how to strike the authentic lyrical note, but no
less evidently time was not on her side: the fashion in English
poetry which allotted music a more honourable place than
meaning was on the way out when she began. However, to discuss
this is idle: she had decided that writing poetry was a waste of
energy when there was something more exciting to be done.
I roped in the doctor in charge of the Zenana Hospital who was a

Madrasi lady; a social welfare worker, a Miss Sorabji, who was
a Parsee; and Mrs Chaterjee wife of Dr. Chaterjee of the University,
who was of a family of Bengali Christians. As will be seen, Delhi’s
own daughters were beyond the reach of my lasso, being hardly in
the open at that time. Ah! one conspicuous exception there was,
Mrs Asaf Ali, Hindu wife of the well-known Muslim Congressman
who was beside her husband in the amphitheatre, albeit less
constant outside it, caustic tongues would add. Sarojini Devi had
not approached her, so I formed my own conclusion. Over the
teacups, then, I explained that the staff would attend to the seating
but the rest I must leave in their own hands: in the Town Hall we
had no female employees on the pay-roll. The lady doctor said she
would bring two or three of her nurses along to help, and Mrs
Chaterjee undertook to persuade some women from her church to
act as ushers.
‘But, my dear young man, won’t you be there to present me to
the audience?’ Mrs Naidu asked. I agreed, but on the cowardly
stipulation that I should slink off immediately afterwards.
When the day came the hall filled punctually and quietly. About
half those assembled were enveloped in voluminous burqas; even
among the Hindu element the majority were clearly from behind
the purdah. But I noticed with relief that there were at least a
score of chairs on the platform, which indicated that my three
helpers had co-operated loyally. I introduced the speaker with a
consciously anodyne allusion to the role she had played on the
stage of a ‘progressive India’, and motioned her forward. There
was no clapping, but that was out of modesty.
She began—in English.
‘Urdu! Urdu!’ shouted one after another of the hitherto
tonguetied congregation.
I hear her lame reply even now, lame and somehow so out of
character in a woman of her sparkle and wit.
‘Not in Urdu, Urdu m .’ Three words in the vernacular. And
then she looked round helplessly, and again it was out of
character. Anyhow, there was help in that semi-circle behind her;
after a bit of whispering two ladies stepped to the front—an
interpreter and a co-interpreter. The talk got to its feet again and
advanced—but with a disastrous limp! Was the contretemps due
to my neglect? I knew that Mrs Naidu was of Bengali extraction
but she had resided for years, I was almost sure, in Hyderabad
where her husband had been in the Nizam’s service, and Urdu
was the language there. And then there was this bigger Why. Why,
having twitted the City Fathers with their custom-ridden mentality
204 WHEN WAR CAME
did she imagine she could get away with English in her discourse
to these house-wives whose days revolved within the capsule of
joint-family or seraglio?
This incident set me wondering why the Congress leadership,
having ignored the problem of a national language, was even now
so reluctant to come to grips with it. India’s society, everybody
knew it, was multilingual, but by the grace and favour of history
one language there was which was neither regional nor the
deposit of a religious community—and this was Urdu. Gandhi
himself had declared as much in one of his published essays. You
would suppose therefore that men and women passionately
concerned to lay the foundations of the new edifice of India would
have jumped for joy at the thought of the ready-mixed cement
that was to hand. Instead, they were treating it like an
inconvenient heap of rubble that needed clearing. Myself I do not
doubt that a certain blame attaches in this to the exclusive ‘Anglo-
Indian’ milieu—the Nehrus, Sarojini Naidus, a few others—which
called the tune. But had not the Congress, it will be asked, latterly
and with considerable noise adopted Hindustani as its language
for the conduct of business? And was that not tantamount to
naming it the language of Independent India? Admitted. The
leaders had indeed adopted Hindustani (a sort of ‘Basic’, being the
ground shared by Urdu and Hindi at the more unsophisticated
levels of expression), but adopted it with duplicity. This was
patent from an escape clause in the relevant Article of the Party’s
Constitution providing for the use of English ‘whenever permitted’;
which was another way of saying ‘always’.
Was I then deploring the high store the Indian National
Congress leaders set by the English language? On the contrary.
Like every Indo-British official of my time I believed this to be
among the precious gifts we had made to India. But one there was
yet richer—Unity. This was a sacred value in the service of which
nothing, nothing must be left untried. However, let me say my
piece out.
Around then I was introduced to Dr Zakir Husain, and I
remember what this Muslim Congressman, an outstanding
educationist close to the counsels of the High Command who
would in the sequel become world known as President of the
Indian Union, told me. It was Gandhi who, having started off well
(he meant, of course, in his just appreciation of Urdu’s unique
worth) had presently ‘queered the pitch’ for this language that was
so healing and so binding in its influence, by accepting the
chairmanship of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, a communal
organization if ever there was one, Hindu to a man in its
membership and publicly pledged to the sanskritization of the

language. What, I have since wondered, would have ensued if
Gandhi had behaved logically instead of paradoxically? What if
(say, after the 1935 Act and anyhow before the Congress ministers
took office in 1937) he had pronounced Urdu, the non-regional
and non-communal Urdu, to be the All-India language? It would
have brought instant relief to the anxiety of the great Muslim
minority, have been proof of the Congress’s respect for Muslim
sentiment, a guarantee of the will to preserve intact the vast area
of common culture that history had hallowed. It would have
anticipated many of the arguments of those Muslims who from
1940 onwards began to think in terms of a divided India. Would
it, would it even have snatched the Indian people back, just in
time, from the precipice of Partition?…But all this is now such stuff
as dreams are made on.
4.
TAKING MORE TIME OFF
‘A Mr Brown, Sir, wants to see you,’ said the City Magistrate. In the
paradisial Bahraich there had been no Mr Browns; indeed not a
single Englishman in all the 2,654 square miles of my
jurisdiction. Even in Agra the ‘Sahibs’ were not thickly represented
and the chances were I would have known who Mr Brown was in
advance. I would have come across him at the Club, if not within
the still more tightly closed circumference of our Tent Club. Does
anyone nowadays remember what a Tent Club was? Its members
were the pig-sticking set. In the season we would go out every
Saturday evening, sleep under the stars, or in some grove, with our
hunters tethered in a line at the foot of our row of camp beds, and
after a gigantic breakfast of steak and onions be merrily away long
before the rim of the sun showed over the horizon. Having chased
the wild boar for several hours, we would manage quite often to be
back in time to put in an appearance, washed and brushed up, at
Evensong in the Garrison Church. This concluding rite was
something of a rush but we made the effort because our Honorary
Secretary who kept scrupulous tale of the Tent Club ‘gests’ could
prove from the book that such piety paid. When I wrote to my
mother about these goings-on and boasted, most
imprudently, that the Hoghunter’s Annual 1936 had praised me
as an indefatigable ‘spear’, she had let me know in reply—it must
have been among her very last letters—how vexed she had been to
learn of my brutal amusements. Of course there is no real answer
to Wordsworth’s
206 WHEN WAR CAME
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels
but at all events this was no tame or enervating pursuit, and was
arguably as wholesome a pastime as any other within the reach of
our coterie. Be that as it may, of this distraction Delhi now
deprived me and I was never to resume it. However, to adjust the
balance the choice of company was wider; and, presently, as the
war ceased to be remote and encroached on India itself, evacuees
arrived from Singapore, Rangoon and other places to swell
numbers. For example the Cecil Hotel, presided over by the
redoubtable Miss Hotz of whom all the servants and most of the
guests stood in reverential fear, instead of catering for casual
tourists as in peacetime, now received and sheltered until further
notice as heterogeneous a clientèle as could well be imagined from
which enemy aliens and Indians alone seemed to be excluded. To
say that the wartime contingent was yeast to pre-war dough would
be a wrong way of putting things, but I do say that it lent an
agreeable variety to the circles, inner and outer, in which one
could move.
‘A Mr Brown, sir, wants to see you. He is at the Cecil Hotel.’
Well, so was everybody, The ex-husband of Mrs Simpson (future
Duchess of Windsor) was, a daughter of H.G.Wells was, all sorts
of other celebrities, it seemed, were, and now…this Mr Brown.
When he turned up, my impression was of a frail intellectual,
grey-haired, bespectacled, very slight in build, not the pukka sahib
type, not the sort you would see on a horse, anyway. He looked
unused to the Indian heat, for he had doffed his jacket, loosened
his collar and rolled up his sleeves above the elbow. And he had
gone to the City Magistrate by mistake, apparently not
understanding that in India we magistrates were, as in ancient
Rome, maximi, medii, and minores. The other thing I noticed was
he could not say ‘r’. What did he want, I wondered.
He told me he knew India (I trust I concealed my astonishment),
loved her as he loved his own country and had come back to
her once more. ‘If you prefer New Delhi to Mughal Delhi/ I hear
him saying, ‘we shall have nothing in common.’ He had come out
first, he continued, as a subaltern to join the 17th Cavalry, ‘it
must have been around the date of your birth’, and for years that
had been his world, there was no other, and then…‘You are Yeats-
Brown,’ I interrupted, tumbling to it, ‘you are “Bengal Lancer”!’
He had retired, I believe, from the Indian Army shortly after the
Great War, was Assistant Editor of The Spectator by the
mid‘twenties and turning out best sellers in the’ thirties. With the
Hollywood version of ‘Bengal Lancer’, I remember his telling me,

he had nothing whatsoever to do, but as I had neither read the
book nor seen the film I could only infer the sense of this remark.
That is in parenthesis. His purpose in coming to me now was to
help him pick up the threads, the cronies of his own generation
having all passed on. Held up in India indefinitely, he was anxious
to make a virtue of necessity, collect up-to-date information, meet
people, and so on. Was it a feasible idea to…?
‘I’m as attached as you are,’ I broke in, ‘to the Delhi of the
Mughals, so let’s s go to it.’
Within a matter of days he received an invitation to the home of
Mirza Khairuddin in Daryganj, senior representative of the exroyal
house, and that exuberant young man—he was about the only
one of them not satisfied to ‘sit upon the ground and tell sad
stories of the death of kings’—drew up a programme of
sightseeing. He was a strapping youth: a champion weight-lifter,
whom I had once teased about his bulk, nicknaming him the
Mughal Monument. He now rather charmingly signed the
programme ‘“Khair”, Monumental Guide.’ We next looked up the
gentle and scholarly Rai Bahadur Raj Narain, of a Hindu family
scarcely less characteristic of Delhi’s forgotten élite who with
nothing but time on his hands was only too glad, as he phrased it,
to walk with his English visitor in the vestiges of the glory of the
Hindu Kings. And, thirdly, for the sake of objectivity I got hold of a
Mr Mukherji, an acquaintance in the Archaeological Department,
dedicated, single-minded, who likewise undertook to walk the
enthusiast off his feet. Yeats-Brown could hardly believe there
were such people as these, and one or two others like them, that
he was able to encounter, so courteous, of such dignity he found
them, so utterly removed in their lifestyle, as we now say, from the
Indians who got into the news. When he had succeeded in
returning to England a year later, we corresponded, and by
chance I have kept one of his letters as a LBI—H book-mark. In
this he reminds me of our excursions and refers to those three
companions who trudged round with him in quest of the Seven
Cities, and whose names would probably have deserted my head
otherwise. My own small contribution had been to collect a few
facts and figures from records in my Office or from volumes in the
Hardinge Library, and this information, he wrote, would go into a
book he was working on, to be out with luck in 1944. In due time
a copy of his Indian Pageant arrived, and it is in between the
pages of this that Francis Yeats-Brown’s letter reposes after all
these years.
208 WHEN WAR CAME
The Times withdrew their correspondent soon after the outbreak,

and it must therefore have been at the very beginning of the war
that ‘Sandy’ Inglis introduced me to Ella. We British had been so
lax in peacetime towards foreigners (Russians excepted) as to
encourage a certain negligence on their side in such matters as
registration and passports. But we were tightening things up now
willy-nilly, and Ella, being an alien, had come up against some
difficulty or other. She was of the company of lady-travellers, and
this band in my experience usually did tiresome things under the
shield of imposing credentials. Rosita Forbes’ style had been
histrionic: I remember my bearer reporting in consternation her
refusal to swallow the smoky cup of tea offered her at 7a.m. and
her insistence on ‘the juice of three oranges!’ I remember at 7 p.m.
her theatrical account of ‘her ride into the sunset with the
Assistant Superintendent of Police’. And Freya Stark’s visit (this in
the late stages of the war) was to be soured by the wayward
purchase of a motor car for re-sale in Peshawar or somewhere, an
offence under wartime regulations even if you are staying with the
Viceroy. But back to Ella whom Sandy had invited me to meet at
supper so that she could explain what she needed.
Many of us in Delhi in 1939 knew who Ella Maillart was. She
was the intrepid young woman who had traversed the land of the
Kirghiz between Tien Shan or ‘Celestial Mountains’ and Qizil Qum
or ‘Red Sands’ which border on the eastern shore of the Sea of Aral.
It is not enough to glance at those romantically named regions on
the map. One requires also some practical familiarity with the
harsh terrain of Central Asia they designate, in order to appreciate
what such a journey, five or six consecutive months of it, must
have demanded in terms of mental and moral resource quite apart
from physical endurance. And not content with that, she had set
out again, this time in association with Peter Fleming, and
accomplished a second journey of roughly equal duration
beginning at Peking and ending up at Kashghar. From here the pair
of them had come down to Delhi—which accounts for such inkling
as we had of Mademoiselle Maillart’s past exploits. Probably a
certain public at home knew more than we did; for, if I remember
rightly, the two travel books Turkestan Solo and Forbidden
Journey in which she chronicled her expeditions had appeared
before war broke out. What she was doing in India now I supposed
I should learn at supper.
Ella, who was Swiss, had a passport problem, as I have said.
This, however, was in her eyes of small concern, and what she
wanted to see me about was something else. Having dashed
through Delhi without stopping at the finish of that second
journey a few years previously, she was now bent on exploring it.
The passport matter was easy to arrange, its holder being known
to us already and persona grata. Against ‘signes particuliers’ in
the document the space was blank, I saw. In fact she had
distinguishing marks, they hit you: she was ‘type nordique’, she
was ‘hardie’, she was ‘sportive’. Besides—and you could not miss
this either— there was something for which you could find no
adjective at all. As to the other request, I was of course inured to
this and fairly well up in the technique of complying with it. Before
many days had passed we had ‘done’ several of the better known
sites with some thoroughness. She was the model reporter, I
found, displaying an insatiable thirst for information, asking the
pertinent questions and quick at getting the gist down on paper.
Always, she told me, she had had to augment her ‘viatique’ in this
fashion: but, alas, now the market for articles, and especially in
French, of the sort she did, had collapsed, and she was fauchée.
After one of our outings we repaired to the Cecil Hotel for lunch
and I was able to hear about some of the other things she had
done, I mean apart from the two stupendous journeys that had
placed her among the great travellers: climbing in the Alps, sailing
a small boat round the Mediterranean, spending six months in
Moscow learning Russian in preparation for the Turkestan
adventure, and a year teaching at a girls’ school in England to
bring grist to the mill. Perhaps it was the ex-schoolmistress that
acted at the moment for her eye lighted on the wrong spelling of
some culinary term in the menu and out came a pencil and some
very audible ‘tut tuts’. Miss Hotz, bustling round as usual at
mealtimes, bore down on us in a dudgeon as if hotel property were
being disfigured. I was on Miss Hotz’ side over this, and fear I
showed my irritation. But Ella was my guest and also it was
becoming clear to me, she was worried and selfquestioning at this
time. She was quite evidently of those who detest the Machine Age
and it was for this reason the East had stolen her wits away. It
was Hinduism that was the immediate pull, and her idea was to
join an Ashram—she named a Swami of repute in the South—
where she intended to do the chores, clean pots and pans, cook,
anything—and see what happened. In a week or so she went off to
it, taking her rucksack, her miniature medicine-chest and her
precious Leica, sum total of her material impedimenta, and I
believe remained at the Swami’s feet throughout the war
conducting a long and difficult search for her true vocation.
In peacetime Delhi each of us had always known what the other
was doing: now we did not always know. Theodore Gregory of
course was Economic Adviser to the Government of India, you
210 WHEN WAR CAME
could look him up; ‘Gregorius’ moreover, many had heard it, had
got into Hitler’s bad books and won the honour of inclusion in the
celebrated Black List of the Führer. But what Evelyn Wrench was
doing we were never certain. One of the high-ups in the
newspaper world, it seemed; behind The Spectator; great on the
Commonwealth; tremendously in with the Americans; the English-
Speaking Union was practically his invention; and so on. I first
met him over some fuss we had about the European community
arming itself—it was 1942—when there was an outbreak of pillage
and arson in the City, and certain of the Cecil residents started
organizing themselves against a situation they thought was
getting out of my control. I went to his room rather wondering
what reception I should get: Would he prove a sort of Harmsworth
or be like the Berry brothers perhaps, or a Beaverbrook even? I
was set at ease by his instant willingness to accept my opinion
and his promise to see to it that some of the more excitable spirits
calmed down. But what so astonished me that it returns to me
after all these years was the faint lavender and old lace flavour of
the speech and manners, the appearance even, of the delightful
couple, elegant and serene, the Wrenches were when others—not
many, indeed, but some— among the strangers to India housed at
the time in Old Delhi were so jumpy. Those who are lucky enough
to have known them will, I believe, understand what I am
probably failing here to put into words. Another of our group was
the brilliant and enigmatic Guy Wint, Oxford historian, ambulant
student of Asian affairs who would alarm me with a battery of
questions at the end of a long hot day. Why did he ask them? He
appeared to me—and I think also to himself—to know so much
more about the given subject than I did. His stamina matched his
intellectual vigour and I would often catch sight of him in the
midsummer heat, an incongruous broadbrimmed black hat on his
head, walking with his short rapid steps to the corner on Alipur
Road where the bus for New Delhi marked ‘Private’ would pick him
up (only the old Sahibs, and not too many of those, had their own
cars). On that same road again—this picture has recurred to me
many times since —I used to see a figure of even more
phenomenal fortitude, a wartime Brigadier on a bicycle. What pre-
war Brigadier would bend low over the handlebars defying the loo,
the scorching dry wind, and pedal like fury towards General
Headquarters at nine o’clock every morning? One day he came
into my room unannounced—and to the point without preamble.
He intended to learn Urdu. He would get up daily at five and put
in some hours at it before the sluggards in New Delhi were astir.
Could I recommend a teacher? He was a Professor of Greek, he
added: not just some pukka sahib like the rest of them at GHQ, I
was meant to understand. Having taken the hint, I found a
welleducated scholarly Muslim for him, not a regimental ‘munshi’,
and from the first lesson his progress was astounding. Within
weeks the teacher had reported to me wide-eyed in admiration;
and within six months Powell—that was the Brigadier’s name—
was discussing some verses of the poet Ghalib with me. But in the
meantime he had asked another little service of me. On this
occasion our meeting was out of Office, on a Saturday evening,
and I remember the irrelevant detail that we devoured a mound of
ham sandwiches as we chatted. He wanted me to introduce him to
two or three U.P. households, people of the lettered classes, not
over ‘Anglicized’, essentially Indian in culture and tradition, who
would be willing to provide him with a bed and whose table he could
share. The addresses were to be within reasonable range of Delhi
so that he could descend on his hosts whenever he got short leave
of absence from GHQ. In the event I gave him three introductions.
With one of these something went wrong, I remember, but in the
other two cases the plan worked to perfection. If Powell could do
other things in the way he mastered Urdu—and presumably that
was so, considering that he had attained to a University Chair in
his twenties and now risen from private to brigadier in record time,
then, I felt, whatever he took up he would attack with fanatical
zeal, assail it remorselessly, worry it like a terrier. Would he, like a
terrier, tire of things and drop them? Some present day critics of
the Rt. Hon. Enoch Powell have lamented that he does indeed
drop both causes and colleagues. Of such matters I know
absolutely nothing. I am content to consider it my fortune to have
spent the better part of one year not on terms of friendship,
certainly, but in close contact on and off with that powerful and
ingenious mind.
Later on in the war we had Noel Coward amongst us. His
prestige was rated sufficiently high by the powers that be to justify
an aeroplane for himself, his grand piano and his accompanist,
and so on occasion this master of entertainment would drop from
the clouds upon New Delhi. Entertain he certainly did—but the
wrong audience. On us his songs, perfect within their trivial limits,
worked their brittle miracle, and we went about for weeks
afterwards—especially those who had not succeeded in attempts
to meet him off-stage—imitating Noel’s breathless overpunctuated
talk. But in the forward areas his turns brought puzzled frowns to
the boys of 19 and 20 he was supposed to entertain and whose
feelings moved in another key.
212 WHEN WAR CAME
By good fortune a more sober and earnest, also a more

continuous, delight was available to us, for we had as a permanent
resident a gifted professional pianist in Clifford Huntsman. His
Saturday night recitals in New Delhi were something, absurd as
this may sound, to which we had been totally unaccustomed in
the piping times of peace; Indo-British society having been, one
cannot say too Philistine but simply too exiguous to support
concert halls and the executant musicians to perform in them.
Needless to labour it, none in the little list I am compiling at
random bore the slightest resemblance to the Quai-hai of either
caricature or—why not say it?—historical fact. That Huntsman did
not, the following story, which he hugely enjoyed telling us, was
proof. Travelling long distance on one occasion in this land where
all trains were crowded trains, he could not but notice that his
fellow-passengers positively spilled from the carriage windows and
some even appeared to have corded themselves between door-
handles and running-boards. At dinner he found himself sharing
the restaurant car with one companion, a colonel. Being British,
they did not exchange a syllable that night but at the breakfast-
table next morn ing the colonel, halfway through the meal and
after an apologetic cough, volunteered the comment: ‘Seems we’re
the only people on the train.’
Some in the above list I knew over a long period but none of
them, as I think I have stated or implied, did I know intimately.
Indeed not only in this section but throughout my chapters I have
felt that friends were not to be treated in a marginal manner;
whereas acquaintances might be convoked when and to the extent
that my context needed them. From this method, indeed, I have
had to depart occasionally: a Hugh Bomford here, a Denys Kilburn
there, has been spotlighted upon my stage. But momentarily, and
it is not, so to speak, as my friend that my friend fulfils the role I
assign him.
This is precisely the case with my next and concluding vignette.
One of our wartime duties was the detention of enemy aliens and
my friend comes into this picture because he was an enemy alien.
Not that the description fitted. Father Leone had said farewell to
Florence a good twenty-five years previously and had been
genuinely astounded when I once asked him if he had ever
considered going back. The life of this Capuchin missioner until
God should call him was among India’s poor and India’s sick. His
rather prominent forehead was pitted by small-pox; a small-pox
attributable, according to the report of the health authorities, to
his stubborn refusal to take precautions (what precautions could
he take short of abandoning the particular village?); but by him to
divine favour: the marks it left were stigmata. The Blessed Virgin
Mary herself had become visible to him one night in that stricken
hovel there on the Muttra border (not in a dream, he would insist
to me, nor when the fever had taken its hold) and, smiling, nodded
her encouragement. Nevertheless of his native Tuscany he was
not really rid: nor ever could be, and I used to listen to him
singing its praises. Oh, I must go and learn the beauties of the
Italian of the ‘bel Paese là dove il si suona’. In my time at Agra we
would generally be able to squeeze in an hour’s Dante at week-
ends, of a Sunday preferably, and since my transfer to Delhi I had
missed those readings sadly. It must have been in the sweltering
heat of the second summer of the War, anyhow some while after we
had complied with Churchill’s injunction to ‘lock the lot up’ that I
decided to take a breather of two or three days in order to visit my
friend up in the prisoners’ camp at Mussoorie to which he had
been sent on arrest. We managed to arrange several long
walks together, for the regulations permitted outings at fixed
hours and under suitable surveillance. And then I came back by
the night train from Dehra Dun. As I alighted from my carriage at
Delhi I was tapped on the shoulder by a European Sergeant ‘Just
come along, will you,’ he said, taking my arm. He led me to the
Railway Police Office, sat down at his desk and took a sheet of
paper from a drawer. I stood before him, my chin doubtless dark
with stubble and my slept-in khaki shirt and slacks showing
perspiration patches. ‘Savvy English?’ he began, against the
human clamour and the metallic clatter of the great station
outside. Then ‘Name?’ ‘It’s your name, Sergeant, I’d like to have,’ I
replied, ‘to pass it to the Senior Superintendent of Police. I’m sure
he’ll want to compliment you on a smart job.’
5.
ANOTHER VICEROY’S HOUSE
Whenever I see the name Wavell in print or hear it spoken I think
neither of his military achievement which I am quite incompetent
to assess nor of his viceroyalty concerning which I could hardly
assemble the coherent pattern from the detached fragments of
information that alone came my way in the Delhi provincial
round. I think of a sturdy figure in a bush shirt and spotted
muffler, of a man in whose rugged countenance there was
strength without ruthlessness; rather, indeed—and it was a
strange combination—a kind of sweetness. I think of a preux
chevalier.
214 WHEN WAR CAME
This impression derives not from scores of more fleeting chances

to observe him but from two which to me are memorable, and
memorable probably because they were private. One was in Agra
where he turned up with his sister and left her in my house so
that she could ‘do’ the Mughal monuments without hurry; the
other, earlier in date, in Viceroy’s House. A Scottish laird of whom
it was justly said that ‘He took great burdens and he bore them
well’, had been replaced there by a soldier. Four years exactly had
gone by, counting from that first winter of the war when, as I have
related, we would all still go along to the palace dressed up to the
nines. Four years during which much that was catastrophic had
happened in Asia, much that had made it high time to tell the
bearer to remove the topper from the hatstand, and put away the
tails, the gold braided coatee and the knee breeches in the
mothproof trunk.
There had been no invitation phrased in the language of
yesterday: only a ‘Why not come along to lunch on Sunday and we’ll
go into it’ So what did you wear? I had a raw tussore jacket and
thought that might do. Yesterday you would have been told about
dress but not why you were being invited. Today it was the other
way round. To a Viceroy’s House accommodating various wartime
departments, to a Viceroy’s House where Red Cross work is going
on in the spacious salons, where the Women’s Voluntary Service
had its headquarters, and where the dreamlike ornamental
grounds are occupied by an immense leave camp, you did not go
simply because it was your turn. No, it was in connection with an
amenity for troops, a canteen. A side-show then, but Wavell was a
soldier and—in point here—his wife was a soldier’s wife; to both of
them ‘canteen’ was a word with pleasurable associations. If ‘Her
Ex.’ poured out mugs of tea for Sepoys—and was this a function
less vice-regal than queening it in the pre-war style at some
glittering reception in the ballroom?—then ‘the memsahibs’ of the
imperial capital would follow suit, and men from the front
accustomed indeed to the ministrations of women but in the
simpler décor of a village home, could not fail to be moved by this
proof of esteem. In short the Wavells had lent it their enthusiasm,
and their name as well. Where the names of their predecessors
were perpetuated in parks and crescents, theirs would be linked
with a wartime canteen.
The initiative had been due to the ‘Auk’ as we called General
Auchinleck: the Commander-in-Chief. I am clear about this
because he had written me as the Jack-of-all-Trades for advice on
some preliminary step and then made me a member of his
committee of management. The project had taken shape, donations
had come in from business circles, and someone offered us the

use of his house. This, alas, was too cramped for our needs, and
to secure roomy premises in wartime New Delhi was a problem, no
doubt about it. The Masonic Hall suggested itself, but would the
Lodge play? The Viceroy was not a Freemason (Oh: no, no,
anything but! Her Ex. had confided to me) and such hints as we
others, equally strangers to the fraternity, had so far dropped had
produced no effect. I remember thinking that our Nazi enemies, a
pair of Hitler’s generals, say, would have conducted matters
otherwise, but then Wavell and Auchinleck were defending a
different cause from theirs. However, I was on good terms with one
Sardar Bahadur Sundar Singh, a Sikh gentleman of high ‘degree’
in Freemasonry LBI—H* who, away from New Delhi these last
weeks, was now back. I had seen him, and my soundings had
relieved me of anxiety.
No lancer in scarlet and jack boots, no mounting of the guard
these days, only a solitary policeman in the outer box by the
railings. The grand sweep of the courtyard was deserted this
Sunday morning, and I could not discern a chaprasi even on the
entrance steps. In all Delhi, in all India, I never saw a bell-push at
a front door, so how did I make my way in? It must have
presented no difficulty for my next memory is of a round table laid
for six in a smallish room. ‘Archie John’, the son, was with us, his
arm in a sling (he had recently lost his left hand in the Assam and
North Burma operations) and so was one of the daughters,
Pamela; and there was one of the As.D.C. Of drink the choice lay
between beer and Kia-Ora; and a curry was the plate of
resistance. It was not what I had known at a Viceroy’s table; but
then, too, never before, never had a Viceroy asked me about my
Districts. Which had they been? How many years was it now I’d
been in the Delhi administration and did I like it when I thought
of Bahraich? I envy those—numerous to judge by autobiographies
—who can quote entire conversations years and years later. I
cannot, but it will be understood why just those questions, plainly
put in the Wavell manner, are with me still. The Wavell manner, I
have said. A legend attached to it in those times, and a legend
always has a basis of truth. There would be dreadful silences,
people said, and especially when some comment was expected.
Evan Jenkins, his Private Secretary, had told me how things had
gone in a tête-à-tête with Churchill at the beginning of the
Viceroyalty. ‘I felt,’ said Evan, ‘like the sailor home from the sea
with a parrot, and the parrot wouldn’t talk.’ But if never voluble,
Wavell invariably made his meaning clear, whether to the A.D.C. or
to the P.M. And I think he had never exploded with anger in the
216 WHEN WAR CAME
whole of his life. In New Delhi, anyhow, whenever a political leader

had come out with something peculiarly uncalled for during an
interview, or one of his staff had read out the contents, as
decoded, of a peculiarly infuriating telegram from London, he used
to pick up four or five pens and pencils from his desk and crunch
them together with nothing nearer to an expletive than his
predictable, laconic ‘I see’.
The man in worn tweeds and a sports shirt was taking the
afternoon off for a round of golf, so had to go and change (I could
not imagine why). The son and daughter sat down to a game
of draughts or backgammon, and then their father returned
looking more sturdy than ever in khaki shorts. This is really “Her
Ex’s” show,’ he said, shaking hands, ‘and I’ll leave you to it’ Since
he had called her, I could have sworn to it, ‘old girl’ the instant
before, the ‘Her Ex.’ was within sufficiently audible inverted
commas. Her show indeed it was. My contribution was precisely
nil, for the Masonic Hall was as good as in the bag, and the two
hours that are vivid in my mind to this day, to be candid I had
lived them under false pretences.
The Viceroy’s dismissal (‘at shorter notice’ Lady Wavell was to
say in the hearing of us all ‘than you are compelled to give a
housemaid’), the whys and wherefores of Attlee’s becoming fed up
with him—upon these fields I am unqualified to trench. But of this
much I can remind the readers of this page: it was Wavell and not
Mountbatten who persuaded the British Government to fix a date
for our withdrawal from India, Wavell who convinced the British
Government that Partition had become inevitable. These lines
were mine, I wrote them…’ Thanks to the prodigious memory
whose feats he describes for us in his anthology Other Men’s
Flowers, some poet would always be at his beck and call to match
his mood. May he not in the few short years that remained to him,
perhaps while driving his car alone through the English
countryside, or giving a satisfying smack to a golf ball, have
repeated occasionally out loud that remonstrance of Virgil’s which
nicely fitted his own case? For Wavell also had fashioned
something for which ‘another took the applause’. Tulit alter
honores.
But I am recalling the man here, not his work. And from this
man which of us could withhold admiration? Which of us could
feel for him anything less than affection?
12
GANDHI—HIS LOT IS AMONG THE
SAINTS
1.
BAPU
My mother, writing in 1931, reported how she had been to tea
with Maude Royden who was ‘not at all dowdy and used lipstick’. I
am not sure whether half a century later Miss Royden’s name is
widely familiar. At the time it was: she was minister at the
Guildhouse, had been preacher or assistant preacher at the City
Temple, was a social worker of distinction. And recently she had
been Gandhi’s hostess, I suppose at the Guildhouse, when he was
in London to attend a session of the Round Table Conference. The
talk, my mother said, had revolved on him and one thing had
startled her much more than the use of make-up (which she
herself heartily approved) in this deeply religious woman, and that
was her remark that Gandhi was not properly to be equated with
Our Lord, no, not with him, ‘because Jesus of Nazareth was
unique in his perfection.’
There were, of course, many in Europe and America to echo
Miss Royden, many, too, who without quite going to her lengths
would tell you that Gandhi was the St Paul of our own days or a
St Francis of Assisi who had taken Poverty as his bride or —I
forget what else, there was so much of it. Remarkably, such
eulogies left India out, except as the geographical area in which
every now and then thousands of his devoted following allowed
themselves to be beaten to pulp without lifting a hand in self-
defence. But discuss it with Indians—I think inevitably of three or
four, one of them a Muslim, among my own close acquaintances—
and they would remind you that to describe Gandhi’s thought and
action at all you had to fall back on a string of Sanskrit terms
bearing on a view of life as utterly Hindu as it is possible to
conceive. In an earlier chapter attempting to assess what it means
to be a Hindu, we saw how to Hindu thinking all things are graded
218 GANDHI—HIS LOT IS AMONG THE SAINTS
Mahatma Gandhi—from the painting by Oswald Birley

and how, as a corollary, finer spirits will be closely attached to
what is of high grade and loosely attached to what is of low grade.
Mira Behn and Mahatma Gandhi in London, 1931 (see page 253)
Now bring in Gandhi here: bring him in on the subject of truth,

for example. Truth to him has two levels: one with difficulty to be
apprehended, so pure is it, and the other, which is the truth we
are confronted with in our daily affairs, a sort of inferior truth.

Listen to his exact words. ‘Dip your left hand in a bowl of iced
water, then in a bowl of tepid water. The tepid water will seem
hot. Then dip your right hand in a bowl of hot water and
afterwards in that containing tepid water. The tepid water will
seem cold. Absolute truth was the constant temperature of the
water; but relative truth, that perceived by the hand of man,
varied.’ Truth, he is telling us, varies; it is not indivisible. The Holy
Man, which Gandhi was, will know that its different aspects
cannot always be reconciled. And so it must be with whatever end
you deem to be good. The Freedom Fighter, which Gandhi was,
will know that you cannot maximize a particular ideal without
diminishing some other ideal. Is this perhaps the key to what
puzzled us all in Gandhi: how, inflexible in his attachment to
noble ends, he could be supple, loosely attached, not to say
without scruple, in regard to the means employed of attaining
them; how, briefly put, he could succeed in combining the roles of
saint and politician?
Before I try to bring the saint and the politician into focus, or
isolate the social reformer into whom this saint-cum-politician
would again and again slide to the enduring benefit of his people,
I want to introduce the eccentric, the endearing but also at times
exasperating eccentric, whom his entourage called ‘Bapu’, which
is ‘Father’ in Gujarati; not ‘Mahatma’, not ‘Gandhiji’, but ‘Bapu’. He
was in London, as I have said, at the date of my mother’s letter.
London, it seemed—and particularly the East End, for he was
stopping in Kingsley House at Bow—had taken a look at him and
liked what it saw. Was tickled too by what it saw. His dhoti, or
loincloth, always appeared bulky above his spindly legs, and the
shawl hiding his arms flapped on either side as he walked so that
you would think from a distance some outsize exotic bird had
strayed into Whitechapel. Pedestrians who encountered him at
close range and exchanged remarks with him had been aware of a
smallish, neatly cropped head (he would cut his hair himself—
perhaps the only Indian who did!); of ears resembling a bat’s s; of
a nose that dropped suddenly from the bony ridge to the tip and
had rather long nostrils; of a short upper lip barely concealed by a
thin moustache; of a lower lip occasionally jutting in sign of doubt
or dissent; of a smile—and the whole countenance beamed when
it came—revealing both broken teeth and toothless gaps. Aware,
not finally as I am listing it here but from the very start, of
glittering eyes peering through glasses, holding the vis-à-vis in a
kindly glance and—not to be missed—sizing him up.
I was able, it may have been two or three years later, to cap that
picture. I was able to inform my mother that the Londoners who
had taken to him in the Mile End Road had been denied one laugh
which was ours, from time to time, in India. If only his Cockney
acquaintances could have met him on one of his prodigious tours
across the plain! The procession tramping towards them along the
soft and dusty margin of the metalled highway would have
declared the following order of march: heading it, a posse of
constables from the local police-station, then the amanuenses and
the pressmen, then the ‘menagerie’ as the entourage was
nicknamed, then Bapu himself, staff in hand, huddled in a blanket
against the winter air and stepping out at a brisk pace; and at the
tail, a grave porter bearing on his head the personal commode.
Gandhi had a near obsession with his bodily functions. Indeed
certain humourless pilgrims, turning up all the way from the
United States to worship at the shrine, are reliably reported to
have been put out when the provoking sage would talk to them
about nothing but enemas. Diet with him was a subject of
constant study: he performed prolonged experiments with ground-
nut oil, soy bean oil and coconut milk; and observed a Panch
Vastu (Five Items) vow which restricted his regimen to the said
number of vegetables and-or fruits in the course of the day. And
sharp was the scolding if the least mistake was committed by the
devoted women responsible for his meals. From cow’s milk he
had, as everyone knew, abstained these long years because it
inflamed the passions. In the beginning his health had suffered
from this abstention, until a compromise, the unkind critic might
term it a Gandhian compromise, had suggested itself. After some
shilly-shallying he was able to reconcile himself to the drinking of
goat’s s milk as a substitute. Then he found it did him good if
someone would rub oil into his scalp at the end of the day and
someone else rub ghi, the clarified butter of India, on the soles of
his feet. Then he became convinced that the cure for his high
blood pressure was to have a cotton bag containing wet earth
placed on top of his head.
And then those monologues. His collected speeches and the
articles dictated to his weeklies, Young India and the Harijan, now
in process of publication by the Government of India, are likely to
run to fifty volumes! Small wonder if the ‘menagerie’ listening to
his moralisings six days a week looked forward to each Monday
when his tongue rested in strict silence and when, as somebody
remarked, Bapu’s Inner Voice got its chance to put a word in.
Hindu to the core, he would go into raptures over the cow: were
she sick, the barrister-at-law was ready to acquaint the rustic
owner with the proper remedy for the given ailment. For the
horse, the dog, and every other animal his solicitude was
guaranteed, for was he not, in his own phrase, ‘at one with dumb
creation’? Since there is little evidence that he had ever had
anything to do with either horses or dogs, and still less that he
had a ‘way’ with them, the claim sounded a bit complacent and I
know I would never have permitted him to treat my mare Shireen,
had the occasion arisen! I know he could never have attended to
the demands of our Briard bitch as my wife is doing while I write
these very lines. All in all, these and other cranky ideas, these
nostrums went down well with most of the following; and by an
inner minority they were tolerated as the expression of a lovable
personality.
Fond of his own legend and alive to the uses of publicity, Bapu
had allowed much of what I am here relating to become common
knowledge. For the rest I am indebted to a credible witness, if ever
there was one. The singular circumstance which brought me, a
run-of-the-mill official, into the very bosom of the ‘menagerie’
occurred late in my story and I shall reserve it for a concluding
chapter. But of the little band itself that bore this flippant
designation I must insert some account without more ado.
In the early days of the Great War, which is to say shortly af ter
his return to India from South Africa where he had tried out his
famous technique of Satyagraha (of which more below), Bapu had
founded an Ashram at Ahmedabad. There, assisted by a few dozen
co-workers, he delivered his opening attack on Untouchability by
admitting a family of India’s unfortunates into the precincts of the
hermitage. He had taken a step which he was never to retrace.
And second, profiting by the fact that the immediate region was
among the few where traditional village occupations had not died
out, he inaugurated his celebrated revival of hand-spinning. Of
Untouchability and his life-long fight to abolish it, known later as
the Harijan movement, I have spoken in earlier pages, and to
Handspinning I shall come in a moment. Here it is the disciples
who are in point. To start with, these had totalled no more than
some forty men, women and children headed by one or two
ascetics of repute like Sri Vinoba Bhave. But the number
increased rapidly until it was nearing two hundred. It had become
not only unwieldy in the process of growth but, according to my
informant, infected; it contained too many social snobs at one
extreme, too many halfcrazed Sadhus stupefied with bhang at the
other. To these annoyances financial worries, not to say disputes,
had been added, with the result that the Master decided to make a
clean break with Ahmedabad. In 1933 he wound up the Ashram
there, and created a new one in the heart of India, initially in the
small town of Wardha but soon afterwards in the thoroughly rural
setting of Sevagram, ‘Village of Service’, which was his apt re-
spelling of the place’s original name, Segaon. Here, henceforward,
his experiments in village economies and village education were to
be conducted, and here he gathered round him the select little
group, motley but co-ordinated, that came to be referred to as his
menagerie. Its members were, and would remain, the cream of the
cream of the disciples. They ranged from the genuine ascetic to
the competent private-secretary, from the Vinoba Bhave to the
Pyare Lal; from the finished products of Roedean or Sherborne
School for Girls to India’s cloistered and illiterate womanhood,
from the Srimati Amrit Kaur of noble birth or the English devote
Mira Behn to the uneducated Kasturbai who was Bapu’s wife. The
fact was that Bapu demanded, and got, an efficient headquarters
staff: one or two ambassadresses who could state his case
winningly to Viceroys, and half-a-dozen Marthas willing to potter
about in the kitchen and anoint his feet. To this milieu Kasturbai,
or ‘Ba’, Mother, as they called her, who had been married to
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at thirteen and started bearing
his children at sixteen, adapted herself with simple dignity. For
twenty-seven years until her death in 1942 she endured the
Ashram life which, not of her choosing, can hardly have been
much fun. In an Indian hermitage there is a Master, there are
disciples of both sexes, there is no Mistress.
The second of the themes to which Bapu the social reformer,
surrounded and assisted by these disciples, harnessed his
pheno menal energy was, we were saying, the revival of the lost
practice of hand-spinning. Soberly judged this was not to be
bracketed with the Harijan cause; it was, frankly, the most
notable of his fads, and ‘fad’ is how the Congress and the
intelligentsia at large concurred in describing it. Quite early on, in
the ‘twenties, he had persuaded himself that hand-spinning and
handloom-weaving were the panacea for rural ills; they would
yield an income in the off season when there was no work in the
fields, yield moral dividends into the bargain since they would
cure idleness. He was no countryman, and naïvely confessed he
had never set eyes on a Charkha, a spinning wheel, at the time.
However, Bapu was never one to be daunted by his own ignorance.
He took his stand by regeneration; and this in the literal sense of
bringing back into existence the spiritual and material values that
had lapsed. India’s salvation consisted in a return to the simplicity
of her past. ‘The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors,
and such like all have to go,’ he declared sweepingly. India had no
need of them, the Charkha would satisfy her wants.
Understandably such intimations of Utopia exasperated
educated opinion, and so eminent a figure as Rabindranath
Tagore ridiculed the Charkha programme publicly. The Party, too,
as mentioned, jibbed at it—or did so until the leaders tumbled to
something which had been absent altogether from Bapu’s mind:
namely that the end-product of the Charkha which was Khaddar
or Khadi, ‘homespun’, could redound to limitless political
advantage. It was decided that Congressmen throughout the land
should from now on clothe themselves in an essentially Indian
style. And so Khaddar in due course ‘refashioned’ a nation-wide
section of society; an urban middle-class section of society. In the
beginning, unlooked-for difficulties had to be overcome, for
neither spinning wheels nor spinners to act as teachers were easy
to find; and but for the ardour of Bapu’s disciples in the Ashram
the thing would never have got under way. They set the example;
the nationalist leaders followed it, and presently everybody who
was anybody in Congress was doing his daily stint of spinning as
a matter of Party honour. And a pretty comic sight they presented,
I was once told, these dutiful politicians propped on cushions on
the ground in front of their wheels! What of the villager, though,
the villager on whose budget, and on whose soul as well, the
Charkha was calculated to confer benefit? Alas, he did not take to
it. If you asked him about it, he would look awkward and grin. If
you pressed him, he would answer that men never used it, only the
women had done so; that anyhow he had more than enough to
occupy him in the slack season. Could you really wonder if he
continued to walk to the nearest bazaar when he wanted cloth?
2.
AN INDUBITABLE SAINT
Gandhi with his gift for the apt phrase referred to the poor,
unprivileged mass of his people as ‘my principals’. How did they in
their turn look upon him? A solitary Englishman under canvas
was in a position to ask them. They would not always answer
intelligibly, but sometimes they did, and the reply would be
arresting. So listen to the humble Hindu peasants who are seated
every evening under a tree, or round the fire if it be mid-winter—
there was hardly a village where you would not see a little group
of them. And bear it in mind that with them no sharp line is
drawn between the supernatural and the familiar. Only here and
there will one of them know how to scrawl his name; but they will
all know, having imbibed it from childhood, about the avatars.

Will know, having had it recited to them a thousand times, that the
Lord spoke, saying ‘When lawlessness is abroad, I bring myself to
bodied birth. I come down age after age’. Avatar, a learned word to
us, is the easiest of words to these simple souls; it is merely a
‘descent’ whether a bird makes it or an aeroplane or—Vishnu. And
in the present instance it was Vishnu himself that had made it. I
can still hear how they pronounced it, two syllables on their lips,
autār. ‘Vishnu,’ they are saying, ‘has come down’. But what about
the educated? The Babu, for example, what did he think? In India
—and the reminder is needed—when you say ‘babu’ you are not
being contemptuous; on the contrary you are being correct, even
respectful. And respect this man merited, for without about one
million of him the edifice of the British Raj could not have
remained standing for twentyfour hours. The Babu mattered.
Suppose then I had tackled the steadier of the Hindu clerks on my
office pay-roll, graduates several of them might be and anyhow of
consequence in the quarter, each probably with a manservant to
bring him his tiffin at noon. I can guess pretty well what their
answer would have been: ‘Sir: we are not illiterate cultivators and
we don’t take Gandhiji for an incarnation of God, no; but he is
living closer to God, Sir, than we people, much closer.’ Thirdly,
what did the sophisticated think, the nationalist élite on whom the
task would soon devolve of con structing Independent India? The
most notable of them came out in the open on this issue at a well-
remembered juncture. It was January 1934 and Gandhi was half-
way through one of his fantastic tours, thousands of miles of it,
collecting money for the Harijan cause, when an earthquake shook
and devastated considerable areas of the Bihar province. It was so
violent that the Daniell engravings I had on the walls of my rooms
in the old Collector’s House at Allahabad, an eight- or ten-hour
train journey away, swung on the hooks. When news of the
tragedy was brought to Gandhi he promptly issued a
pronouncement that the calamity was a punishment for the sin of
Untouchability. Nehru, who had taken the Natural Sciences Tripos
at Cambridge could not stomach this, and did not mince his
words. In a scornful rejoinder he deplored the airing of antiquated
views ‘opposed to the scientific outlook’. The public then attended
to a curious debate in which the refractory lieutenant never had a
chance. The laws of God were unknown, Gandhi argued, and
hence there was nothing to disprove the causal connexion between
the disaster and Untouchability of which, for his part, he had
received intimation. Nehru gave up. India, or most of it, was
persuaded that the population of Bihar had been visited by the
wrath of God. The intelligentsia, then, of which Jawaharlal Nehru

was a shining exemplar, was averse to the veneration of the saint.
But it was, notwithstanding, patently prepared to revere the
saintly character; and this reverence, almost awe, was of such
depth that in crisis after crisis within the Party Gandhi emerged
as its undisputed master.
How did it come about in our twentieth century that a whole
society set this man apart from his fellows and above them? I
think because every Hindu, whatever his station, had been
conditioned by his religious upbringing to dwell on saintliness,
much as we in Europe did in the Middle Ages but do no longer,
and subconsciously to await its embodiment. In the person of
Gandhi he sensed just that blend of renunciation of desire and
service to mankind which Scripture taught him was the mark of
sainthood.
Now according to hallowed Hindu teaching, these coupled
attitudes of renunciation and service could not be stoked save by
a rare fuel which is tapas. I was to notice in any talks I had about
Gandhi with Indian colleagues that tapas always cropped up.
Literally ‘heat’ in Sanskrit, it is the ardour which impels. Looking
back I have no doubt that my companions were right: this was the
quality which sustained him in those attitudes. But an attitude,
all said and done, is a posture with reference to something, not
that something itself. That would be for the saint to choose, and
Gandhi chose Ahimsa, Non-Violence, the anthithesis of Himsa
which is Violence. He was being one hundred percent Indian here,
not borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount as some, or from
Tolstoy as others, would have us believe. Ahimsa lies deeply
embedded in ancient Hindu piety, being pin-pointed in the
Mahabhamt as ‘the highest duty.’ Moreover, to come very near
home, it was the way of the Jains whose company Gandhi, born in
Kathiawar which is a stronghold of the sect, much frequented in his
youth; it is the Way of the Jains who must not be farmers lest
they harm the earth with the plough, who cover their mouths with
a veil to save insects of the air from injury. Of course, no more
than ‘Charity’, which is perhaps its nearest equivalent in English,
is this Ahimsa a passivity —let not the ‘A’, the ‘Non’ of Himsa
mislead! On the contrary, Gandhi insisted, it is a forceful,
aggressive and, in the last resort, irresistible activity. Being an
activity it has to be put into practice, has to be applied; and its
practical application in life is Satyagraha. The term, a neologism
meaning ‘Truth-Firmness’, he hit upon to express a technique of
his own invention. Satya is a ‘truth’ or ‘that which is’, or ‘the real’,
and about this there must be ‘firmness’. The least wavering, and
the cause, Ahimsa, is lost. And to the pilgrim who employs this
exacting technique Gandhi gave the name Satyagrahi: Mr Valiant-
for-Truth, if you like, progressing towards a beckoning bliss.
Progressing towards it, for there is no suggestion that Ahimsa is
an end; it is a duty, a mission. The goal, whether for Gandhi or for
his disciples, is nothing less than Moksha, that state of ultimate
Salvation in which, as Hindus hold, there is release from birth and
death. It was in pursuit of this goal, Gandhi declared, that he lived
and moved and had his being. If these concepts seem to us
strangely fluid, let us remember they are Hindu concepts; if the
resultant doctrine is a counsel of utopian perfection, remember it
was enunciated by a saint.
As the world knows, Gandhi was dubbed the ‘Mahatma’ (usually
translated ‘Great Soul’)—the title had caught on as irrevocably in
the West as in India itself. I have read somewhere that it went out
of vogue in the later years of his life, but this is not so. Mahatma
Gandhi ki Jay, ‘Victory to the Mahatma!’ was the slogan of the ‘42
rebellion as I intend to relate presently, and I heard it chanted as
vociferously as ever in the very last act when the ‘Mahatma’, victim
of the assassin’s bullets, was being borne on his bier through the
avenues of New Delhi en route for the Burning Ghat. What is true
is that he himself came to dislike the title. And why, after having
accepted it for many, many years he changed his mind about it
can, I fancy, be understood if we recall who it was that conferred
it on him in the first place. It was Rabindranath Tagore in a letter
written to him in 1915. Now Tagore had followed through in the
succeeding years, and very publicly indeed, not with the praise of
this ‘Mahatma’ but with blame and, what was worse, sarcasm.
Gandhi grew to suspect that the rival sage had had his tongue in
his cheek, all the time, and the galling fact was he might have
detected the irony from the start. Strictly ‘Mahatma’ means ‘Great
Spirit’ not ‘Great Soul’, the Greek pneuma not the Greek psyche,
and could only be applied to one who has, in the perfect tense,
attained the Moksha which is total liberation. The Bhagavad Gita
had said it: ‘These [Mahatmas]…have come to Me, they never
again return to birth…they have reached the last fulfilment…have
taken on the nature of God’. The mockery had been thinly
disguised.
3.
THE CALL OF THE ARENA
This indubitable saint was fired, we saw, with a burning resolve to
serve his people. Now the chief service of which it stood in need,
was moral regeneration, and Gandhi’s ‘constructive programme’,

as it was known, of hand-spinning, basic education, the removal of
Untouchability and the rest, was consciously framed to effect this.
However, in India’s case such a reform of character was thwarted;
morale, he insisted, could not revive in an atmosphere of political
subjection. To express what he was after, there was an ancient
term Swaraj meaning ‘self-discipline’; and then, lo and behold, the
very word came to his rescue for in the old Sanskrit speech this
had signified ‘independent sway’ as well as ‘self-control’. Thus
Swaraj was the heaven-sent device appropriate to India’s banner
from now on, her watchword in the moral cause and in the
political cause indiscriminately. And just as the political Swaraj
was the necessary concomitant of the moral Swaraj, so this saint
in the lineage of the Rishis of old was of necessity a politician. Of
the individual and collective comportment he expected to flow from
his Swaraj he gave enough indication to reassure the high and
mighty. He staunchly defended the caste system, and the
accumulation of capital was not among the activities he deplored.
No social equality in private communications was thus calculated
to supervene, which pleased old-fashioned Hindus; no socialism
either, to the relief of the magnates contributing to Party funds. In
fact, no ‘ism’ of any description—not even ‘Gandhism’, he liked to
add with a twinkle. To be sure, his ideal of an India of self-
governing villages was pooh-poohed by nationalist leaders
enamoured of the apparatus of parliamentary democracy and ‘sold’
on the prospect of an industrialised society, but for them, too,
Gandhi was the leader who matched up to the moment.
Again and again I would hear it said by his admirers and
detractors both, that the agitator was a completely different
person from the visionary. But let us dismiss such nonsense.
Emphatically we have to do with a man who to his dying day,
when he fell victim to political assassination with ‘Ram! Ram!’ the
name of God on his lips, was ‘in character’; we have not to do with
—the phrase of Robert Louis Stevenson is tempting—‘a fellow who
was two fellows’. The celebrated Gandhian fast, popularly
associated in the West with his career in the arena rather than the
cloister but in fact common to both, illustrates this to perfection.
It was, being Gandhi’s, a thoroughly Hindu fast, hallowed by the
ages and now harnessed to actuality. From ancient times there
had been a practice known as ‘sitting put’ (dharna baithna), and I
have never met a Hindu, educated or uneducated, who could not
tell me what that meant. It meant sitting doggedly, and fasting
unto death if need be, at the doorstep of an obstinate debtor until
he paid up or you died; in which second case he would have your
ghost to reckon with for the remainder of his days! Dharna

baithna, in short, was twisting an opponent’s mind instead of his
wrist to get something out of him, and as a method of distraint
requiring courage, ruthlessness and persistence it appealed to the
Gandhi who was so richly endowed with these qualities. It
appealed to him also as a method capable of application far
outside the private field; that is, in the social field: in the political
field itself. So we watch the fasting and praying Gandhi treating a
sinful Hindu society as a debtor unwilling to discharge a crying
obligation to the Untouchables. We watch the fasting and praying
Gandhi casting the British Empire in the role of the debtor who
owed India her freedom and would not pay up.
That Western observers should fall for Gandhi’s personal
magnetism was understandable—we on the spot fell for it
ourselves. Less comprehensible, however, was Western gush
about his celebrated modus operandi, his employment of ‘the
Force which is born of Non-Violence’. Just now we saw him
drawing inspiration from the Way of the Jains, but perhaps I did
not bring out the degree to which they too, like the Saint in his
turn, operated a kind of shuttle service between the Ahimsa of the
individual and the non-violent attitude of the collectivity—with no
jolt in thought or action. Historically, in their case it had paid off.
Historically, the peaceable Gujaratis, faced with the martial
Marathas who harried and pillaged them, had behaved very
sensibly; and that model community in their midst who were the
Jains, spearhead—if the expression be allowed—of the non-violent
onslaught, the Jains who eschewed agriculture because the
plough hurt the soil, had raised themselves into a proficient and
incidentally very affluent commercial community. The Gujarati
Saint not only knew all about this, but perceived that the scene
was nowadays being restaged at national level: an unarmed
society was being vexed by a martial race; in this instance, the
British. And no other weapon than the Non-Violent agitation was
to hand.
The Congress command was open about this: there was scarcely
a leader who would not tell you his Party adopted Non-Violence as
a tactic, and Nehru never concealed that they were making a
parade of what they did not believe to be a virtue.
Lord Irwin as Viceroy—and his sympathy with Gandhi was
extreme—had judged him to be the victim of unconscious
selfdeception over the whole thing, and this may well have been
the case in the earlier phase. But it is doubtful whether Gandhi
clung to his faith as the years and events unfolded; whether, for
example, he believed, as he pretended ad nauseam in the opening
days of the War that soul force, moral authority, resolutely exerted
would reduce Hitler to repentance. And there must, one can only
suppose, have been moments when he despaired of its power to
move the comparatively tender-hearted English. What Gandhi was
thinking in petto we could not know of course, but we could draw
our own conclusions when, as happened time and again he called
a movement off, put the blame rather disingenuously on the
Satyagrahis who had not come up to scratch, shook the dust of the
arena from his feet and—for the immediate while, anyhow—
refreshed his mind and spirit in the unvitiated air of moral reform.
Over the span of the years a magistrate in my shoes was
inclined to prefer Tagore’s summing-up to the gentler judgment of
Lord Irwin. To Tagore—and plenty of us in the I.C.S. wished we
had thought of this ourselves—Gandhi was a man ‘of natural
cleverness in manipulating recalcitrant facts.’ It was perhaps an
unkind hit by a rival whose nose was out of joint, but it was a hit.
Of what man could it be more aptly remarked that while clinging
tenaciously to his purpose he got round whatever stood in the
path? Fervid for his goal, he was never so attached to his way that
he was not prepared to abandon it in favour of some other. If you
plotted Gandhi’s course on a chart it would resemble the very ivy
to which the Roman poets ascribed the two epithets ‘tenacious’
and ‘ambitious’ —the latter in its primary meaning of going round
things!
This Gandhi had no special field: his thoughts and actions were
coterminous with life. But whilst he wrote indelibly upon the page
of history, it was in what I have termed above the unvitiated
climate of moral reform, and not in the noisome atmosphere of
politics with which the outer world connected him, that he
triumphed. In politics his achievement was to set the tone, and no
more. India was being shepherded at a measured pace towards
independence by her foreign rulers, and this would have come
when it did without Gandhi. Indeed it can be plausibly, if
inconclusively, argued that Gandhi by sedulously confusing the
bid for freedom with the revival of inherently Hindu values
shattered the dream, his own as much as anybody’s, of national
unity after we had gone. But in that other area of his endeavour,
there he raised a monument more durable than brass.
4.
DO OR DIE
‘Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you. You may imprint it
on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it.
The mantra is: Do or Die.’
In this stirring call, worded, as will be seen, by a master of the
English language, there was no ambiguity. But lest any should be
in doubt as to its meaning it was repeated in plain, emphatic
Hindustani. And there was this also about it that to Hindus a
mantra is of holy alloy; it is a sacred text, a spiritual instruction. It
was uttered on 8 August 1942, and the occasion was a meeting of
the All India Congress Committee in Bombay.
None of us was really taken aback. During the last couple of
months Gandhi—for the author of the mantra was none other
than the Apostle of Ahimsa—had been working himself up into a
mood of, in his own phrase, ‘open rebellion’, and doing this, as he
did everything, with no small publicity. Had he not just three
weeks previously written in his weekly Harijan that although he
did not ‘want’ bloodshed as a direct result of a show of strength, if
this did take place it could not be helped? His position could not
have been more nakedly stated.
Thus the Gandhi who had broken down and wept as he pictured
Westminster Abbey in ruins had suffered a sea-change, and most
noticeably since the preceding spring. In March the British
Government had made India an unequivocal promise of Dominion
Status immediately hostilities should end. This was remembered
as the ‘Cripps offer’ after the envoy, member of the War Cabinet
and a personal friend of Nehru, who had proceeded to Delhi in
order to explain it viva voce. It was rejected with contumely alike
by the Congress Party which demanded that power should be
handed over to them without more ado, and by the Muslim League
whose idée fixe by that time was Pakistan. The subsequent report
to Parliament that whereas our spokesman had flown many
thousands of miles to meet the Indian leaders, these had moved
not one step to meet each other, reflected the situation; but of
course it fell far short of acquainting the nation with the
underlying reason for the mission’s failure. This was that the offer
came two-and-a-half years late. Had it been made in September
1939—that is, before we looked like losing the War, and before
there was any talk of Pakistan, it would beyond a shadow of doubt
have been accepted. But by this date—what? Not only had all
hope of India’s unity been blasted, but the war had gone from bad
to worse. Rangoon had fallen a bare fortnight before Cripps
touched down at Delhi airport; on the very morning the

negotiations opened, news came of the Japanese occupation of the
Andaman Islands, an outpost of British India; and a few days later
bombs were raining on the seaboard towns of the Madras
Presidency. So while the Muslim Leaguers, apparently divorcing
the war from their minds altogether, were vowing that by God they
would have Pakistan, the Congress ‘high command’ convinced
themselves that we were promising what it would never be ours to
grant, that India was on the verge of suffering the fate of Malaya
and Burma, that the offer was ‘a post-dated cheque on a failing
bank’. That biting phrase is always attributed to Gandhi himself
but one does not quite hear him uttering it. It is much more in the
style of the glib young journalists of, say, the extremist National
Herald. Class it perhaps with, and let it be counter-balanced by,
the more hearten ing rejoinder, apocryphal likewise, that also
went the rounds in those dark hours: that of our Sepoys arriving
up country wounded or on leave, who, when told by defeatists
dressed in Khaddar, the homespun symbol of defiance of our rule,
that the Japanese would be in Delhi in a few days, flung back:
‘Not with this bloody awful train service, they won’t’.
So Cripps had been sent packing, and ‘the chief servant of the
nation’ turned his back once and for all on the realities of Indian
politics. He could not wait any longer, he declared, for freedom:
the Congress was ‘to take delivery’ of the British Raj, and then
promote unity. The bombs, which had been falling on Chittagong
aerodrome and the Imphal bazaar and cantonments, would cease
to fall because the Japanese would no longer have any motive for
dropping them.
Such, in sum, was the position on that 8 August 1942 when
Gandhi’s mantra was received by the Congress following: which is
to say, by a cross-section of Indian society ranging from some of
the most talented and high principled in the land to the rabble in
the back streets of twenty cities and harbouring between these
opposite poles the organized left wing revolutionaries.
‘I want freedom immediately,’ Gandhi had declared in his
speech: ‘this very night, before dawn…’ The hour accentuated the
urgency of the words, for it was close upon midnight as he uttered
them. It was between one and two in the morning that he got to
bed and he was having oil rubbed on his head in the usual way
when the telephone rang. Some well-wisher on the line had heard
a rumour that Bapu was going to be arrested. Gandhi had made
one extraordinary pronouncement that night, and now he was to
make another. ‘Never,’ he said—and I am citing the words as they
were repeated by the disciple who was at his bedside—‘never! It’s
impossible after what I have just been saying in the meeting.’ Then
he went to sleep peacefully and unconcerned.
At daybreak he was arrested together with the Party’s ‘high
command’. Simultaneously the All India Congress Committee and
the provincial branches were declared unlawful associations. We
picture the dawn drive to Victoria Terminus where the saloon
special was drawn up. The destination was Poona—and the prison
in Gandhi’s case was to be the Agha Khan’s palace. As Kalyan
Station flashed past and receded, the rebels were politely
motioned to the dining-car where a slap-up breakfast with
waiters, menus and the rest of it had been prepared. The senior
guest characteristi cally disapproved of these frills; but, and again
characteristically, allowed the reigning Martha to bring him
something along the corridor to his compartment
5.
DOING OR DYING IN DELHI
Gandhi’s rebellion made sense if you assumed, as he did, that the
Allies could not win. If the Raj could be wrested from us before we
went under, then clearly India’s position vis-à-vis the Japanese
would be changed for the better. He had devoted little thought to
the operation he had taken upon himself to direct, for it was not
his habit to do much homework. Apparently everything was left to
the general staff, and very sedulously it had applied itself to the
job. The brunt of the attack fell on our lines of communication;
which is to say, on the United Provinces and Bihar. Mobs
destroyed some two hundred and fifty railway stations, at least
that number of post offices, and upwards of one hundred and fifty
police thanas. For a time Bengal and Assam were cut off from the
rest of India, and the units, Indian in their large proportion,
defending the north-east frontier were deprived alike of their
means of reinforcement and their sources of supply. Two adjacent
areas were affected as well; namely, the Central Provinces and
Delhi itself. It was in the former and, ironically enough near
Wardha where, as I have recounted, Gandhi had his famous,
rather cranky Ashram and where, therefore, his doctrine of
Ahimsa, Non-Violence, might if anywhere have sunk in, that a
crime of extreme savageness was perpetrated. At the outlying little
centre of Chimur the Sub-Divisional Magistrate, the Circle
Inspector of Police, the Naib-Tahsildar and a humble Javan in a
khaki tunic and scarlet pagri—their very designations belong to a
page of our history that has long since been turned—were offered
their lives if they promised to join the Congress. They refused, and
were then murdered in cold blood. The loyalty of the civil services
and the police, of which this was only a sublime example, marked
the whole insurrection—and governed its issue. None of this
surprised the ‘clod-hopping’ Collectors in the Districts whom
twenty years of intimate association had taught to trust their
subordinates absolutely. But suppose things had been otherwise.
Suppose those subordinates in their hundreds of thousands,
magistrates, revenue-assistants, clerks, chaprasis etc, had been
untrue to those whose salt they had eaten—and presum ably
Gandhi was counting on that to happen—then the scales of the
balance of War would have been tipped to our disaster.
On the morning after the Bombay arrests, a dozen or so
demonstrators held up my car as I was going to office at my usual
hour, and started banging the bonnet and roof with sticks. When I
got out and shouted at them to desist a couple of them ripped my
shirt half off. However, let me explain, in extenuation of this
incivility, first that our shirts in India tore very easily through
overmuch laundering and second that these demonstrators were
not real rowdies but simply overwrought adolescents. Of course
they had recognized my car by the ‘D.I’ number-plate, of course
they had waylaid me of set intention, but they seemed not to have
thought further ahead than that. In Hindustani you can say a
person is pukka (lit. ‘cooked through’) or that he is kachcha, and it
was obvious that these youths were ‘half-baked’, did not do
anything properly. Certainly did not scrag me properly. My orderly
dealt one of them a heavy cuff and I jumped back into my car. My
Gurkha chauffeur went into gear, accelerated sharply, and sent
two or three of the others sprawling in the roadway.
A mild enough scuffle therefore; but on past showing such
exhibitions of juvenile effervescence heralded an offensive by the
Congress Party’s lower echelons in concert with the underground
revolutionary groups. We were about to live laborious days. In a
chapter about Gandhi I must not describe what happened next in
any depth; but neither, in a chapter about Gandhi must I ignore
altogether the response of his following, in many cases his
perplexed following, to the mantra he had given them.
Let me just recall in a sentence that the Delhi Province was
administered by the Home Department of the Government of India
through a Chief Commissioner, Arthur Vivian . at this date; that
the Province was territorially coterminous with a ‘District’; that
qua District it had like any other District its Zila Magistrate; and
that like the more important among the Districts up and down the
continent it ranked as a Brigade Area with a couple of battalions
usually present for the District Officer to call upon in an
emergency. In a previous chapter I was saying something of the

additional duties, Civil Defence, A.R.P. and so forth created by the
War. These had by now so multiplied as to allow little time for
much else, and some weeks back, consequently, I had been
relieved of magisterial work by a Punjab Civilian, W.G. Lebailly.
His arrival had made us one up on peacetime strength; but, alas,
this new colleague was to be laid low by a severe head wound in
the very first hour of the insurrection.
If, then, what I now recount sounds like a District show, well,
that is what it was. Because every so often I managed to get
through to ‘Mike’ Askwith at the end of a telephone, because every
so often he and I corresponded orally through our Indian
subordinates, somebody—and I neither knew nor cared who—in
the imposing Imperial Secretariat over the way could attempt to
piece things together if he wished. But at no stage, either during
the revolt or when it was over did the Viceroy nor any member of
his Executive Council, nor any Permanent Secretary, nor the
Commander-inChief (though I had had troops out in the streets of
Delhi for a whole week) require me to explain why I had done this
or why I had not done that. Herein was the flavour of a system
that had lasted a hundred years without change—and was about
to perish.
When order had been restored it fell to me to draft the official
report on the Delhi rebellion of 1942, and eventually this will be
accessible in the archives to whoever cares to read it. Meanwhile I
can but select patchily from a picture which, vivid as ever here
and there, has almost faded in other places. It was three days
after the warning little episode of my own on the Alipur Road—
time, that is, for the agreed signals to be sent out and received—
that the hour struck. A mob of many thousands materialized out
of nothing in the Chandni Chowk. Whether New Delhi as the seat
of imperial rule would be the next target, or a target at all, of the
rebels was to be seen; but the odds were against this. It sheltered
no canaille, it hated the profane crowd, its richer Congressmen,
industrialists and mill-owners, had been shocked by Gandhi’s
mantra. Broadly, the standing arrangement in case of civil
disturbances was to seal the exits from the bazaars both towards
New Delhi on the one side and towards Civil Lines, the Kashmere
Gate area, and Qudsia Gardens—those old evocative place-names
of the Mutiny—on the other; also at the same time to alert the
commander of the troops stationed in the Red Fort. This ‘riot
scheme’, as we termed it, had instantly been brought into effect.
From that stage on we should simply have to react to
developments. Delhi Congressmen consisted of the respectables
who could be counted on to wait and see which way the cat
jumped and the riff-raff of the back streets barely better than
goondas, hooligans, who—why speculate on what they would do?
They were out in the Chandni Chowk now, and by the look of it
interpreting the Mahatma’s exhortation as a licence to kill.
I have good reason to remember that opening hour: there was
first the message that Bill Lebailly had been knocked out in an
initial clash with the insurgents, and there was another to say
Denys Kilburn who had chanced to be in the City’s central police
station, the Kotwali, was trapped there. It was a Hindu merchant
who had sounded this second alarm, the police wires having been
severed, and I pick here on an early proof of what, in Delhi
anyhow, was to mark the sequel: namely, that secure society,
while revering the saint was unready to go along with the
politician in this latest adventure. I hurried to the Police
Headquarters at Kashmere Gate where the Deputy
Superintendent, a greying Sikh near the age of retirement, was at
his desk. News was coming in, he informed me, of fresh trouble
spots, particularly along the limits of the Municipality fronting the
Ridge and Civil Lines. The SubPolice Station there was being
stormed, and at Delhi Junction two signal cabins had been burnt
and some track pulled up. A large building in the neighbourhood,
the Railway Clearing Accounts Office, was ablaze and two sub-
inspectors of police had been murdered while attempting to protect
it. Their bodies had been mutilated and were being paraded in
front of the jeering multitude. Both were Muslims, he said, and it
was no idle remark.
It was none too soon for the use of troops. Happily the line to
the Red Fort was functioning, and I asked for one Company to
move into the City and a second Company to get ready to follow. I
told the Deputy Superintendent I would go to the Chowk. Then
take this, Sir/ he said, seeing me unarmed. And he handed me a
lathi, the six foot bamboo pole, brass-tipped, lethal, which to the
policeman as to the peasant of India is a very present help in
trouble.
Perhaps I was half-way to where the ‘Silver Street’ debouches
when I caught a bass rumour as of a swelling sea. Under the riot
scheme I had a magistrate with a platoon of armed constables near
the entrance to the famous thoroughfare, and in a couple of
minutes I was being brought abreast of a sufficiently nasty
situation. The police had been attacked with brickbats—no need
to tell me, the roadway stretching a hundred yards in front of us
was littered with them—had been rushed, had opened fire. The
mob had retreated, and seemed to me to be pausing, mechanically
yelling Mahatma Gandhi vivats, but that was about all. I could not
doubt that the real weight was not against us, it was further up,
in the very heart of the Chowk and thrown against Denys’
beleagured band. I suppose the rhythmic tap of ammunition boots
crossing the metalled surface of the square behind us was
drowned in the uproar, and I was facing the other way. Anyhow
before I expected it a Company Commander was asking for
instructions. His men and he had no experience, he began, of this
kind of thing, and I fear I told him unfeelingly they were not going
to like it. We had to go down the Chandni Chowk right to the end,
where the mosque stood, at the tempo, half the tempo, of a dead
march, I said. The police contingent would lead to begin with, but
we’d probably have to pull them in. The mob, as he could see, was
armed with sticks, lathis, and crowbars but there were some shot
guns, too, and a few—a very few—rifles presumably snatched from
scuppered pickets. And—a novel sight for him, if not for me—a
hero here and there in the van was clasping a small child to his
chest by way of protective clothing. Just for the form of it my
magistrate shouted through his megaphone an order to disperse;
just for the form, a warning that the police would be compelled to
fire. Of the constables who had reported for duty that morning not
a few had done so for the last time, and their surviving comrades
had no room left for squeamishness. They fired and fired again
with their smoothbore muskets enough times to demonstrate that
their volleys were too feeble: there was some scampering back,
there were twenty wriggling bodies on the ground, but no lanes
were opening in that heaving mass. I called back the policemen; it
was now for the soldiers. Several of these young chaps had gone
very white by this time and after a first round more than one of
them was flat on the road, vomiting. After a second round the
crowd was visibly yielding and we went slowly forward. Ten or
fifteen minutes later Denys’ people were coming out alive and
Denys himself leading them. As more and more of the throng
escaped into the side-alleys, doing some hasty looting as they fled,
the Chowk began to clear so that I even got intermittent glimpses
of the Fatehpuri Mosque down to pavement level—and of a very
ugly spectacle in front of it: a serried gathering of our Muslim
butcher community. They had been waiting, their long knives
gleaming, to see what we were going to do.
Leaving Denys Kilburn to clean up in the Chandni Chowk and
attend to the City’s centre, I set off for Civil Lines in a police truck
to see how our check points were holding on that side. I would
circle back into municipal limits from there. The British Infantry
could stand at ease until I returned. At one of the road blocks on
the slope to the Ridge I came to my astonishment upon Bill

Lebailly. He had crawled from his hospital bed when nobody was
looking and here he was holding off an attack, as it happened,
just as we drove up from the rear. I see him still, his head heavily
bandaged, astride the barricade, hear him bellowing his orders in
the stentorian voice that none who knew him can forget. But
unless my memory is letting me down, he had to be carried back
immediately afterwards to the ward from which he had played
truant. For myself, I went from there by a route that dropped
towards Daryaganj and came out almost opposite the Railway
Clearing Accounts Office—or rather its smouldering remains. The
crowd there was excited but lacking direction, and the police,
firing with deliberation were not in danger of being worsted. Young
McClintock, our very junior Assistant Superintendent of Police,
was in charge of them, his revolver at his hip, and I stayed long
enough to be able to commend him joylessly on the accuracy of
his aim. Long enough also to learn that the corpses of the two sub-
inspectors had been burned after their mutilation. Islam does not
like its dead to be burned, and Muslims in the Force would take
some restraining in the coming days. And one chagrin yet. A lovely
precious fire-engine, long awaited and recently delivered from
England for our A.R.P., instead of fighting the conflagration had
been shoved into it by the malefactors and had added fuel to the
flames.
It would continue for several days, the pillage and the arson and
the attempts on police pickets—but diminuendo. Several days in
which military patrols would be rattling through the bazaars
dispersing assemblies of five or more persons; several days of
curfew and the shooting at sight of any so ill-advised as to break
it. This in Delhi: in eastern U.P. and in Bihar the doing or dying
lasted weeks, as against our days, before the Congress Party
publicly conceded, though not quite in these words, that the saint
who had stooped had failed to conquer.
13
TWO YEARS TO GO
1.
‘LOOK HERE, UPON THIS PICTURE, AND ON
THIS.’
The war is over. The war is over, and in this hour of victory we
address ourselves to the fulfilment of a solemn pledge. We gave it
four years ago: it was that when hostilities should have ceased we
would accept whatever constitution seemed good to the major
elements in this country’s politics. The path to freedom is now
unbarred.
‘Long, long ago in the story, indeed before the French Revolution,
when a Bill was being debated in the House of Commons which
sought to impose on India the kind of rule that seemed
appropriate to her British masters, Burke stood up to speak. “We
are on a conspicuous stage,” he exclaimed, “and the world marks
our demeanour.” At that distant date, and at each successive
phase in India’s political advance, it has been enough, if things
went awry, to lay the blame at Britain’s door. This time it is for
her own statesmen to determine her destiny; and by that same
token it is they who are now on a conspicuous stage, it is their
demeanour that the world will mark.’
Was this too high falutin as an opening, I asked myself as I read
it through. Or would it pass? I had got out of bed exceedingly early
that Sunday morning and spent an unconscionable time drafting
it. The place was Agra, the period ‘the aftermath’, and the occasion
—well, this had been created by a couple of hundred wartime
officers, on the average my juniors by twelve to fifteen years,
attached to the Central Command, whose only wish was to be off
home and out of uniform. Three or four weeks previously, the night
sky over the City, a mile away, had been reddened with the glow
of leaping flames, the night air laden with the dull roar of battling
crowds. We had been in the midst of a gruesome exhibition of
communal violence. The solicitors, schoolmasters, insurance

agents, farmers, musicians (there was one—he had enquired if I
could introduce him to someone with a piano), engineers, or
whatever they were or intended to become in civil life had, it
seemed, been studying the English-language press. They had
gathered that the principal Party, the Congress, was led by Nehru,
the Old Harrovian in Indian dress who was apt to fly off the
handle quite frequently, while the Muslims were united in their
League behind a barrister of la-di-da manner, one Jinnah,
photographed in well-tailored clothes, who had a habit of saying
caustic things about ‘a Hindu Raj’ and about ‘a holy humbug’.
And by the way, where was Gandhi these days? He appeared to
have handed over to his impetuous lieutenant, now that the latter
had been released from jail. But weren’t they all Indians together,
these people, and hadn’t we promised them independence? Why
then the delay? The upshot had been that General Scoones, the
G.O.C, pressed me to give a talk in Cantonments about what was
going on.
I decided the best method of filling my allotted forty-five minutes
would be to develop the thesis, the surely tenable thesis, that
India was a unity and then go on to account for the birth of the
‘two-nation’ theory, the antithesis so to say, which quite recently
had put a sprag in the wheel to which the British, as energetically
as the nationalists themselves, had for a quarter of a century and
more been putting their shoulders. When I had finished, my
hearers paid me the compliment of asking a lot of questions. Most
of these I could answer, but one I could not. And it was crucial:
What were we going to do about it?
During the twenty-four months which separated the surrender
of the Japanese from the date on which, forcing the pace, we left
India to fend for herself, the I.C.S. in the Districts went on doing
the things they had always done and doing them in the time-
honoured way: keeping public order, dealing out justice that was
sometimes rough but invariably ready, exacting the payment of
fairly assessed taxes, maintaining the land records—all the old
round. And if I have conveyed the impression above that we were
distracted by the political issues of the hour, I must correct it. It
was just that in certain of the larger centres we might be
interrogated about the situation and invited to comment on it—
and Agra to which, on returning to my Province I had to my great
joy been assigned once again after an interval of eight years, was
one such place. In the sequel of that stilted lecture I delivered to
the officers of the wartime Central Command located there, I was
to have more relaxed and much lengthier talks with several
TWO YEARS TO GO 241
members of a Parliamentary Delegation out from England who

were under my roof for several days, and also some briefer but
equally intimate conversations with two Cabinet Ministers (their
names will come lower down) who in the course of a somewhat
exhausting one-day visit primarily devoted to sight-seeing took the
opportunity, a novel one they assured me, of some soundings at
the headquarters of an Indian District. In short, a Zila Sahib
conforming to the standard, I was now and again jolted, after
hours as it were, into reducing to some sort of order the untidy
thoughts that cluttered my mind in those concluding months of
Empire. If I am able to recover them here, that is because each
one of them was born of some private experience which of its own
right has remained safe in my memory.
At the beginning of the previous chapter we watched Mahatma
Gandhi exciting the curiosity, and eliciting the smile, of the
London crowd in the year 1931; we did not follow him into the
Conference chamber. Had we been able to do so, we should have
listened to his intervention on the item of the Hindu-Muslim
schism, and in particular to the sentence: ‘This quarrel is not old
…I dare to say it is co-eval with the British advent.’ At this
pronouncement—and I was told it by one of the Indian delegates
and not by any member of the home team—many at the round table
rolled their eyes upward to the ceiling in despair. The hackneyed
charge of Divide and Rule—couldn’t the saint do better than that!
But of course Gandhi was right. His performance at the Round
Table Conference might be, indeed was, disappointing, and the
inference he intended to be drawn from this specific remark might
be, and was, false. But if he was baldly stating that Indian society
contracted a certain disease after and not before a certain
historical event, of course he was quite right.
The English-speaking world of my mother’s generation, or at
least a small and perhaps precious fragment of it, had been
offered and been carried away by a little volume entitled One
Hundred Poems of Kabir. The translation made by Rabindranath
Tagore in collaboration with Miss Evelyn Underhill introduced the
West to a mystic of the calibre of St Augustine or Ruysbroeck. I
spoke of Kabir in my chapter on the Indo-Muslims, and I must
bring him in again. I want to cite him because this poor weaver of
fifteenth century Benares—of an epoch, that is, when India was
already dominated by men of alien race and other faith—went
about the countryside calling himself ‘The child of Allah and of
Ram’, and twining together, as he might have woven contrasting
threads upon his own loom, all that made for division in the
attitudes and the practices of those around him. To this rustic
singer whose name proclaimed him a Muslim but whose aspect

suggested the Brahmin ascetic, the whole apparatus of piety was
an impediment to a proper religious approach. ‘The washerwoman
and the carpenter’ had no need to visit the shrine of the Black
Stone at Mecca, or alternatively to climb to the Himalayan abode of
Shiva.
O servant, where dost thou seek me?

Lo! I am beside thee.
I am neither in temple nor in mosque;
I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash.
In the countryside and in the cities of what is now Uttar Pradesh

the people hearkened. The Hindu may not have relished the
sentiment that ‘There is nothing but water at the holy bathing
places’, nor the Muslims have echoed the psalm which dismisses
the Koran as ‘mere words’. But they did think of themselves as
brothers in their common humanity. How otherwise could Kabir
have been permitted to tread his eclectic path so ostentatiously
without being stoned or having his head chopped off ? More than
once, as a matter of fact, he very nearly did fall foul of the
authorities; but the Emperor of the day, Sikandar Lodi, was not
among the bigoted, and on second thoughts decided to tolerate his
eccentricities. Now, as I can myself testify, four hundred and
thirty years or so afterwards those hymns were still being sung
throughout Northern India, and an English Collector could hardly
be many months in Benares or Basti or Gorakhpur before learning
about Kabir and, if he took some interest in Hindi—the psalmist’s
language was of the sirnplest—listening (for there would be many
who were able and willing to sing them in his hearing) to the
hymns in the original. Nor was he, I think, likely to complete a tour
in the direction of Maghar which is situated, if I remember, about
mid-way between the towns of Basti and Gorakhpur, without
becoming acquainted with a peculiarly beautiful legend. It was at
Maghar that Kabir died, and the legend tells how his Hindu and
Muslim followers contested the possession of his body, which the
former wished to cremate and the latter to bury. As they were
arguing over it, the weaver appeared before them and bade them
lift the shroud and look beneath. When they did this, they found
in the place of the corpse a heap of flowers; half of which were
then taken away and buried by the Muslims at Maghar, and half
conveyed in procession by the Hindus to Benares to be burned.
And now let us pursue the trail right into the twilight of our
Mughal predecessors’ regime, and more especially into a society as
TWO YEARS TO GO 243
polite as Kabir’s was unlettered. I am choosing Ghalib as the

spokesman of the period because that is precisely what he was.
His name has occurred already: he is the noble, the wit, the
littérateur to whose poetry Brigadier Powell, the future Rt. Hon.
Enoch Powell M.P. was ‘getting down’ with such amazing aptitude
in the Delhi of my eleventh chapter. Now Ghalib, aristocrat of
Turkish lineage, enjoying the patronage of the Mughal court, had
a host of Hindu intimates and by example as well as precept
protested all his life against everything that savoured of
communal prejudice. There was a couplet of his that
‘encapsulated’, as we now say, his outlook admirably, and both in
Agra where he was born and in Delhi where he mostly resided you
would hear it nostalgically trotted out to the accompaniment of
sighs, so that it stayed in your own ears finally. It does not
translate, but approximately it went:
I stand by Oneness and an end to ritual;

Dismantle the communities, assemble the parts of faith.
His ample correspondence is no less illuminating. Here is the

scion of conquerors from Samarkand writing to an adolescent
Hindu of a Delhi family whose doings and fortunes from almost as
long as he could recall had been part and parcel of his own
background.
‘Your grandfather and I were roughly of the same age…We were
close comrades and used to play chess together; often we would
sit up late into the night. His house was quite near ours, so he
used to drop in sans façon…our mansion is the one that is
nowadays owned by Seth Lakhmi Chand…and I can still see
myself flying my kite from the roof of a house in the adjacent lane
and matching it against Raja Balwan Singh’s.’
It happens, too, that Ghalib’s Delhi is adequately documented
on the British side—we were, as I say, in the process of taking
over from the Mughals in his lifetime—and on the whole it is a
tranquil tableau that the records allow us to reconstruct. So much
so that Dr Percival Spear, the historian of Mughal India and, I am
lucky enough to be able to add, the companion of my own Delhi
days, assures his readers that for the space of fifty years
corresponding to Ghalib’s floruit there is no evidence of a single
outbreak of communal rioting in the capital.
It may be objected that I have my head in the clouds of
literature here, that facts speak louder than letters, that had the
overall Indian condition not been one of strife and discord an
insignificant band of merchants from a remote island in the West
could never have ascended step by step from the status of

enterprising traders to that of political overlords. If so, I mean if I
have invited the criticism, then I have been badly wanting in
clarity. I am not ignoring the centuries of misrule and tyranny. I
am depending on literary sources (do we not do the same in our
attempts to recapture the thought of classical antiquity or of the
Middle Ages or of our own Shakespearian England?) purely and
simply to show that before ‘the British advent’ of Gandhi’s phrase
Hindus and Muslims did in fact manage to live and work
alongside each other in something that approached very close to
amity.
During the period of our rule that spirit evaporated; not however
in the initial century, not even in the middle phase, but in the last
lap of the course. Gandhi, and the Congress behind him, omitted
to observe that the worsening in communal feeling had not set in
whilst our hold on India was tight but only when we began to
relax it. The Hindu-Muslim schism was not causally linked with
our presence; on the contrary, it was the prospect of our
departure that was now accentuating it. Mid-way between the
date of Ghalib’s rather charmingly worded letter which I was
quoting and Gandhi’s 1931 diagnosis of the communal malady, a
warning voice had been heard. It belonged to one whom, as I
noticed on an earlier page, the better educated Muslims of India
and Pakistan still look back on as their G.O.M.: that is, Syed
Ahmad Khan. We have bisected a time span and similarly we
could remark that the occasion too was a half-way house; half-
way on the constitutional road along which we were conducting a
subject people. For we were at that stage deciding to confer self-
government upon India at the level of the local boards and district
councils. Now what Syed Ahmad Khan spelled out so long ago, at
a date, say, when the parents of today’s septuagenarians were
small children, was precisely what we ran into in the final phase.
India being India, he said, and not being England, the
introduction of representative institutions would be attended by
difficulty and grave socio-political risk. Well, the ship sailed on,
but less and less merrily the nearer it drew to the visible reef in
whose direction the West wind was driving it.
Nobody will be misled by the inverted commas within which I am
going to enclose the rest of this section. When the Parliamentary
Delegates and, a little later, two members of the Cabinet Mission
asked me for my own estimate of India’s predicament I made no
notes, and of course after this lapse of time the actual words of my
reply have flown. However, if I have forgotten the words, the
TWO YEARS TO GO 245
instances were of so personal a sort as to be in my mind even

today. It is really these that I am editing below.
‘When I came out to India what struck me was not her diversity,
of which everyone talks and writes, but the unity which underlay
everything. There was that journey up-country from Bombay to
begin with; there were to be, afterwards, journeys from Calcutta to
Peshawar, from Allahabad to Karachi, from Delhi to Hyderabad in
the Deccan. Whenever the train stopped, and this was exceedingly
often, my Muslim bearer, Husain Ali, alias Kalloo, which is pure
Hindi for Bruno because he was the dark one of a fair brood,
would come along to my carriage to report. The signal was against
us; or we were waiting on the loop for the down express to pass us
in fifteen minutes; or the restaurant car would be hitched on late
this trip but in time for dinner; or we could get ice at the next
station; or the monsoon—that gang of coolies repairing the
permanent way had told him—had been nothing like normal, a
proper sūkhā, a drought, hereabouts. The tit-bits of information
with which the tedium of the railway time-table was relieved might
be even more complicated. How, I used to ask myself, could this
lad be at home when so far from it? Put these distances on the
map of Europe and realize how far. Because he was an Indian,
that was the answer. In his case, an Indian from Fyzabad the one-
time Mughal settlement dotted with royal hunting boxes which is
also, under the ancient name Ajodhya, a celebrated setting of
Hindu mythology. India had had her Conquest, it began just when
we had ours, and there had been succeeding waves of invasion by
men of alien culture. But it is in the nature of a wave when it is
passing through a resistant medium to become weaker and fainter
the further it travels. The LBI—J Muslim waves were soaked up in
Indian earth. As the weeks followed on and I looked about me in
the villages and the bazaars of cities I could detect nothing,
positively nothing, that was without an Indian colour. India, I said
to myself, is one country and all its people Indian. And now that
the years have followed on—it will shortly be eighteen of them—
what? Well, in this compound there are a dozen servants, Hindus
and Muslims, who have been together all that time or most of that
time. My bearer you know, and there is his young brother, the fair
boy—both Fyzabadies. The two syces are from Fyzabad’s suburb,
the famed Ajodhya, the cook is from Chittagong, all that immense
way off. The gardeners are Agra men, the dhobi is from Allahabad,
and the sweeper joined us in Delhi. Occasionally, but I hope not
while you are here, there will be squabbling, raised voices, and
they will receive an order to shut up. But never, never once, over
the years has a communal fracas occurred. In Delhi there was a
painful incident leading to blows, and I will relate it for the sake of
the moral. Kalloo’s wife, who had always been delicate, died of
consumption; and those in charge of the cemetery went back on
their word, so that when the funeral procession arrived there was
no burial plot available. Bargaining started for an alternative slice
of earth but Kalloo protested that the piece offered was too narrow,
and the mourners returned. It was then 2a.m. (burials are
commonly at night in the hot weather), and I remember this
vividly because poor Kalloo came to my bedside and woke me up.
“The new plot won’t do,” he said. “Thin as she was, she will not fit
into it.” Why had they come back? The Muslim mourners had come
back for help, and Hindu help was tumbling out. You could hear
the syces stirring in their quarters, the malis coughing and
cursing, and in minutes all the able-bodied of the assorted
household would be at that cemetery presenting a united front to
perfidy. But why take up your time with such stories? Which of us
with an uncle, a cousin or a friend in the Indian Army hasn’t
heard about the comradeship in arms that bridges the communal
gulf in the mixed regiments and battalions; so that in the month
of Ramazan, for instance, when the Muslims have to go without
food and water between sunrise and nightfall, the Hindus will beg
to be allowed to perform their fatigues on top of their own? And is
anyone in England or in the theatres of two World Wars going to
forget that Hindu and Muslim soldiers have known how to stand
shoulder to shoulder, have known how to die together?
‘Something else of relevance here comes back to me while I
am talking, something to do with upper-class people for a change.
Still new to my surroundings, I was invited to an Allahabad house
one evening where the company was elderly—or elderly to my eyes.
Two Hindus, Kashmiri Pandits they were, and prominent enough
for you to recognize their names, reminisced in that room about
their early manhood which must have meant, say, the ‘nineties or
the turn of the century. They said that whilst in the nature of
things ties of kinship were lacking between themselves and their
Muslim contemporaries, other ties were constant and close. They
would not fail, for example, to foregather in each other’s homes to
exchange compliments and congratulations when the great
religious festivals came round, or, if the occasion were a
bereavement, to offer their condolences and pay their last respects.
The older generation, of course, in the milieu I am considering still
do exert themselves to keep these courtesies intact; I can testify to
that from my own observation. So far as the final homage goes, I
remember how as City Magistrate of Allahabad I found myself
once in a large salon, unfurnished save for the chairs ranging the
TWO YEARS TO GO 247
four walls. A prominent Muslim citizen had died, a Shi’a named

Majid Ali, and as we sat there silent and pensive in the domicile of
the deceased I was able to glance along the rows of sorrowing
friends. At least one half of these were Hindus. But for the most
part, the old manners are only signalled nowadays by sighs of
regret. The cultured classes harp on these things continually. One
of the two elders, I think I called them that, of the Allahabad
soirée, is still going strong happily, and in a quite recent
conversation I had with him told me something that sets two
pictures side by side. I made a mental note of it. He told me that
over the entire north of India— the Punjab, the United Provinces,
the Central Provinces, Bihar— precisely in those areas, that is,
where the communities are at the present time so painfully self-
conscious, it was quite impossible when he was a young man to
detect the slightest distinction either in speech or the written style
as between Hindus and Muslims. Distinctions there were; but
they were regional, not religious. The way people express
themselves is an index of the way people feel: fifty years back you
had those millions and millions of Indians feeling a cultural unity,
and now they have lost all sense of this. You could scarcely name
two more distinguished practitioners in the old culture that was
Hindostan’s until yesterday than my two mentors of Allahabad, so
what wonder if they grieved over its decay. But I still haven’t
named them. I told you that you would have heard of them both.
One is the Liberal leader Tej Bahadur Sapru and the other the late
Pandit Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father.
‘I suppose if I had been asked at any time during the early and
middle ‘thirties whether Federation was a practical hope for India
to entertain I would have answered, yes. Yes, she manifestly did
possess the substantial degree of homogeneity between the
component elements which a federation to be a lasting success
requires. Nonetheless I believe I should have had certain qualms
even then, listening to what was being said. One could make
allowance for nostalgia in the milieu of people like Motilal Nehru,
an affluent élite that set great store by appearance and manners.
But what was one to make of the terrible words spoken by Abdur
Rahim, the President of the Central Assembly, before ever we had
Congress ministries, before ever the Round Table Conference met?
IndoMuslims, he said, feel quite at home in the Muslim countries
of Asia but in India, and I’ll quote him: “In India we find ourselves
total aliens when we cross the street and enter that part of the
town where our Hindu fellow-townsmen live.” And there was
Gandhi making matters worse instead of better. In one of his
publications he wrote that it had come to his ears that a pious
Hindu had been pained to learn of his accepting the hospitality of

a Muslim. This is a wrong reaction, Gandhi said: he was not
penitent, he was proud to have “taken toast at the Mussalman’s
hands”. Vis-à-vis the Muslims the Mahatma’s ineptitude is
sometimes beyond belief. A community stemming in fact or fancy
from the Mughals and sharing, or affecting to share, a cultural
tradition with Cairo and Baghdad and Granada does not
appreciate condescension even though it number rather less than
one-quarter of the population. Which brings us to the crux. I am
here on your ground, not mine, but I imagine getting down to
brass tacks, democracy means the rule of the majority, and of
such a rule the Muslims have had a bitter foretaste. When the
Congress arrogantly claiming to stand for the entire populace took
office in various provinces, Congress Raj slid imperceptibly into
Hindu Raj. This, in a nutshell, is why Jinnah and the League who
had in the earlier ‘thirties pooh poohed the notion of Pakistan as
the chimerical and impracticable scheme of a few Indo-Muslim
undergraduates at Cambridge, in 1940 performed a sharp volte-
face and committed themselves to the “two-nation” doctrine to
which they are now wedded.
‘In the course of the last five or six years the Indo-Muslims
at large, and not just an exclusive set of top people to which your
Abdur Rahim, or your Muhammad Iqbal the poet, or their
compeers belong, have become aware for the first time in their
lives that the faith which unites them among themselves divides
them from other Indians. And something else has happened which
I do not think is quite grasped in Westminster—you will contradict
me perhaps—and that is that it is not only Jinnah and company
who want Pakistan, it is the Congress, Gandhi included, who have
got over their initial horror at the thought of the vivisection of
Mother India and are now saying, and saying it pretty crudely: all
right, let them go. Better the Muslims outside than kicking up a
chronic hullabaloo inside. Let them go, good riddance to bad
rubbish. Oh, the thing has gone too far to be halted. At this
moment there is a book the English-educated Muslims are reading
and praising, a most scientific work, according to one of my callers
who lent me his copy. It argues that men living in a dry climate,
eating wheat and accustomed to camels can never enter into
political union with men of a damp climate, eating rice and
accustomed to coconuts. The boundaries of Pakistan thus draw
themselves, and the reader is invited to study these on the maps
at the end illustrating the distribution of the rainfall, the cereals,
the camels and the coconuts. Perhaps I am making too much of a
mere piece of silliness, so I’ll choose another example of extremism,
TWO YEARS TO GO 249
one of evil augury in my judgment. They are mauling people’s

mother tongues and giving even these a communal badge. From
conversation and the press you’ll learn that there are now Muslim
words and Hindu words. From Jinnah you’ll learn that Urdu,
which he does not know, and which is not the mother speech in
any of the predominantly Muslim provinces, is the national idiom
of his Pakistan-to-be. Nehru, not to be outdone, has decided that
foreign words—among which he does not, oddly enough, class
English words—should be dropped and replaced by Sanskrit
equivalents which either exist already or can easily be invented.
He gave as an example the word for handkerchief which is loaned
from the Persian. We must not go on calling it rumal, he said, we
must learn to call it something else. Those who applauded the
policy at least agreed with those who deplored it that the instance
was singularly unhappy. Indians do not use handkerchiefs.
Whether the visitors coming to me three mornings a week between
9a.m. and 11a.m. for these past seventeen years or so have been
townsmen or villagers, Hindus or Muslims, they have all, except
for an occasional toff, wiped their noses, should the need have
arisen, in what to my thinking is an infinitely more hygienic
fashion than the one we favour. This, very often done on the steps
of the verandah before the interview, is to press the right nostril
with the right thumb and blow sharply and then the left nostril
with the tip of the index and blow again. The perfectionist may
lightly pinch the corner of a whitewashed wall or of a door-post as
he passes into the waiting room. I am trying to be funny, I know.
But apart from comic relief I see no other in the sombre picture.’
2.
AT THE HOUSE IN AGRA
The house in Agra had not to my knowledge been featured in any
of those engravings or colour-prints that document so
nostalgically for certain of us the India of the Indo-British; yet it
merited, and would have rewarded, attention of the sort. The
stately lines of its immense porch, the flat roof of the centre block
stepping down to the somewhat lower roofing of the two wings, the
deep verandahs upon which every apartment opened, all spoke of
the period and the life we led in it. Ever since 1803 when Lord
Lake’s army took the region, Agra had been numbered among the
‘Stations’ of upper India and by Kipling’s time was competing
successfully with the select few. In the social sense Kipling would
not have recognized it now. In that narrow sense I hardly
recognized it myself. Fifteen years ago when first I had come here
as a junior magistrate all the heads of the civil departments, and

of the colleges too, had been British. There had been a British
regiment, very keen on polo; Gunners, very keen pigstickers; a
battalion of the Rajputana Rifles whose officers were mad on
shooting. There had been the Saturday Night Dance at the Club,
there had been ‘Agra Week’. No, none of that any more. In this,
the last lap of the Imperial course, I was to find myself the sole
Englishman in the administration. Company, however, I would
not lack; I could count on the society of the Indian heads of the
different departments and of the University; and on the Central
Command, that wartime enclave already mentioned, which was
still there, albeit melting rapidly. Nor, as it turned out, was this
the half of it. I was in for an invigorating deluge of visitors and
house guests. But of them presently. I am only just back in the
Province, and letting my thoughts run on the special delights
denied me these past seven or eight years in the capital—that
Delhi which, except when one is actually there, is
Jim Corbett (see page 256)

TWO YEARS TO GO 251
Maulvi Wali Muhammad Khan of Agra. A teacher and friend over the
years (see page 199)
proverbially ‘far off. The District was the thing, and the District
was its old self. If the Station had dropped in the social scale,
what of that? We were in October, and the cold weather touring
could commence. There would be the avenues of neem trees again
and the mango groves with their long shady aisles so cool after the
hot sunshine; towards Christmas with any luck I would halt at
The house at Agra (see page 250)
Fatehpur Sikri and have them kindle a mighty blaze each evening
in the open which would fling its dancing glare upon the walls of
the deserted city; and, spring approaching, there would be the
flame of the forest, which India names the Dhak, bursting into its
fiery bloom. There would be the peacock spreading his train, not
for me indeed but at least for my entertainment, shivering, rattling
his quills only a few yards from where I sat at my camp table. I
would be addressed as ‘Protector’ or else ‘Mother and Father’ by
all or any of two million enchantingly unaffected peasants given to
bickering amongst themselves and to ingenious lies in the face of
my authority, and whose abiding and central concern was the
state of the crops and the price of kerosene. The student of
constitutional law might describe me as a servant of Parliament,
but my conduct in Agra was unlikely to provoke inquiries in either
of its Houses; the Secretary of State for India was a remote, a
faceless figure; the Viceroy, a real person, would probably descend
on me—but only to shoot duck at nearby Bharatpur; and as for
the Congress ministers who, the war over, had taken office once
more, they were a great deal too jittery to jump on the I.C.S.
Provided I submitted my Fortnightly Report saying what I had
done or what I had decided against doing, I should be left alone to
carry on my day-to-day job as might seem to me best. In the
middle ‘forties of the twentieth century the Head of the District
was a throwback to a bygone age. He saw no occasion for a
telephone at his elbow. Mine was on a side-table in a passage
leading to the typist’s room and so far as I was concerned could
remain there.
TWO YEARS TO GO 253
Just one factor there was to qualify this serene prospect, and I
was shutting it out from my mind deliberately. A winding stone
staircase gave access to the roof of this house in Agra, and every
morning at sunrise, every evening at sunset for the past—what?—
one hundred and thirty years a grave chaprasi had gone up, a
grave chaprasi had come down it with a folded Union Jack under
his arm. I knew the two whose charge it now was; since 1932 I
had known them. I would have trusted them with my life; I would
not trust them to haul down that flag for the very last time. I
should have to do it myself, and the sooner the better I went up on
the roof and had a rehearsal when nobody was looking. You could
never tell, the rope might go foul or something.
The main verandah gave on to the lawn, was spacious,
massively pillared, gracefully curved and paved with the beautiful
red freestone quarried in the neighbourhood. But not so much for
itself does it come back to me now as for the strangely assorted
company that frequented it in those numbered months. Had I
kept a visitors’ book (what bachelor ever did?) it would have been
forgiveable to leave it ostentatiously open at a page, more than one
page, I can think of. They did not come to see me, of course, the
majority of these callers or guests; they came to see the Taj Mahal
principally or, as one important politician put it to me apparently
in all seriousness, to ‘get the feel’ of an Indian District. It does not
happen—at least not to me—that those whose names are
inscribed on the roll of history are automatically the easiest to
recall in after years, and to be frank the person whom I most
vividly remember on that verandah had a striped body, maned
neck and back, high withers and low quarters; was a hyena.
Zoologists maintain that he is only to be encountered on the
outskirts of the jungle, in the depression of a nullah, in caves, in
crevices between boulders. However, there he was on the said
verandah where I was lying in a doze. A tracker in Bahraich once
advised me that when a bear lumbers in your direction, if you lie
down and pretend to be dead he will lollop off; but that the hyena,
should he ever be your vis-à-vis, must be induced to believe the
opposite, since carrion is exactly what he loves to take between
his vicious jaws. You gesture, and wildly because his sight is
indifferent; you yell, and loudly because his hearing is poor. Given
our mutual surprise, our respective reactions were creditable.
Gesticulating vigorously, I bawled to whoever was within earshot—
and in the Indo-British household somebody always was—to fetch
a joint of meat from the larder; and he, for his part, showed no
disposition to gnaw at me meantime. My surmise is that having the
most phenomenal of noses, he had quickly sensed the appetising
fare being borne towards him from the cookhouse door. This he
took very daintily and then, leering visibly, made for the bushes,
whence presently he favoured us with his chattering laugh.
I have been describing an expatriate Englishman who has not
been ‘home’ for touching a decade, has three horses whom he
rejoices to hear stirring and stamping in their stalls during the
night, has tiger skins adorning the walls, panther skins the floor of
his drawingroom, has hog spears on a rack in the vestibule, is
waited on hand and foot by a dozen silently efficient servants; in
brief, is the throwback I called him to the hey-day of the Indo-
British. This considered, the role in which he is on the point of
appearing will seem incongruous: he is about to play host, not for
a few minutes or an hour, or a day, but for a whole week at a
stretch to one of Mahatma Gandhi’s female disciples.
I had never in my service been instructed to approach Gandhi in
any matter. I had, and repeatedly, forced police protection on him
in his comings and goings in Delhi; had—and I think I have said
this earlier—issued a gun licence at the request of G.D.Birla for the
use of a Sikh watchman at Birla House where he used to lodge;
had come to his aid once when his ramshackle old car gave out
close to my gate in Rajpur Road. That was all. Cranky admirers of
his from Europe and America would wend their way to the
Sweepers Colony in Delhi to pay homage, to have darshan, or ‘the
glimpse’, but it had not occurred to me to join them. Thus it was a
bit puzzling to account for the proposal that Mira Behn should
stop with me during the halt the Mahatma was intending to make
in Agra just then, and to this day I do not know if it was his
suggestion or hers. Some there were who whispered all was not
well in the entourage at that juncture and hinted that the
presence of two great-nieces, much to be seen latterly ministering
to the saint, had something to do with it. I do not know. What I
know is that quite recently ‘Bapu’ had had a talk with Pandit
Govind Ballabh Pant, now back in office as Prime Minister of the
U.P., in result of which this kindly man had created for her benefit
the post of Honorary Special Adviser to Government in connexion
with the Grow More Food Campaign, the very designation of which
revealed what in fact it was: a sinecure designed to keep Mira
Behn if not exactly occupied at any rate at arm’s length from the
saint’s chevet from which she had scarcely moved these twenty
years.
When Gandhi had gone to London in 1931 she had travelled
with him and herself been written up. The public read that Mira
Behn was a Miss Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British
admiral. They read a lot else about her, some of it difficult to
TWO YEARS TO GO 255
follow, seeing that a pianist called Lamond, known for his

renderings of Beethoven’s sonatas, and also Romain Rolland came
into it; and they read that Clare Sheridan, the noted sculptress
and incidentally the cousin of Winston Churchill, who was
modelling the Mahatma’s head at the time, had pronounced her to
be the living image of Sainte Geneviève as portrayed by Puvis de
Chavannes in his famous mural. This then was the guest I was
greeting and I can see her, a sari half veiling her countenance,
pausing to step from her sandals as the chaprasi ushers her in,
walking barefoot across the carpet and giving me the namas or
salutation performed by joining the palms and inclining the head,
for all the world like a Hindu lady unaccustomed to western ways.
It was on a charpoy placed near my desk that she sat cross-legged
during our conversations or else on another charpoy out on the
verandah. Sometimes it was in Hindi that she spoke, and she
spoke it well, sometimes in English; and in whichever it was I had
to remember that when she said ‘we’ I was not included. Her
recurrent theme, naturally, was the Gandhian recipe for India’s
ills; and the things to be done ‘once we get control’ were none of
them, quite clearly, the things that Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel between them were planning to do. Such as winding up all
military installations, ploughing up the airfields so as to bring vital
acres under cultivation, and so on. Apropos, there was an airstrip
in Agra; could I not put this to better use? Still, in spite of all, I
believe we did manage to hit on occasional topics of common
interest, even though I cannot recollect what these were. And of
course it is to Mira Behn that I am indebted for much of the
information concerning Bapu that I have put into my twelfth
chapter.
I had guessed that the Viceroy would want to shoot duck in
Bharatpur, all Viceroys did; but I had not foreseen the agreeable
adjunct to this. He would bring his sister, lately arrived from
home, and leave her with me to ‘do’ the Mughal monuments under
my guidance. And so it was. Miss Nancy Wavell looked the part
every whit as much as Mira Behn had looked hers, but it was a
different part and from the host’s s standpoint it would have
complicated arrangements had their respective visits coincided.
For one thing Mira Behn had displayed no wish whatever to see
the Taj Mahal and the triumphs of Mughal architecture generally
in which Agra abounds; for another there would have been the
problem of seating, whether on the floor or on chairs; for a third
the contrasting menus at table; and so forth. Both were from that
class in society which had fashioned the British Raj and
determined its character, but I doubt if they could have used this
bridge to cross into each other’s territory. You would not, I was
saying, have required to be told that Miss Wavell was bent on
sight-seeing: her appearance indeed suggested she was doing the
Nile, say, at the end of last century. The 1899 ‘terai’ hat had a
muslin puggaree floating down behind for good measure, and the
white canvas shoes had sensible low heels. Besides which, she
was furnished with a valuable mnemonic her brother had invented
and passed to her before going to the duck-shoot. This went ‘Best
Horses And Jockeys Seen Ascot’. I was able to recite this, with or
without acknowledgment, on a number of subsequent occasions.
Agra rivalled Delhi itself as a capital seat of the Mughal Emperors,
but how to remember their names and their correct order? They
were: Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shahjahan, Aurangzeb.
If only I had some similar mnemonic to assist me in sorting out
my house guests I would know for certain who came next. But
never mind, I shall assume it was President Ho Chi Minh. He was
on his way to Paris in the care of two or three French army officers
for complicated negotiations with the government there. I need not
describe his appearance: his likeness is in a hundred photographs
except that he was even more undersized and emaciated than
these suggest. His speech was the plucking of a banjo string but
he was comprehensible both in English and in French, at the
conversational level anyhow. He knew London, he told me, having
been a dishwasher at the Savoy or somewhere, if I got it right. His
interest, I soon discovered, was rather in actual rural conditions
than in the relics of Mughal grandeur and he particularly wished
to see how our fields were irrigated. So after a perfunctory glance
at the Taj Mahal I took him out to some villages, driving myself
and with nobody else but an orderly sitting behind us. It is always
tempting to lean over the parapet of an Indian well and try,
according to the light, to catch one’s own reflection in the water;
and this, heads together, we succeeded in doing. My guest
chuckled his appreciation. When I pictured this little scene to one
of the staff officers afterwards, a Captain Cartier Bresson I think it
was, I felt that I had perhaps proved a disappointment. ‘But you
could push him in,’ he protested in his near English.
Then there was a countess commanding the Women’s Voluntary
Service who astonished me by her knowledge of Arabic; there were
the Killearns from Egypt en route to Dacca at Jinnah’s instance to
consider a governorship that in the event was not accepted: there
was—and this memory is scarcely dimmed by time —a Marshal of
France, Philippe Marie de Hautecloque, Leclerc that is, who had
liberated Paris exactly two years previously. Partly because
Fatehpur Sikri enthralled him, and partly because a mechanic
TWO YEARS TO GO 257
was still tinkering with his machine, he stayed on an extra night,

which allowed an intimate dinner followed by a long talk into the
small hours as the prelude to a dawn departure. As he stood at
the salute in the strengthening light he belonged in that moment
to the age of the knightly virtues. His aeroplane took off, and an
aeroplane it was that carried him to his death but a few months
later. Then there was Jim Corbett who wrote Man-Eaters of
Kumaon. He came to discuss a Christmas camp he was organizing:
the last, I imagine, any of us attended. I ought not to have been
invited since I did not shoot nowadays. My left arm, awaiting its
bone-graft ever since Shireen came down on top of me before ever
the war broke out, saw to that (and, strangely, I believe I was not
sorry). Jim, born and bred in India like a second Kim, knew the
jungle as nobody else, and had become a sort of honorary adviser
to viceroy after viceroy in this department. Tigers, he lamented,
were down to between three and four thousand on the evidence he
had collected and would shortly become extinct. ‘So will the
I.C.S.’, was my rejoinder to cheer him up, ‘we’re down to one-tenth
of that and I’m not yet sure if we’ll be a subject for protection by
the game laws as I expect your tigers will be.’
And the politicians of course. Seven Members of Parliament led
by Lord Chorley and including a Mrs Nicol, put some strain on the
bedroom accommodation (indeed Woodrow Wyatt had to be
housed in town), but their company was pleasurable enough to
make me wonder on what happy principle the delegates had been
recruited. Two members of the Cabinet Mission visited Agra: Lord
Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, exuding a naïve
benevolence; and A.V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, who
was sensible and full of blunt humour. You knew without being
told which of them had gone to prison in the suffragette
movement of 1912, and which was the football fan. Coming to
India, the former wanted progress but, so far as I could gather,
wanted this to be slow; the latter wanted us to hang on, so that at
moments it might have been Churchill talking. I supposed—but
what did a Collector in an Indian District know of such
things?’ that Labour was like that; running in two currents: the
one pacifist, universalist, internationalist, Girondin so to speak;
and the other patriotic and all for ‘the nation in arms’—Jacobin, to
complete my comparison. I was told that Stafford Cripps, the third
member of the Mission, whose programme had prevented his
coming to Agra with the others, was the only one of our politicians
in a hurry. Had we really the face—and here the Collector in his
District might be excused for talking out of turn—the face to be
contemptuous of India’s hopelessly disunited political leadership
when there was such patent disarray on the Indian issue in the
ranks of our own leaders, and a disarray cutting across the party
allegiances?
My experience as a guide taught me that the importance of the
judgments passed on the Taj Mahal by visiting V.I.P.s was apt to
be in inverse ratio to the importance of the persons themselves.
However, there was no rule about this, or rather the only rule was
that everybody had to say something. Those who were wise made
it short: least said is soonest mended. There had been the case of
Aldous Huxley. All readers of Jesting Pilate know what he said
about this dreamlike tribute to the memory of a woman, but
perhaps they do not know that he lived to regret it. When he
revisited the country forty years on, he was taken aback: what
Westerneducated India had saved up about him was not his
literary achievement but his silly disparagement of the Taj Mahal!
But back to my own guests. It was not in Lord Wavell, as is
proved by his Other Men’s Flowers, to be insensitive to beauty in
any of its expressions; but with that, he was a man most in
character when he said nothing at all. How would he react? I
never found out; for on his return from Bharatpur he had no
leisure to stop overnight for the sake of sight-seeing. From among
the remarks made by other sight-seers two or three come to mind.
That of General Salan, for instance, remains fresh. He was the
commander-in-chief of the French Forces in Indo-China and
would one day be condemned to death (but afterwards reprieved)
for his share in the Algerian putsch. In his published memoirs Fin
d’un Empire this taciturn Tarnais from Rocquecourbe praises me
for my competence as a guide, so I shall praise him in my turn.
His comment on seeing the Taj Mahal was: ‘he (Shahjahan) had
loved her so,’—‘il l’avait tant aimée.’ The Persian couplets delivered
for my benefit by the Agha Khan at the self-same spot did not,
because they could not, say more. Pethick-Lawrence said: ‘Look at
it, Alexander. You won’t see anything like that again.’ Not bad, not
bad at all. But spoiled by the clanger with which he followed it up:
‘the more remarkable because they (sc. Muslims) don’t believe a
woman has a soul.’ Cameramen dogged our steps, but fortunately
in those days news films were silent. As for Ho Chi Minh, he had
merely given the high-pitched near-laugh, alternately sibilant and
sucking, which is good form on occasions of solemnity or emotion
east of 100 degrees of longitude, and left it at that.
TWO YEARS TO GO 259
3.
THE THRESHOLD OF INDEPENDENCE
India was on the threshold of independence, but India was on the
brink of chaos. Never in history had the Hindus and Muslims
ranged themselves like this in hostile blocs. A communal
explosion in Calcutta had killed 4,000 people and injured another
15,000. The frenzy spread like wildfire to Dacca and beyond, until
whole districts of Bengal became the happy hunting-ground of
roaming bands of Muslims out to pillage, to convert forcibly or to
kill the Hindus and abduct their women. In retaliation for these
atrocities the Hindus of Bihar had fallen to butchering the Muslims
of that province by the thousand. And now, as 1947 came in, it
was only too evident that the Punjab and the North-West Frontier
were smouldering. It could not be long before they erupted into
flame. Gandhi’s Ahimsa, he had been driven to acknowledge it
himself, had been but ‘the non-violence of the weak’, a technique
adapted to the fight against the British; violence was the order of
the day in this fight of the Indians against each other. His political
authority, unquestioned for the past quarter of a century, was at
an end and his utterances henceforward were to strike an
anguished note. ‘Neither the people nor those in power,’ he
complained, ‘have any use for me.’ The night was dark and he was
far from home.
Convinced at length of the gravity of the Indian case and
galvanized by its urgency, the British Government came to a
momentous decision. We would ‘Quit India’. We would quit by a
date not later than June 1948. Agreement or no agreement
between the warring elements in her society, we would not stay in
India after that. Mr Attlee made this announcement on 20
February 1947, adding that Lord Mountbatten would replace Lord
Wavell as Viceroy. It meant that Partition was certain, and that it
would happen under British aegis. The new Viceroy arrived on 22
March and within a couple of months produced a plan for the
transfer of power to two successor States: a reduced India and a
Pakistan mutilated and ‘moth-eaten’ because without Assam and
with only half of Bengal and half of the Punjab. It was some sort
of a solution, and the parties accepted it. And into the bargain the
date for the liquidation of British rule was brought forward from
June 1948 to 15 August 1947.
These decisions were taken by hardly more than a dozen
Englishmen, not one of whom had the slightest first-hand
knowledge of India’s condition, but I am far from implying that the
few hundred mercenaries who have peopled my narrative up to
this point would have counselled a different course. It was not as

if the British people were bent on retaining their Empire. Had that
been the case, those mercenaries would even at this eleventh hour
have built up a formidable union of interests anxious to co-
operate with them against Congress or against anybody. But that
was not what the public at home—when it considered the position
at all wanted; the very thought of clinging on to India for an
indefinite period could be discarded. The choice lay between a
drift into civil war and—withdrawal. The plan adopted would
require us, as I have said, to implement something we detested
only a little less than did Gandhi himself. But even on the issue of
Pakistan we could reflect that, having granted India parliamentary
institutions, we must now bow to the consequences.
This said, we had distinct reservations about the advancing of
the date. It did not make a pin’s difference to us personally
whether we lost our careers this year or next, but the revised time-
table threw ten and a half million souls living in the so-called
‘contiguous areas’ of the two potential States into a panic of
preparation to leave their homes for ever, and this just when
Nature was at her harshest. Moreover, we could not associate
ourselves with the seemingly bland assumption that the movement
of these refugees in opposite directions could be supervised. For
who would the supervisors be but local civil officials, sub-
divisional magistrates, revenue assistants, ordinary constables
too, with or without sepoys from the army to aid them in the task,
whose own plight would be every bit as parlous, indeed more so,
than that of the moving masses they were supposed to shepherd.
Without great strain on the imagination we could picture the fix of
a Sikh subinspector of police in a predominantly Muslim tract at
sunrise on 15 August. Or of a Muslim naib-tahsildar, say, on the
Hindu side of the future boundary. The poor fellow would know
that he must either get somewhere else pretty quickly or never see
another dawn. In the regions about to be torn apart there was not
an I.C.S. Officer who did not forecast a total breakdown of the
administration and an uncontrollable slaughter in the sequence of
this. And so it was. In the Punjab, mother of the most warlike of
India’s sons, the massacre was of indescribable horror and on a
scale which the absence of every governmental agency rendered
literally incalculable. A High Court judge charged with an
investigation much later put the deaths at 500,000; others have
arrived at half that figure. We cannot know which of these
estimates is the more reliable; cannot know if either of them
approaches the truth.
TWO YEARS TO GO 261
While the ‘contiguous areas’ now on the point of witnessing

these massive migrations would be the scene of maximum tragedy,
the countless districts forming the interior of the two new
dominions would experience their own suffering. In their case it
would not be the quick laceration of the knife but the festering of
a running sore. As India and Pakistan were virtually at war, the
members of an immense Muslim minority in the one, and of an
immense Hindu minority in the other, would wake up on 15
August to find themselves enemy aliens in the land of their
fathers. We should have been hard men indeed if we had not
spared a thought for them. And when the moment for goodbyes
arrived, a Zila Sahib in such districts would stumble in his speech
with those of the stranded minority and falter in the search for a
consoling phrase.
By March—we are in 1947—the communal fever was mounting
rapidly in the Punjab and its heat was being transmitted to the
neighbouring U.P. districts: to Saharanpur where there was a
Muslim majority; to Meerut where a colony of Sikhs had long been
settled; to Muttra; and latterly to Agra. We had a bout of rioting
just then, I remember, mildish comparatively speaking, yet
serious enough to keep me in the streets all night. I recall it for no
other reason than that it was then, in the Kotwali during the
small hours that Hashmi, my City Magistrate, the ‘Aligarh man’ of
an earlier page, and Badr ul-Islam, the Deputy Superintendent of
Police, first revealed to me their private predicament. Lahore, their
obvious destination, would be packed out with Muslims dislodged
from the eastern districts of the Punjab; and also, from their rather
exaggeratedly ‘Aligarh’ standpoint, too provincially ‘Punjabi’—
They had consequently opted for Karachi as being, though remote,
more cosmopolitan. They were already engaged in the attempt
to secure a billet there. Serve on under a Hindu Raj they would not
not after the preliminary taste they had had of it. Those Congress
Ministers now! They began to pull certain of them to pieces, the
Home Minister in particular, one Qidwai. A skunk. Their quality is
uneven.’ I contributed judiciously. ‘Anyhow we’re having a
Minister here in a few days, just to cheer you up.’ Banter of this
standard between us was usual in the lulls of a riot; you could not
sit there with your chin in your hand gazing at a row of
grotesquely hacked corpses. ‘Who is he?’ they asked. ‘It isn’t a he,’
I replied. They knew I meant Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit,
Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister. Minister of Local Self-government and
Health in the Party’s previous flirtation with responsibility, she
had been imprisoned with the other leaders but released later
along with Mrs Naidu on personal grounds. She was now back in
office. ‘Oh, she’s quite different from the rest of them,‘ they
conceded chivalrously. They were chivalrous, but also they were
right.
I had not wanted the visit, these tours only aggravated Muslim
antipathy and were sterile administratively. But the Congress had
to impress its following in the districts, one saw that. So Mrs Pandit
would come in by road f rom Etawah, halt a day or two, and leave
by train. I arranged for her to stay in the Circuit House which was
well away from the City, and stood in beautiful surroundings on
its own; we could cordon it off. The callers queueing up for
interviews could be subjected to police-cum-party scrutiny,
searched if need be—we had come to that. The day as well as the
hour of arrival was concealed and nothing untoward occurred.
But then some idiot in the Party’s local organization let out the
departure programme. A nasty mob of Muslims composed largely
of the town’s butcher confraternity headed for the Railway Station
and demonstrated in front of it. They are shouting indecently’
Hashmi understated over the telephone. Vijaya Lakshmi’s car
flying its Congress tricolour and probably preceded by two or three
other cars carrying the office-bearers of the Party’s District
Committee would have to pass my entrance gates. So instead of
going in advance to see her off at the Station, I intercepted the
motorcade and told them they could not proceed. Only the
Minister could. With me. I instructed my chauffeur to drive slowly:
I must look as if I was (in the Hindustani) ‘eating the air’. If my
passenger was frightened, as she had full cause to be, she did not
show it. I tried to remember some remark her father Pandit
Motilal had made once, long ago now, when I was in Allahabad.
‘He didn’t approve of your messing about in the streets, did he?
But you’re still at it’ She smiled. ‘Are they good sorts, the
Congressmen here?’ she enquired, keeping the conversation
going. ‘Oh, yes, considering.’ She smiled again. Her own brother’s
description of the type was in my mind and doubtless in hers:
urban, he had labelled them, dressed in khadi, chiefly drawn from
the lower middle class. Presently the crowd came into view: it was
not noisy now, only sullen. Hashmi had commanded silence. Badr
ul-Islam had brought along all the Muslims I should think in the
City Force, a lot of them armed, and a decent lane had been
cleared right up to the Railway Station steps. I had had to rely on
my Muslims that day, Muslims exclusively, to get my Hindu charge
—she was still my charge, if not for very much longer through to
the platform and on to the train. It was a sign of the times, it
could only have happened in 1947, and as an omen it was not
very pleasant.
TWO YEARS TO GO 263
However I can cancel that episode with another which was pure
‘period’, 1847 say. My Number Two, Ram Narendra Singh, Rai
Bahadur, old-style Rajput, pushed past the chaprasi into my room.
‘Our dākū, Sir,‘ he tumbled his sentences out, ‘he’s dossing down
in some village on the border, opposite Rajakhera it is, and it’s a
chance providing we’re quick.’ A dacoit is a brigand, a member of
a robber band. The police had succeeded in arresting the gang
which he captained but he, the leader, had eluded capture by
retreating into the ravines on the edge of Dholpur territory.
Murderer a hundred times over, he lived and lodged nowadays at
gun-point, never long in the same locality and merciless to any
who informed against him. His fame had spread through the
entire province and in the colourful tradition of dacoity he had
given himself a highsounding sobriquet, King Cut-Throat or the
like, so much in love was he with his own legend. He was
emphatically a character evoking the early British period in India
and most out of place in the New Society—oh, they could be
smug, the Congress—to be inaugurated in less than two months.
Through the mouthpiece of the aristocratic Kunwar Maharaj Singh
who was one of the few of noble birth in the United Provinces to
have made his number with tomorrow’s regime and was
earmarked for the governorship of Bombay, they had told me it
would be ‘a feather in my cap’—his exact words—if I could nab
him. I fetched my 12-bore and a pair of field glasses. Kalloo
produced a thermos of iced water and a bath towel from the ghusl-
khanah. The gallant Thakur had a jeep waiting, and I noticed a
couple of rifles sticking out from beneath the seats. The police
driver looked a tough enough specimen, and off we went, the three
of us. From the map I calculated we had about the same number
of miles in front of us that June morning as the Empire had days.
I had no clear conception of what I would do—or come to that, of
what I wanted to do. Well, I was running true to the imperial form
there. The British had never had any clear conception of what
they would do with India. The I.C.S. job was to attend to the
administration, and one day go out doing the things we had done
when we came in. When the June sun beats pitilessly on the plains
even solid objects get delicately out of focus, so it was not strange
if my flimsy thoughts were without contour as we bumped along
the unmetalled road. And then, no warning, the driver slumped
forward over the steering-wheel. We slewed, then ploughed to a
standstill in the soft verge of the track. We laid him out in a scrap
of shade, forced some of the iced water down his throat, splashed
the remainder on to my bath-towel, wrapped this round his face
and neck. We waited what was probably half-anhour till he came
round, then carried him back to the jeep. I took his place, and we
went on. When we came in sight of the village—there was no
mistaking it, there was no other in this barren stretch of country—
I passed my binoculars to Narendra. ‘People moving about busily’,
he said. ‘Women scouring their pots and pans, several men—I
can’t see what they’re at’ Then he added, ‘But I think I know, Sir.
They’re putting on an act’ They were trying to appear at ease for
our benefit, quite forgetting that normally they would not be astir
at all at two o’clock of a June afternoon. As we drove up we saw
some fresh horse-droppings outside one of the huts. Our guess
was confirmed: our man had been and gone. I had no heart to
cross-question these poor people, extract lies from them. I was too
tired for anything except to call it a day. We came away with no
feather in our cap; we came away with mixed emotions, but upon
the whole more relieved than dejected. And the British as a nation
might speak in that strain, I fancy, of the exodus from India on 15
August 1947.
So did our minutes hasten to their end.
EPILOGUE
The Last Ride Together, I decided, should be to the polo ground,

out in the direction of the Taj Mahal, where Shireen’s memories
like mine could race back a full sixteen years. Ginger, since the
order of precedence was sacrosanct in my small stable, would come
behind us, ridden by the head syce; and after him, mounted by
the second syce, an elegant bay—parting gift of Malcolm Darling,
the Punjab Civilian of fame, to one whose staying power in India,
as things turned out, topped his own by very little. Next day, all
three horses would be taking the road to Gwalior where a trio of
Dutchmen operating a firm there had undertaken to provide them
with a gentle retreat. Soon we were trotting past the Agra Club;
the doors were closed now, its members ghosts already. And then,
Civil Lines traversed, we were turning left and approaching what,
if luck assists, can be a prospect of unsurpassable beauty. The
heat haze of the dawn wreathes the foundations of the Fort in a
muslin scarf, so that viewed from this point of aesthetic advantage
the upper battlements appear to be floating on air. And that
morning luck assisted.
The Fort was by this date held by a solitary British sergeant
with whom a rendezvous had been fixed for the following evening.
I would watch him haul down the Union Jack. Tomorrow would be
eventful in our national story, and with poignant moments. In my
private story too; to begin the day, I would caress Shireen for the
very last time. I wheeled her round and cried out to the syces:
‘Home now!’ Tomorrow all would change; why, the meaning of
those two short words I had shouted would change. But today it
was business as usual. No, honestly, not quite that. For the past
fortnight a stream of local gentry had flowed through the
waitingroom to bid me good-bye; disproving, if disproof were
needed, that the district notables only came to us when they
wanted something. But the stream had now run dry. There would
be no more interviews: and as to my signature on the few
remaining papers on my desk, well, it crossed my mind, this
266 EPILOGUE
might not seem so impressive as formerly by the time it came to

be read! The only file I had called for was one upon which no
action required to be taken. I had never looked at it previously; it
was docketed: ‘European Cemetery’. Our cemetery was the oldest
in all India for the good reason that it was here in Agra that our
adventure had begun three hundred and thirty-nine years before,
to Agra that Hawkins, the English sea captain, had made his way
up country from the Bombay coast to salute and curry favour with
the Mughal Emperor. I leafed through the file idly; I closed it. I
closed it partly because there was nothing to do about it and
partly because the unwonted silence which had fallen on the
whole house was just then interrupted. ‘Father Leone.’ the
chaprasi announced. Since my return to the United Provinces from
Delhi and his own from the prisoner-ofwar camp to his Mission,
our weekly and occasionally even halfweekly re-unions had been
resumed after the gap of years, with the result that he had by now
coaxed me through many a canto of the Divine Comedy. In those
turbulent months, understandably, I had not always been able to
keep the appointment; and then, coming in grimy and at some
ungodly hour, I would catch sight of the slip of paper on my table:
Va bene. ‘Never mind. Let’s give our Dante a rest for a bit longer.’
Lasciamo il nostro Dante reposare un altro poco. That morning he
entered carrying a massive Divina Commedia with illustrations by
Gustave Doré. It added no less than 61bs to the hand luggage
with which I proposed to travel on the 15th, but was worth more
to me than its weight in gold. In sum, the personal effects I was
taking home were those I had come out with. I believe most of us
could have said the same. Every stick of my furniture having been
bought by the Chairman of the District Congress Committee, I was
down to about six items: smallish wooden box of books; uniform
case; cabin trunk; Gladstone chair (vide p.32); my Daniell prints
plus, I admit, my tiger and panther skins. Narendra would see to
the despatch of these few possessions to Bombay for eventual
shipment. On the 15th I would get up to Delhi by train, assuming
there was a train, with a haversack, a suit-case, Kurt my Lakeland
on a lead, and now the Divine Comedy. Kalloo would have a
bundle containing his own things. Traditionally, whenever a train
pulled out with the garlanded I.C.S. aboard it would be to the
accompaniment of the bangs of crackers placed on the line. I
doubted if we should progress very far on this trip without hearing
detonations of a less innocent sort. However, we should see.
On the eve of Independence, eight of the senior staff gave me a
farewell dinner. We were played out emotionally: Narendra
and Hashmi barely managed to get through their little speeches.
And on the afternoon of the next day, Independence Day itself, the
same two, joined by Father Leone, saw me off. To each of the three
I had had cause to be gratef ul during these last couple of years,
and as the Delhi Mail, accelerating by jerks, drew away from Agra,
I leaned out of the carriage-window to postpone their
disappearance from sight as long as I could. I need not have done
that: I can still see them growing smaller and smaller in the
distance, waving vigorously. Crammed into that first-class
compartment, my fellowpassengers, not counting Kalloo and Kurt,
were the Goanese cooks and stewards from the restaurant-car
which had been invaded by swarms of cultivators enjoying a
fleeting euphoria and a free ride. After Muttra speed slackened
and halts became frequent, so that the Express would be either
creeping or not moving at all. Villagers seemed to be getting on
and of f when and where they pleased, and it was touching
midnight when we reached Delhi. But at least—and it was more
than I expected—terror was in suspense that day. The Indian
people paused, and the many, of whom my rustic
travelcompanions were typical, rejoiced like children. Soon it
would be otherwise: within two or three days, train upon train
would be steaming into this same Station laden with the dead and
dying; within two or three weeks, Delhi itself would be seized with
communal fury, and the Town Hall in which I had presided over
so many debates would be burned out by the mob. But these
happenings are not for inclusion here. These things belong to the
story of the new dominions into which our Indian Empire had
been transformed overnight. With few exceptions the expatriates
who served it, appearing variously in this book as ‘the
mercenaries’, ‘the I.C.S.’, ‘the Indo-British’, had by then embarked
on their civil transports at Bombay, and scanned for the last time
the coast, fast receding, on which the breezy Captain Hawkins had
dropped anchor so long ago.
My own turn for a passage from India had been delayed. I had
wanted to go at once—what reason had I to stay? The mission of
the I.C.S. was accomplished, I had not been on home leave for
nine years. However, I was instructed to report to the High
Commission now being set up in the new Dominion which was
India. I was to open its Office in Bombay, and to act for a mere
matter of weeks as Deputy High Commissioner for the United
Kingdom there pending the arrival of a permanent occupant of the
post. This unsought status qualified me for an airflight from
Delhi, but unfortunately the same privilege did not extend either
to my bearer or to Kurt. The place was by now ablaze with
communal strife. The Muslims whose forefathers had ruled it were
268 EPILOGUE
being chased from their houses, their bazaars and their mosques
by mobs yelling murder and committing it. So courageously Kalloo
disguised himself as a Hindu, a Sweeper, grubby dhoti and all,
and like that brought Kurt down to Bombay by rail.
What had promised to be a few weeks longer in India, in the
event lengthened into months, and during these I had to visit the
capital several times more. Thus I came to be in New Delhi when
the news of Gandhi’s assassination on the terrace of Birla House,
scarcely half a mile away, flashed along the adjacent avenues. The
nation reeled under the shock. At the funeral, as the bier went
past us and the cry ‘Mahatma Gandhi amar hoga’e’, ‘has put on
immortality’ rose from the throats of the surging multitude lining
the route to the burning ghat on Jumna bank, none, I mean no
foreigner, could dissociate himself from the bereaved millions. Yet
each of the few foreigners present, I imagine, asked himself what
the man whose head was pillowed on flowers would have had to
say about all this show of grief. Would he not, after his fashion, in
the Harijan possibly, have chided his people? These last months
India had chosen murder. Was it hers, then, today to weep and
lament over this one?
Not less dispiriting, at least to me, was one other ceremony
which it fell to me (and, I believe, alone of the I.C.S.) to attend:
namely, the farewell parade in Bombay to the last remaining
British regiment in India, the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light
Infantry. Moving the ceremony was, intensely; particularly when
the Indian Guards of Honour presented arms in a Royal Salute, the
Indian regimental bands playing God Save The King; and when, as
a finale, the colours were trooped through the Gateway of India to
the tune of Auld Lang Syne. But sadness hung heavily over it all;
sadness not because we were going—India wanted us to go—but
because the erstwhile comrades-in-arms of the splendid Indian
units drawn up in front of us, the Muslim comrades, were missing.
The S.S. Strathmore was now C.T. Strathmore, Civil Transport,
and I was warned in writing to expect none of the comforts
associated with the vessel’s former self. Meanwhile I had found a
home for my lakeland terrier with an ex-Sergeant of the Bombay
Police whom I had recruited as a Security Officer in the employ of
our High Commission. He owned a motor-cycle and on the eve
of my sailing invited me to see where he lived, some little distance
out and where Kurt could be sure, he said, of nice regular walks.
On my first excursion through Bombay I had been leaning back in
a rather grand Victoria; on my last I was leaning forward on a
pillion seat, clutching the rider round the waist. None knew his
way around better than this helpful man and he would place my
bearer on a train for Karachi, where his family had gone already,
as soon as I had embarked. In the morning I was seen aboard by
these two, nobody else, and it was with the support of this
beaming, cheerful Englishman that Kalloo went down the gangway
sobbing loudly, his shoulders shaking. When the hooter sounded
and the ship headed for the open sea I stood facing her bows, not
looking back on India. I should have the rest of my life in which to
do that.
270
GLOSSARY
Achkan, long close-fitting coat Burqa, cotton cloak with hood

Advait,(philos.) non-dual Chait, the 12th Hindu month
Aghan, the 8th Hindu month (March-April)
(Nov.—Dec.) Chameli, jasmine
Ahimsa, non-violence Chapatty, girdle cake of un-
Ahir, herdsman caste leavened bread
Ahmediyya, heretical move- Chaprasi, an orderly
ment in Islam Charkha, spinning wheel
Amar, deathless Charpoy, wooden bed covered
Anand, bliss with webbing
Are bhai, excl. ‘Come now!’, Chela, pupil
‘Oh, dear!’ Chhajja, eaves
Ashram, hermitage; retreat Chhatri, umbrella
Atma, soul Chilamchi, metal wash-basin
Avatar, descent; incarnation Chowpal, village assemblyroom
Babu, clerk; esquire (honorific) Cot, bedstead
Bahut, adv. very Cutcherry, court-house
Baithna, to sit Daku, robber; brigand
Bandobast, arrangement Darshan, glimpse or sight of
Bania, moneylender deity
Boalee, large masonry well Dev, sprite, goblin
Basti, inhabited area Dhak, Flame of the Forest
Bazzaz, draper Dharma, right behaviour
Bhakti, devotion; faith Dharna, act of sitting doggedly
Bhang, Indian hemp Dharti, earth; Mother Earth
Bhavan, abode Dhobi, washerman
Bhishti, water-carrier Dhoti, loin cloth
Bhut, ghost; demon Durbar, levee; court; royal
Bistar, bedding audience
Bohras, a class of Ismailis of Faqir, Muslim ascetic
Gujarat Gambalahi, the senior sweeper
Brahman, the Absolute in village
Brahmin, the teacher group in Ghariyal, crocodile
society Ghi, clarified butter
Buggy, light one-horse vehicle Ghusl khana, bathroom
Buriya, old woman Goonda, hooligan
Guru, spiritual teacher Loo, the hot wind

Hakim, highest authority (of Magar, crocodile
District etc.) Magh, the 10th Hindu month
Harijan, a child of God; Un- (Jan.—Feb.)
touchable Mahant, head of a Hindu
Himsa, violence shrine
Hookah, tobacco pipe Mali, gardener
Huruf, letters (of alphabet) Mandir, temple
Huzoor, presence; your Honour Mantra, a holy text
Imam, Muslim prayer-leader Masjid, mosque
Iqbal, prosperity, felicity Mauza, village
Ismailis, sect of Shiah branch Mela, concourse
of Islam Mlechchha, barbarian;
Jai, victory nonHindu
Jains, sect of Hindu dissenters Moksha, freedom from birth
Jaldi-Jaldi, ‘quick as quick!’ and death
Jali, lattice Munshi, language teacher
Jat, cultivator caste, tiller of Musalli, the ‘Righteous’ (Mus-
the soil lim Sweeper)
Jati, caste Mushaira, symposium of poets
Kachcha, uncooked; crude Nabob, ‘Company’ servant
Karma, the ‘Deed’ retiring with a fortune
Kayasth, the writer caste Naga, naked and armed mendi-
Khabar, news; report cant
Khaddar or Khadi, home-spnn Nam, name
cloth Namas, Hindu salutation
Khana-ba-dosh, vagrant; tramp Naukar-chakar, the domestics
Kharif, the autumn harvest Nazarbandi, mesmerism;
Khojas, members of an Ismaili illusion
(q.v.) sect Nazir, supervisor
Khnnrezi, bloodshed Nullah, watercourse; ravine
Kos, distance of two miles; a Panchayat, village council of
league Five
Kotwali, central police-station Panch Vastu, Five items
Kshatriyas, the warrior group Parsees, community professing
in society Zoroastrianism
Kya hai? ‘What’s the matter?’; Pathshala, place of sacred
‘What is it?’ study
Lathi, quarterstaff Patwari, village accountant
Log, people; folk Pipal, holy tree (ficus religiosa)
GLOSSARY 275
Pir, Muslim spiritual director Satyagrahi, one practising

Prohit, Hindu family priest Satyagraha
Puja, worship; adoration Sayyidsi, Muslims claiming
Pujari, temple priest descent from Prophet
Pukka, baked; cooked; perfect Shabash, Bravo!; Well done!
Pundit, honorific term; learned Shastri, Hindu versed in holy
Hindu writ
Punkah, overhead fan Shaykhs, one of the 4 ‘classes’
Purdah, veil; seclusion of of Muslims
women Shiahs or Shiites, the ‘Party’ of
Qadiani, member of heretical Ali in Islam
Ahmediyya movement q.v. Shikar, hunting
Qasida, ode Shireen, sweet; a woman’s
Quai-hai, lit. ‘Someone there’; name
n =‘Sahib’ Shirsasan, the Head Posture
Rabi, the spring harvest Shudra, the ‘Worker’ order in
Raj, rule society
Rajput, a high caste, many of Sikhs, lit. ‘disciples’ who
whose clans embraced Islam founded monotheistic,
Ram, God casteless
Rishi, sage, seer community
Rumal, handkerchief Sola topi, pith helmet
Sabha, association; society Sukha, drought
Sadhu, Hindu recluse; mendi- Sunnis, members of main
cant branch of Islam
Sahib, title of courtesy: Mr., Swami, Hindu spiritual precep-
Sir. Hence=European tor
Salam, salutation Swaraj, self-control; home rule
Samadh, suspension of breath Syce, groom
or sensation Tamasha, spectacle; entertain-
Sambar, deer; cervus unicolor ment
Sangam, confluence Tapas, fervour
Sannyasi, Hindu devotee Tahsil, section of a District
Sansar, transmigration Thana, police-station
Sari, dress worn by Hindu Thik, correct; O.K.
women Tonga, two-wheeled carriage
Sarit Kalam, fountain-pen Vaishya, the ‘business’ group
Sat, seven in society
Satyagraha, non-violent resis- Varna, colour
tance Vilayet, ‘Blighty’
—Wala or Wallah, suffix mean-

ing ‘connected with’
Yoga, union; religious exercise
Yogi, one who performs yoga
Zila, District
INDEX
Advaitanand, Swami, 91 Iswar Saran, Munshi, 81

Agha Khan, 153ff
Alexander, A.V., 256 Jayaprakash Narayan, 18, 132
Amarnath Pt, 'Sahir', 116 Jenkins, Sir Evan, 215
Ambedkar, Dr., 80 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 119
Asaf Ali, 18, 181, 182 Jyoti Prasad Pt., 65
Askwith, A.V., 234
Auchinleck, Field Marshal, 214 Kalloo, 92, 244
Kapurthala, Ruling Prince, 148ff
Birla, G.D., 16, 18, 187 Kilburn, Denys, 172,187, 236, 237
Bomford, Sir Hugh, 44 Kunzru, Pt. Rajnath, 20
Bowman, Ian, 192
Layard, Austin, 168
Chorley, Lord, 256 Lebailly, W.G., 234, 236, 237
Corbett, Jim, 256 Leclerc, Marshal of France, 256
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 231, 232, 257 Leone, Father, 212, 266
Cruikshank, Col. Martin, 70 Linlithgow, Lord, 176, 186, 187,
189
Darling, Sir Malcolm, 264 Lutyens, Sir Edwin, 176ff
Dholpur, Ruling Prince, 144ff Lyall, Alfred, 26
Evans, Horace, Lord, 132 Maillart, Ella, 207

Maureen, 75
Gandhi, Mahatma, 216ff Mira Behn (see Slade)
Ginger (the author’s horse), 134 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 258
Gooch, G.P., 12
Gupta, Deshbandhu, 182 Naidu, Mrs Sarojini, 130, 201
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 130
Hailey, Lord, 183 Nehru, Motilal, 130, 247
Hasan Nizami, Muslim divine, 64 Nicol, Mrs., 256
Ho Chi Minh, 255, 258
Horace, see Evans Pandit, Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi, 48,
Imam of Great Mosque, 113 261-2
Pant, Pt. Govind Ballabh, 47, 124,
Irwin, Lord, 229 254
275
Paras Ram, Mahant, 94

Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 255
Pethick-Lawrence, Lord, 256, 257
Powell, Rt. Hon. Enoch, 211, 242
Prasad, Rajendra, 47
Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester,
196
Radhakrishnan, Sir S., 77,101

Ross Masood, 118
Royden, Maude, 216
Salan, General, 257

Sapra, Sir Tej Bahadur, 71-4, 200,
247
Scoones, General Geoffrey, 239
‘Shankar’,176
Shankar Lal, 182
Shireen, 33, 256
Simon, Sir John, 183-5
Singh, Kunwar Maharaj, 262
Slade, Madeleine (Mira Behn),
254ff
Spear, Dr. Percival, 243
Syed Ahmad Khan, 117,243
Tagore, Rabindranath, 9, 227, 229
Udaipur, Ruling Prince, 150
Wavell, Field Marshal Lord, 213ff

Willingdon, Lord (illus.), 75
Wint, Guy, 210
Wrench, Evelyn, 209
Wyatt, Woodrow, 256
Yeats-Brown, F., 205
Zakir Husain, Dr., 203

Looking Back To India

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ISBN 0-203-98798-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-7146-3336-4 (Print Edition)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA 1

5. Doing or Dying in Delhi 233

This book of reflections and reminiscences would not have been

expansion of Empire, answered that to extend rulership is to bad

sited concentrations such as Quetta or in a variety of smallish

a certain condescension whenever he thought of them. But this

or even leaf through an album of the paintings of the Rajput

we shall countenance at the public expense medical

The phase of tender regard was over.

the most desirable death for us to die should be the

Still barred thy doors! The far east glows

In the earlier 1920s my mother and I were staying at a house

albeit fitfully, its momentum was due to a handful of

less, in the eyes of the insecure and therefore somewhat bobbery

members of the Congress Working Committee were on their

The two daughters of the house to whom I was introduced had

was a long document, hundreds of words beautifully penned—and

covered a whole century counting from Clive’s victory at Plassey in

sugar and it was proving latterly more bitter than expected. To

Secretariat to report—no, first to Grindlays to touch a cheque; to

present day as when they were compiled’. To my own thinking,

Recollecting old England’s sea breezes

What lured him to life in the tropic?

Why, he asks himself in exasperation, had he not been satisfied to

…to curse Oriental romancing

At least I was not the odd man out, it seemed.

chair (because bequeathed to us by his family), a mid-Victorian

of Cornwallis’ defeat at Yorktown in 1781, had settled in these

man? I answer that I have no proof of it. Seeing however that

.................March: Mirzapur to Robertsganj

Listening to villagers (see page 56)

Going into camp (see page 125)

‘Shireen’ (see page 36)

Collector for information.

Finally over to the right and more gratifying than all:

Signed ................. with a space for my signature.

I was about to ask Hermes to interpret a few of the particulars

Classical Hindi Lexicon 1884 (a veritable Liddell and Scott) will

Leaving by the road that serves Vindhyachal, a resort of

equal, would be to select an area whose turn it was. Ideally, tent

headquarters, even in big cities like Delhi and Allahabad a

in which is entered the serial number of each field in the village;

trouble in focussing the camp, several very large and several

returning from pasture. Here was no ‘dung heap’, but a setting of

that she could go rustic as charmingly as Marie Antoinette could

a local nominee but a Government servant; and his jurisdiction,

tiled, occasionally of dry stone, always windowless, always

predominantly Jats: that is, they belonged to a farming caste

extent were uplifted. On one of my tours in this vicinity, we were

community was the barber, and I am putting the label between

grinding grain, pounding it in a stone mortar with a mighty pestle.

SONG AT THE WELL

We each have got our grouses as we sing about our spouses.

The spinning of thread for the weaver was another of woman’s

comments the speaker allowed himself in his several detailed

‘I had persuaded our Village Accountant who is Kayasth by

not identical performances. So be it. But a shock is in store: in

the disposal of the objectors, a spirit, being unencumbered with

‘Match me this marvel save in eastern clime.’