Hindoo Holiday

J. R. ACKERLEY
(1896–1967) was for many years the literary editor of the BBC magazine
The Listener
. His works include three memoirs,
Hindoo Holiday
,
My Dog Tulip
, and
My Father and Myself
, and a novel,
We Think the World of You
(all available as New York Review Books).

ELIOT WEINBERGER
is the author of two collections of essays,
Outside Stories
and
Works on Paper
, and the editor and translator of the
Collected Poems
of Octavio Paz and the
Selected Non-Fictions
of Jorge Luis Borges.

HINDOO HOLIDAY

An Indian Journal

J.R. ACKERLEY

Introduction by

ELIOT WEINBERGER

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1932 by the Trustees of the J. R. Ackerley Fund

Copyright © 1932 by The Viking Press

Copyright © renewed 1960 by J. R. Ackerley

Introduction copyright © 2000 by Eliot Weinberger

All rights reserved.

 

Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of J. R. Ackerley

First Published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 1932

Cover image: Maira Kalman, from her book
Swami on Rye
.

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Ackerley, J. R. (Joe Randolph) , 1896–1967.

      Hindoo holiday : an Indian journal / by J. R. Ackerley ;

   introduction by Eliot Weinberger.

         p.cm.

      Originally published: London : Chatto & Windus, 1932.

      ISBN 0-940322-25-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

      1. Ackerley, J. R. (Joe Randolph) , 1896–1967—Journeys—India.

   2. Authors, English—20th century—Journeys—India. 3. British—

   India—History—20th century. 4. India—Social life and customs.

   I. Title.

   PR6001.C4Z466

   2000

828' .91203—dc 21

[B]                           99-34710

ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-524-8
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

HINDOO HOLIDAY

Dedication

Principal Characters

Preface to the Second Edition

Explanation

Part 1

Part 2

The double “o” in the title immediately signals that we are returning to another time: one that was not so long ago, but is now as antiquated as its orthography. An era that was tragic, perhaps, in its essence, but comic in its particulars; a time of unspeakable wealth and inconceivable poverty, continual cultural misunderstandings, unfettered whimsy, and cruelties large and small: the age of the British Raj and the Indian princes.

The Raj was born in the wake of the 1857 Sepoy Revolt against the Honourable East India Company, which had controlled much of the subcontinent for a hundred years. Realizing that the Company could no longer protect British interests, the British government, with some reluctance, intervened. Slightly more than half of the country fell under the direct administration of the Crown, but the rest of the land was divided into 562 states, from tiny principalities to kingdoms as large as the British Isles themselves. These states enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy in their internal affairs, but all had to pledge not to pursue independent courses of foreign policy.

This meant peace for hundreds of kingdoms that had spent centuries warring. And it meant that the princes, whose pride was based on a heritage of martial valor, had to find new ways of demonstrating their princeliness. Many found the solution in the overflowing coffers of their treasuries. With war no longer draining their time and revenues, they attacked leisure as though it were the citadel of an ancient rival.

There were palaces with seven thousand servants, and a maharani whose jewels were so heavy she could stand only when supported by two attendants. There were royal hunts on the backs of four hundred elephants, where scores of tigers or tens of thousands of birds would be slain in a single day. There were children's toys of solid gold, nursery balls encrusted with rubies, a turban with three thousand diamonds, a carpet made only of jewels.

There was a maharajah who changed his clothes when the thermometer rose or fell by one degree, and one who sent his laundry to Paris. There was an auto enthusiast with 270 cars for his personal motoring, and a Scotophile who outfitted his idle troops in complete Highland gear (with the addition of pink tights, so that the brown knees of his men would take on a ruddy Scots complexion). There was one, unlucky in love, who checked into a Paris hotel, ordered cases of Dom Perignon, and drank until he died. And another who occupied thirty-five suites of the Savoy in London and received three thousand fresh roses a day, for he said he loved nature.

A fantastic spire atop the most hierarchical society in the East, princely India was administered or advised by the stodgy, lower-middle-class members of the military and bureaucratic castes of the most hierarchical society in the West. Transformed by colonialism into aristocrats, these sahibs and memsahibs inhabited a world of pig-sticking and costume balls, puttees and topees, tin peas and quinine, calling cards and chits. A world that was ritualized in its slightest details to preserve its newly found decorum in the vastness of an India teeming with germs and masses: a chaos to be largely ignored but strictly controlled when it entered the home or barracks or office in the form of the retinues of servants.

J. R. Ackerley wandered into this scene in 1923. The handsome son of an extravagantly
nouveau riche
fruiterer—the selfstyled “Banana King of London”—he had gone directly from his militaristic public school into the trenches soon after war was declared in 1914. He saw action at the Somme (where a million and a half shells were fired, and sixty thousand British soldiers were killed or wounded) and in other terrible battles; lost his idolized brother; was wounded and taken prisoner; and was not returned to England until months after the peace.

He then entered Cambridge, and a homosexual world that itself now seems as remote as the Raj. Still under the shadow of the Oscar Wilde trial and the Sodomy Laws, more circumspect than closeted, it was a tiny universe of brilliant upper-class men who reveled and suffered under a sharp class distinction between sex and friendship. As detailed in Peter Parker's witty biography of Ackerley, they talked endlessly to each other about their sex lives, but would select their actual partners from the working class. Often heterosexual and sometimes married, their lovers—unlike themselves—had little spare time and little to say that would be of interest to Oxbridge. Romance was furtive, brief, complicated to arrange, thrilling, and boring.

In 1923, Ackerley was twenty-seven, had published a few poems, had written a play,
The Prisoners of War
, that was having trouble finding a producer because of its implicit homoeroticism, and was adrift. His friend E. M. Forster suggested a stint in India, from which Forster had recently returned, perhaps as the secretary to the Maharajah of Chhatarpur, a minor noble whom he called “the Prince of Muddlers, even among Indian muddlers”—and who was also gay.

Months of negotiation followed. The Maharajah had wanted a secretary who was exactly like Olaf, a character in H. Rider Haggard's
The Wanderer's Necklace
, and had even written to Haggard for help. He was oddly unimpressed by Ackerley's photograph, then impressed by his poems, offered him lifetime employment leading to a cabinet post, dismissed the whole thing as impossible, and finally hired him for six months. Ackerley ended up staying less than five.

Back in England, Ackerley slowly transformed his Indian diaries into
Hindoo Holiday
, which appeared in 1932. His publisher, fearful of libel, had insisted on cuts in the text pertaining to the Maharajah's sexual preferences and speculations on the paternity of his heirs. Chhatarpur was jokingly changed to Chhokrapur, which means “City of Boys.” Nevertheless, it was too salacious to be broadcast on the BBC, and salacious enough to become an instant and unexpected hit. Vita Sackville-West, Evelyn Waugh, and Cyril Connolly loved it. André Gide recommended it to Gallimard, and the Aga Khan, the playboy spiritual leader of the Ismailis, not only insisted on writing a preface to the French edition but also named a race horse after the book. (Unfortunately it was a loser.) The book remained in print for decades. A new edition in 1952 restored some of the cuts, but it was not, strangely, until its first Indian edition in 1979 that readers could find a completely unexpurgated text. (This is the first Western edition of the uncut version.)

Ackerley went on to become the much-loved literary editor of
The Listener
from 1935 to 1959, and to write, at tortoise pace, three more books: an extraordinary portrait of his Alsatian,
My Dog Tulip
(1956); an autobiographical novel,
We Think the World of You
, which was rejected by Maurice Girodias as “not dirty enough” but which became a scandalous prize winner; and the frank and pioneering memoir
My Father and Myself
, which Ackerley had begun in 1933 and finished just before his death in 1967.
V. S. Naipaul, recalling his first visit to India (in
The Enigma of Arrival
), writes:

It is an indication of the place that
Hindoo Holiday
held on the short shelf of enduring literary books produced by the Raj: preceded only by Emily Eden's
Up the Country
in the mid-nineteenth century, and, of course, by
Kim
and
A Passage to India
. Later it was followed by L. H. Myers's
The Root and the Flower
(also known as
The Near and the Far
, a tetralogy of philosophical novels set in the Mughal age, and thus a product of the Raj but not about it) and Paul Scott's operatic
The Raj Quartet
with its nostalgic coda,
Staying On
. The literature's final flowering was, appropriately, not written by an Englishman, but by a fiercely Anglophilic Bengali, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in his half-Proustian, half-polemical
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

Hindoo Holiday
is the most comic of these, and the only one to avoid larger issues, eternal mysteries, or the temptation to throng with as much life as India itself. Ackerley was clearly severe in reworking his diaries, limiting himself to the creation of a handful of unforgettable characters, and eliminating anything he experienced outside of Chhatarpur itself. There is no description of his journey to the state, and none of his departure; a three-week trip to Benares and other places is discussed only in terms of the complex negotiations with the Maharajah for a leave; and there is no mention of the famed erotic temples of Khajaraho, which were nearby and which he surely visited. Instead, he essentially transplanted the comedy of manners from an English country estate to an Indian palace; this may be the only travel book ever written that could easily be adapted as a play.

Ackerley makes no pretense that this is anything more than a holiday; he does not presume to characterize, let alone condemn, the Indian soul, based on his chance encounters. (And in fact he is often a little fuzzy or simply wrong on Indian details.) Kipling loved India, and especially the words of Anglo-India—the first half of
Kim
has an exuberance of language that would not be seen again until Joyce—but he still bore the white man's burden. Ackerley, even more than Forster, has no agenda; both are extraordinarily tolerant, reserving their scorn —like many travelers—only for their fellow countrymen.