India (4 page)

Generation followed generation quickly here, men as easily replaceable as their huts of grass and mud and matting (golden when new, quickly weathering to grey-black). Cruelty no longer had a meaning; it was life itself. Men knew what they were born to. Every man knew his caste, his place; each group lived in its own immemorially defined area; and the pariahs, the scavengers, lived at the end of the village. Above the huts rose the rambling two storey brick mansion of the family who had once owned it all, the land and the people: grandeur that wasn’t grandeur, but was like part of the squalor and defeat out of which it had arisen. The family was
now partially dispossessed, but, as politicians, they still controlled. Nothing had changed or seemed likely to change.

And during the rest of that day’s drive North Bihar repeated itself: the grey-black hut clusters; the green paddy fields whose luxuriance and springlike freshness can deceive earth-scanners and cause yields to be overestimated; the bare-backed men carrying loads on either end of a long limber pole balanced on their shoulders, the strain showing in their brisk, mincing walk, which gave them a curious feminine daintiness; the overcrowded buses at dusty towns that were shack settlements, the children wallowing in the muddy ponds in the heat of the day, catching fish; the children and the men pounding soaked jute stalks to extract the fibre which, loaded on bullock carts, looked like thick plaited blond tresses, immensely rich. Thoughts of human possibility dwindled: North Bihar seemed to have become the world, capable only of the life that was seen.

It was like the weariness I had felt some weeks before, in the Bundi-Kotah region of Rajasthan, eight hundred miles to the west. If in North Bihar there had seemed to be, with the absence of intellect and creativity, an absence almost of administration, here in Rajasthan was prodigious enterprise. Here were dams and a great irrigation-and-reclamation scheme in a land cut up and wasted by ravines.

Imperfectly conceived twenty years before – no drainage, the nature of the soil not taken into account – the irrigation scheme had led to waterlogging and salinity. Now, urgently, this was being put right. There was a special commissioner, and he and his deputies were men of the utmost energy. The technical problems could be solved. The difficulties – in this state of desert forts, feudal princes, and a peasantry trained only in loyalty, equipped for little else – lay with the people: not just with the ‘mediocrity at every level’ which the commissioner said he found in the administration, but also with the people lower down, whom the scheme was meant to benefit. How could they, used for generations to so little, content
to find glory only in the glory of their rulers, be made now, almost suddenly, to want, to do?

The commissioner’s powers were great, but he was unwilling to rule despotically; he wished to ‘institutionalize’. One evening, by the light of an electric bulb – electricity in the village! – we sat out with the villagers in the main street of a ‘model village’ of the command area. The street was unpaved, and the villagers, welcoming us, had quickly spread cotton rugs on the ground that had been softened by the morning’s rain, half hardened by the afternoon’s heat, and then trampled and manured by the village cattle returning at dusk. The women had withdrawn – so many of them, below their red or orange Rajasthani veils, only girls, children, but already with children of their own. We were left with the men; and, until the rain came roaring in again, we talked.

So handsome, these men of Rajasthan, so self-possessed: it took time to understand that they were only peasants, and limited. The fields, water, crops, cattle: that was where concern began and ended. They were a model village, and so they considered themselves. There was little more that they needed, and I began to see my own ideas of village improvement as fantasies. Nothing beyond food – and survival – had as yet become an object of ambition; though one man said, fantastically, that he would like a telephone, to find out about the price of grain in Kotah without having to go there.

The problems of the irrigation project were not only those of salinity or the ravines or land-levelling. The problem, as the commissioner saw, was the remaking of men. And this was not simply making men want; it meant, in the first place, bringing them back from the self-wounding and the special waste that come with an established destitution. We were among men who, until recently, cut only the very tops of sugar cane and left the rest of the plant, the substance of the crop, to rot. So this concern about fertilizers and yields, this acquiring by the villagers of what I had at first judged to be only peasant attributes, was an immeasurable advance.

But if in this model village – near Kotah Town, which was fast
industrializing – there had been some movement, Bundi the next day seemed to take us backward. Bundi and Kotah: to me, until this trip, they had only been beautiful names, the names of related but distinct schools of Rajasthan painting. The artistic glory of Bundi had come first, in the late seventeenth century. And after the flat waterlogged fields, pallid paddy thinning out at times to marshland, after the desolation of the road from Kotah, the flooded ditches, the occasional cycle-rickshaw, the damp groups of bright-turbaned peasants waiting for the bus, Bundi Castle on its hill was startling, its great walls like the work of giants, the extravagant creation of men who had once had much to defend.

Old wars, bravely fought; but usually little more had been at stake other than the honour and local glory of one particular prince. The fortifications were now useless, the palace was empty. One dark, dusty room had old photographs and remnants of Victorian bric-a-brac. The small formal garden in the courtyard was in decay; and the mechanical, decorative nineteenth-century Bundi murals around the courtyard had faded to blues and yellows and greens. In the inner rooms, hidden from the sun, brighter colours survived, and some panels were exquisite. But it all awaited ruin. The monsoon damp was rotting away plaster; water dripped through green-black cracks in underground arches; and the sharp smell of bat dung was everywhere.

All vitality had been sucked up into that palace on the hill; and now vitality had gone out of Bundi. It showed in the rundown town on the hillside below the palace; it showed in the fields; it showed in the people, more beaten down than at Kotah Town just sixty miles away, less amenable to the commissioner’s ideas, and more full of complaints. They complained even when they had no cause; and it seemed that they complained because they felt it was expected of them. Their mock aggressiveness and mock desperation held little of real despair or rebellion. It was a ritual show of deference to authority, a demonstration of their complete dependence on
authority. The commissioner smiled and listened and heard them all; and their passion faded.

Later we sat with the ‘village-level workers’ in the shade of a small tree in a woman’s yard. These officials were the last in the chain of command; on them much of the success of the scheme depended. There had been evidence during the morning’s tour that they hadn’t all been doing their jobs. But they were not abashed; instead, sitting in a line on a string bed, dressed not like the peasants that they almost were, but dressed like officials, in trousers and shirts, they spoke of their need for promotion and status. They were far removed from the commissioner’s anxieties, from his vision of what could be done with their land. They were, really, at peace with the world they knew. Like the woman in whose yard we sat. She was friendly, she had dragged out string beds for us from her little brick hut; but her manner was slightly supercilious. There was a reason. She was happy, she considered herself blessed. She had had three sons, and she glowed with that achievement.

All the chivalry of Rajasthan had been reduced here to nothing. The palace was empty; the petty wars of princes had been absorbed into legend and could no longer be dated. All that remained was what the visitor could see: small, poor fields, ragged men, huts, monsoon mud. But in that very abjectness lay security. Where the world had shrunk, and ideas of human possibility had become extinct, the world could be seen as complete. Men had retreated to their last, impregnable defences: their knowledge of who they were, their caste, their
karma
, their unshakable place in the scheme of things; and this knowledge was like their knowledge of the seasons. Rituals marked the passage of each day, rituals marked every stage of a man’s life. Life itself had been turned to ritual; and everything beyond this complete and sanctified world – where fulfilment came so easily to a man or to a woman – was vain and phantasmal.

Kingdoms, empires, projects like the commissioner’s: they had come and gone. The monuments of ambition and restlessness littered the land, so many of them abandoned or destroyed, so many
unfinished, the work of dynasties suddenly supplanted. India taught the vanity of all action; and the visitor could be appalled by the waste, and by all that now appeared to threaten the commissioner’s enterprise.

But to those who embraced its philosophy of distress India also offered an enduring security, its equilibrium, that vision of a world finely balanced that had come to the hero of
Mr Sampath
, that ‘arrangement made by the gods’. Only India, with its great past, its civilization, its philosophy, and its almost holy poverty, offered this truth; India
was
the truth. So, to Indians, India could detach itself from the rest of the world. The world could be divided into India and non-India. And India, for all its surface terrors, could be proclaimed, without disingenuousness or cruelty, as perfect. Not only by pauper, but by prince.

Consider this prince, in another part of the country, far from the castles of Rajasthan. Another landscape, another type of vegetation; only, the rain continued. The princes of India – their number and variety reflecting to a large extent the chaos that had come to the country with the break-up of the Mughal empire – had lost real power in the British time. Through generations of idle servitude they had grown to specialize only in style. A bogus, extinguishable glamour: in 1947, with Independence, they had lost their states, and Mrs Gandhi in 1971 had, without much public outcry, abolished their privy purses and titles. The power of this prince had continued; he had become an energetic entrepreneur. But in his own eyes, and in the eyes of those who served him, he remained a prince. And perhaps his grief for his title, and his insistence on his dignity,
was the greater because his state had really been quite small, a fief of some hundred square miles, granted three centuries before to an ancestor, a soldier of fortune.

With his buttoned-up Indian tunic, the prince was quite the autocrat at the dinner table, down the middle of which ran an arrangement of chiffon stuck with roses; and it was some time before I saw that he had come down drunk to our teetotal dinner. He said, unprompted, that he was ‘observing’ the crisis of Indian democracy with ‘interest’. India needed Indian forms of government; India wasn’t one country, but hundreds of little countries. I thought he was building up the case for his own autocratic rule. But his conversational course – almost a soliloquy – was wilder.

‘What keeps a country together? Not economics. Love. Love and affection. That’s our Indian way … You can feed my dog, but he won’t obey you. He’ll obey me. Where’s the economics in that? That’s love and affection … For twenty-eight years until 1947 I ruled this state. Power of life and death. Could have hanged a man and nobody could have done anything to me … Now they’ve looted my honour, my privilege. I’m nobody. I’m just like everybody else … Power of life and death. But I can still go out and walk. Nobody’s going to try and kill me like Kennedy. That’s not economics. That’s our love and affection … Where’s the cruelty you talk about? I tell you, we’re
happy
in India … Who’s talking about patriotism? Have no cause to be. Took away everything. Honour, titles, all looted. I’m not a patriot, but I’m an Indian. Go out and talk to the people. They’re poor, but they’re not inhuman, as you say … You people must leave us alone. You mustn’t come and tell us we’re subhuman. We’re civilized. Are they happy where you come from? Are they happy in England?’

In spite of myself, my irritation was rising. I said: ‘They’re very happy in England.’ He broke off and laughed. But he had spoken seriously. He was acting a little, but he believed everything he said.

His state, or what had been his state, was wretched: just the palace (like a country house, with a garden) and the peasants. The
development (in which he had invested) hadn’t yet begun to show. In the morning in the rain I saw young child labourers using their hands alone to shovel gravel on to a waterlogged path. Groundnuts were the only source of protein here; but the peasants preferred to sell their crop; and their children were stunted, their minds deformed, serf material already, beyond the reach of education where that was available.

(But science, a short time later, was to tell me otherwise. From the
Indian Express:
‘New Delhi, 2 Nov.… Delivering the Dr V. N. Patwardhan Prize oration at the India Council of Medical Research yesterday, Dr Kamala Rao said certain hormonal changes within the body of the malnourished children enabled them to maintain normal body functions … Only the excess and nonessential parts of the body are affected by malnutrition. Such malnourished children, though small in size, are like “paperback books” which, while retaining all the material of the original, have got rid of the nonessential portion of the bound editions.’)

The prince had travelled outside India. He was in a position to compare what he had seen outside with what he could see of his own state. But the question of comparison did not arise. The world outside India was to be judged by its own standards. India was not to be judged. India was only to be experienced, in the Indian way. And when the prince spoke of the happiness of his people, he was not being provocative or backward-looking. As an entrepreneur, almost an industrialist, he saw himself as a benefactor. When he talked about love and affection, he did not exaggerate: he needed to be loved as much as he needed to be reverenced. His attachment to his people was real. And his attachment to the land went beyond that.