India (7 page)

Some time ago Tendulkar was awarded a Nehru Fellowship, and this has enabled him to travel about India, getting material for a book on violence in India. It was news of this project – at first so startling, and then so obvious and right – that made me want to see him. I put him in his late forties, one generation younger than Narayan. He was paunchy and surprisingly placid. But the placidity was deceptive: his mother had died a few days before our meeting, and the censors had just blocked a film for which he had written the script. He said his travels about India followed no set plan; he simply, now and then, followed his nose. He had been investigating the Naxalite peasant movement, which had sought to bring about land reforms by force, had degenerated in some places into rural terrorism, and had been very quickly crushed by the government. He had been to the Telengana district in the south, and to Bihar and West Bengal in the northeast.

Bihar had depressed Tendulkar especially. He had seen things there that he had never believed existed. But he didn’t speak more precisely: it was as though he still felt humiliated by what he had seen. He said only, ‘The human relationships. They’re so horrible because they are accepted by the victims.’ New words, new concerns: and still, even for a writer like Tendulkar, the discovery of India could be like the discovery of a foreign country. He said he had travelled about Bihar by boat, down the Ganges. And it was of the serenity that came to him on this river, sacred to Hindus, that he spoke, rather than of the horrors on the bank.

So it was still there, and perhaps always would be, in the pain of India: the yearning for calm, the area of retreat. But men cannot easily unlearn new modes of feeling. Retreat is no longer possible. Even the ashrams and the holy men (with their executive jets, their international followings, and their public-relations men) are no longer what they were.

‘You must go to that ashram near Poona,’ the Parsi lady, back for a holiday from Europe, said at lunch one day in Bombay. ‘They say you get a nice mix of East and West there.’

The young man who had been described to me as a ‘minor magnate’ said with unexpected passion: ‘It’s a terrible place. It’s full of American women who go there to debauch.’

There was a risen-dough quality about the magnate’s face and physique which hinted at a man given to solitary sexual excitations. He said he was ‘one of the last, decaying capitalists’; he liked ‘fleshly comforts’. Ashram life wasn’t for him: it was possible to make money more easily in India than in any other country, barring the Arab sheikdoms. ‘Sometimes at night I think about giving it all up. And then in the morning, when I think about speculations and manipulations, I wonder, what’s the use of it all? Why stop?’

It was only half a joke. There are times now when India appears able to parody the old idea of itself.

Parody; and sometimes unconscious mimicry. In September this
letter was featured in, of all places, the
Economic Times
of New Delhi:

In a financial newspaper! But India is India; and the letter seems at first quite Indian, a statement of the Hindu-Buddhist ideal of nonattachment. But the writer has got there by a tortured Western route. Much of his language is borrowed; and his attitude isn’t as Hindu or Buddhist as it seems. The image of the smiling Buddha is well known. He has the bump of developed consciousness on his head, the very long ears of comprehension, the folds of wisdom down his neck. But these iconographic distortions do not take away from his humanity. His lips are full, his cheeks round, and he has a double chin. His senses haven’t atrophied (the Buddha tried and rejected the ascetic way); he is at peace with the senses. The possession of the senses is part of his serenity, part of his wholeness, and the very basis of the continuing appeal of this image after two thousand years. It isn’t nonattachment like this that the letter-writer proposes, but something quite different, more Western: stoicism, resignation, with more than a touch of bitterness: a consumer’s lament.

‘ “Why do you blame the country for everything? It has been good enough for four hundred millions,” Jagan said, remembering the heritage of
Ramayana
and
Bhagavad Gita
and all the trials and sufferings he had undergone to win independence.’

This outburst is from
The Vendor of Sweets
. And for too long this self-satisfaction – expressed in varying ways, and most usually in meaningless exhortations to return to the true religion, and laments for Gandhianism: mechanical turns of the prayer wheel – has passed in India for thought. But Gandhianism has had its great day; and the simple assertion of Indian antiquity won’t do now. The heritage is there, and will always be India’s; but it can be seen now to belong to the past, to be part of the classical world. And the heritage has oppressed: Hinduism hasn’t been good enough for the millions. It has exposed us to a thousand years of defeat and stagnation. It has given men no idea of a contract with other men, no idea of the state. It has enslaved one quarter of the population and always left the whole fragmented and vulnerable. Its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth. So that again and again in India history has repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat, withdrawal. And there are not four hundred millions now, but something nearer seven hundred.

The unregarded millions have multiplied and now, flooding into the cities, cannot be denied. The illegal hutments in which they live are knocked down; but they rise again, a daily tide wrack on the margin of cities and beside the railway lines and the industrial highways. It was this new nearness of the millions, this unknown India on the move, together with the triviality of Indian thought on most subjects – the intellectual deficiencies of the archaic civilization finally revealed during this Emergency, India stalled, unable to see its way ahead, to absorb and render creative the changes it has at last generated – it was this great uncertainty, this sense of elemental movement from below, and an almost superstitious dread of this
land of impressive, unfinished ruins, that made the professional man say in Delhi: ‘It’s terrible to see your life’s work turning to ashes.’ And his wife said, ‘For the middle classes, for people who live like us, it’s all over. We have a sense of doom.’

I
T IS SAID
that every day 1500 more people, about 350 families, arrive in Bombay to live. They come mainly from the countryside and they have very little; and in Bombay there isn’t room for them. There is hardly room for the people already there. The older apartment blocks are full; the new skyscrapers are full; the small, low huts of the squatters’ settlements on the airport road are packed tightly together. Bombay shows its overcrowding. It is built on an island, and its development has been haphazard. Outside the defence area at the southern tip of the island, open spaces are few; cramped living quarters and the heat drive people out into such public areas as exist, usually the streets; so that to be in Bombay is always to be in a crowd. By day the streets are clogged; at night the pavements are full of sleepers.

From late afternoon until dinnertime, on the ground floor of the Taj Mahal Hotel, which now extends over a city block, the middle class and the stylish (but hardly rich, and certainly not as rich as the foreign tourists) promenade past the hotel shops and restaurants in the mild, air-conditioned air: an elegant, sheltered bustle, separated by the hotel carport, the fierce Sikh or Gurkha doormen, the road and the parked cars, from the denser swirl of the white-clad crowd around the Gateway of India, the air moist, the polluted Arabian Sea slapping against the stone steps, the rats below the Gateway not
furtive, mingling easily with the crowd, and at nightfall as playful as baby rabbits.

Sometimes, on festive days, stripped divers, small and bony, sit or stand on the sea wall, waiting to be asked to dive into the oily water. Sometimes there is a little band – Indian drums, Western trumpets – attached to some private religious ceremony. Night deepens; the ships’ lights in the harbour grow brighter; the Taj Mahal lobby glitters behind its glass wall. The white crowd – with the occasional red or green or yellow of a sari – melts away; and then around the Gateway and the hotel only the sleepers and the beggars remain, enough at any time for a quick crowd, in this area where hotels and dimly lit apartment buildings and stores and offices and small factories press against one another, and where the warm air, despite the sea, always feel overbreathed.

The poor are needed as hands, as labour; but the city was not built to accommodate them. One report says that 100,000 people sleep on the pavements of Bombay; but this figure seems low. And the beggars: are there only 20,000 in Bombay, as one newspaper article says, or are there 70,000, the figure given on another day?

Whatever the number, it is now felt that there are too many. The very idea of beggary, precious to Hindus as religious theatre, a demonstration of the workings of
karma
, a reminder of one’s duty to oneself and one’s future lives, has been devalued. And the Bombay beggar, displaying his unusual mutilations (inflicted in childhood by the beggar-master who had acquired him, as proof of the young beggar’s sins in a previous life), now finds, unfairly, that he provokes annoyance rather than awe. The beggars themselves, forgetting their Hindu function, also pester tourists; and the tourists misinterpret the whole business, seeing in the beggary of the few the beggary of all. The beggars have become a nuisance and a disgrace. By becoming too numerous they have lost their place in the Hindu system and have no claim on anyone.

The poet in Vijay Tendulkar’s 1972 play
The Vultures
rebukes his tender-hearted sister-in-law for bringing him tea ‘on the sly, like
alms to a beggar’. And she replies, hurt, ‘There wasn’t any shortage of beggars at our door that I should bring it as alms to you.’ But already that ritualistic attitude to beggary seems to belong to a calmer world. There is talk in Bombay of rounding up all the beggars, of impounding them, expelling them, dumping them out of sight somewhere, keeping them out. There is more: there is talk among high and low of declaring the city closed, of issuing work permits, of keeping out new arrivals. Bombay, like all the other big Indian cities, has at last begun to feel itself under siege.

The talk of work permits and barriers at the city boundaries is impractical and is known to be impractical. It is only an expression of frenzy and helplessness: the poor already possess, and corrupt, the city. The Indian-Victorian-Gothic city with its inherited British public buildings and institutions – the Gymkhana with its wide veranda and spacious cricket ground, the London-style leather-chaired Ripon Club for elderly Parsi gentlemen (a portrait of Queen Victoria as a youngish Widow of Windsor still hanging in the secretary’s office) – the city was not built for the poor, the millions. But a glance at the city map shows that there was a time when they were invited in.

In the centre of the island on which Bombay is built there is a large area marked
‘MILLS MILLS MILLS’
and
‘chawls chawls chawls’
. The mills needed, and need, workers; and the workers live or are accommodated in these chawls. These textile mills – many of them now with antiquated machinery – should have been moved long ago. Bombay might then have been allowed to breathe. But the readily available crowds of the mill area serve every kind of commercial and political interest; and the mills will stay.

Some time ago there was talk of a ‘twin city’ on the mainland, to draw industry and people out of Bombay. The plan fell through. Instead, at the southern tip of the island, on expensively reclaimed land, there sprang up a monstrous development of residential skyscrapers: unimaginative walls of concrete in an unlandscaped desert with, already, on the unmade roads the huts and stalls of the poor,
sucked in by the new development. ‘Here you are … 
QUEEN FOR YOUR STAY
’, says the most recent
Bombay Handbook
, published by the American Women’s Association, ‘Your dream of having servants is about to come true.’ There isn’t accommodation for the poor; but they are always needed, and forever called in, even now.

So, though every day more corrupted by its poor, Bombay, with the metropolitan glamour of its skyscrapers, appears to boom, and at night especially, from the sea road, is dramatic: towers of light around the central nightmare of the mill area.

The main roads there are wide, wet-black and clean in the middle from traffic, earth-coloured at the edges where pavement life flows over on to the road, as it does even on a relaxed Sunday morning, before the true heat and glare, and before the traffic builds up and the hot air turns gritty from the brown smoke of the double-decker buses: already a feeling of the crowd, of busy slender legs, of an immense human stirring behind the tattered commercial façades one sees and in the back streets one doesn’t see, people coming out into the open, seeking space.

The area seems at first to be one that has gone down in the world. The commercial buildings are large and have style; but, for all the Indian ornamentation of their facades – the rising sun, the Indo-Aryan swastika for good luck, the Sanskrit character
Om
for holiness – these buildings were built to be what they are, to serve the population they serve. Like the chawls themselves, which in some streets can look like the solid town mansions of a less nervous time, but are newer than they look, many built in the 1930s and 1940s, and built even at that late date as chawls, substandard accommodation for factory labour, one room per family, the urban equivalent of plantation barracks or ‘ranges’, the equivalent, in twentieth-century Bombay, of early industrial England’s back-to-back workers’ terraces.