….First published 1983
A foreign correspondent in India experiences an authentic
adventure – stimulating, absorbing, daunting, sometimes moving and shocking.
Here is one of the world’s great dramas; an ancient, vast and crowded land
committed to the most formidably challenging exercise in mass democracy. It is
a spectacle in which hope, pride, paradox and uncertainty mingle and struggle;
it is conducted on the whole, and to India’s credit, in the open. It has been
fascinating to be a close witness. I cannot recall that the sun has ever set on
a dull day.
If you wish to know something about India you must empty
your mind of all preconceived notions. Why be imprisoned by the limited vision
of the prejudiced? Don’t try to compare. India is different and, exasperating
as it may seem, would like to remain so ……. This is the secret of India, the
acceptance of life in all its fullness, the good and the evil.
-
Indira Gandhi
Indians embrace the universe and their fated imperishable
souls move to its mysterious awesome rhythms, out of one life and into the
next, sins and atonements inked in heavenly ledgers.
The astrologers are therefore at hand, like discreet, wise
and reassuring valets, with star charts rather than freshly pressed trousers.
…. They comfort parents whose sulking sons have left home by predicting the
‘when returning of gone person’
Indians are a tactile people, living thigh by thigh,
jostling, holding hands and embracing, close to each others breath and
borborygmi, the bubble of each others pots. They have learned to cram, to take
a deep communal breath to admit just one more, to fill every crevice, to hang
by their nails, to sit on one buttock, to stretch the seams of their streets,
houses and vehicles.
If you drive through India, or observe it from a train, you
will see few parts of it unpeopled. You may stop the car in a seemingly empty
space, to drink some water and sleeve the brow, only to find that people
emerge, as if from the soil, to watch with curiosity.
Satyajit Ray, the film maker, recalls that he once began
shooting a film in a quiet country location fifty miles from Calcutta. After
three days, however, a large and curious crowd arrived by rail from Calcutta
and climbed trees to watch the filming. The shooting plan had to be changed,
and six spectators were hurt when the branch on which they perched suddenly snapped.
The democracy is lively, in spite of having had its air
supply interrupted for two years from mid-1975. Socialism can hardly be said to have been practiced
with any determination, and the secular state is profoundly religious ….. India
has been from ancient times a geographical billiard pocket, a destination and a
place of settlement rather than a staging post
As a people they take themselves seriously and their sense
of humour remains as yet an undeveloped region. They are, however, enthusiastic
analysts of their society, bitter and persistent critics of their politics,
institutions and each other, as disputatious as starlings.
It is simply that India occupies several centuries at
once….. In 1981 bullock carts were used to transport Mig 21 fighters to the
Republic Day parade in Delhi.
Air travel is in the 1980s, cars are in the 1950s and the
telephone is in the 1930s.
The new Indian is more likely than not to be a Hindu, one of
the 582 million and 83 per cent majority. He might also be one of the substantial
Muslim minority of 77 million; or one of 14 million Sikhs, so busy and
distinctive that there seems to be more of them than that; 18 million
Christians, who will cook both beef and bacon; 3.5 million Jains who would not
hurt a fly; or 5 million tolerant Buddhists, a mere splinter of the great faith
in the land of its birth. He stands a one in twelve chance of being born into
one of the aboriginal tribes which inhabit forests and remote regions, and
which are gradually being drawn into the mainstream; and a one in ten chance of
being a Brahmin, the upper crust of society; and a one in seven chance of being
born into the community of those Hindus whose place is, strictly speaking,
outside the caste structure and who are graded as untouchables.
Whatever he chooses, an Indian with even a little eduation
will hope to occupy a ‘position’. India is a commnity of hierarchies, rigidly
stratified, and a position is of great importance.
At Bombay airport you present your boarding pass to a young
woman at a table and she stamps it. This serves no purpose. There are two other
women alongside her doing nothing. It is the same throughout the subcontinent:
the bureaucratic warrens are overrun by clerks with little or nothing else to
do. Americans tell me it is all the fault of the British. But if the British
gave it the Indians embraced it.
After marriage there is sex.
In India it is usually in this order.
There is a saying in the Chambal that if a man has three
sons one will become a farmer, one will go into the army and the third into
banditry.
We spend more time in the pursuit of religion than any other
people in the world.
-
Khushwant Singh
Hinduism is both a religious and a social system ….It is a
sponge, admitting far more than it prohibits, and sets little store by dogma.
The existence of an omnipotent force is recognized, but this god-alone is by no
means the central exclusive focus in a religion which admits millions of gods
and allows immense freedom of worship. The spiritual and superstitious can be blended,
permitting limited notions of heresy. You can shout at your god if he or she
displeases you, and withhold your offerings as long as your sulk lasts.
Mrs Gandhi asked newspaper editors not to call her an
empress.
-
Newspaper report, 1982
He will not kill cows, but he can watch thousands of
imprisoned human beings wither before his eyes.
-
K. F. Rustamji
The gap between private cleanliness and public squalor is
one of the notable paradoxes of India.
There are no better critics of Indian callousness than
Indians themselves. They have a very sharp critical faculty and they are
certainly more scathing about their national shortcomings than any foreigner
could be.
Films …. A happy, or at least a positive, ending is
mandatory. India is a country where people aim to survive and they want their
films to give them ideas of survival. They do not want unresolved dilemmas, to
be sent out into the night puzzling.
There was that strong smell of urban India, a compound of
vegetables, drain water, perspiration, fish, bidis, petrol, damp pavements,
sacking, dungcakes, urine and rot.
…Calcutta …It was Kipling’s ‘city of dreadful night … the
packed and pestilential town.’ The young Winston Churchill wrote to his mother
that he was pleased he had seen it because he would not have to see it again. A
hundred years ago a visitor, reflecting on its marshy location and stinking
stews, wrote: ‘Its situation is so bad by nature that there is little that man
could do to make it worse, but that little has been faithfully and assiduously
done.’
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