The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (42 page)

“—and I suppose if things come to a head India will be in the war too. Which will mean me.”

He sat and thought for a moment. He did not feel that it would mean him at all.

“It’s difficult to apply a theory when faced with a situation that calls for some kind of positive reaction,” he continued. “I suppose you’ve been faced with one in much the way that I have.”

He remembered the time when Mr. Lindsey had described Adolf Hitler as a bloody housepainter, and later as a man who, “anyway, got things done.” He also remembered that during Munich, which had coincided with his own act of appeasement of Uncle Romesh Chand, Colin had written him a letter which expressed relief that Mr. Chamberlain’s
commonsense had averted hostilities. To Hari in Mayapore, Munich had meant nothing. He judged retrospectively that to the Mayapore English, blanketed as they were in the colonial warmth of their racial indestructibility, it had meant nothing either. He did not doubt, though, that the tone of Colin’s latest letter was an accurate reflection of a mood now shared by the English as a whole, at home and abroad. He tried to enter it himself, but could not. The inspiration for it was not to be found in the Chillianwallah Bagh, nor was it to be found in the cantonment, in the magistrates’ courts, in the sessions and appeal court of the District Judge, or even on the maidan, places with which Hari had become increasingly familiar as a result of his job on the
Gazette.
It was not to be found in them because he entered such places as an Indian. He entered by permission, not by right. He did not care for what he saw. He did not care for what he felt—the envy of the English and their institutions that came to fill the vacuum left by the loss of his own English identity. He found it depressingly easy to imagine Colin in the place of the young Englishman who sat as a magistrate—not precisely with the power of life or death (because his judicial powers were restricted)—but with the power to send a man who was old enough to be his father to jail for a year; depressingly easy because in this young man Colin himself could be seen, if only symbolically, in an unpleasant light. On the other hand, he could not imagine himself presiding in the place of the Indian magistrate who appeared one day in the place of the Englishman, and conducted his court with no less acidity or assurance. For the first time Hari found himself asking: What is an Indian doing sitting there, fining that man, jailing this woman, sending this case up to the court of sessions? He felt an unexpected resistance to the idea of an Indian doing an Englishman’s work. When he paused to consider this resistance he realized that he had responded as a member of a subject race. The thought alarmed him.

“Such a fuss,” he wrote to Colin two months later (when, far away in Europe, the war had already begun) about the resignation of those provincial ministries which had been dominated by the Congress. “Of course you can see both points of view. The Viceroy had to declare war on India’s behalf because he’s the King-Emperor’s representative, and the Germans now rank as the King’s enemies. But since for some time now the British policy towards India has been to treat her as an embryo Dominion that only needs time to become self-governing, the Viceroy
might at least have gone through the motions of consulting Indian leaders. Some people say that under the 1935 Act he was actually committed to consultation, but even if he wasn’t how much more effective it would have been if the declaration could have been made with a simultaneous Indian statement of intention to cooperate freely. And one can understand why with all this talk going on about British War Aims the Indians feel one of them should be independence for India immediately the war is over. Failure to state that as a definite aim, with a definite date, has led a lot of Indians to believe that independence should be insisted on
now.
They say that only a free country fights with a will. And they fear a repetition after the war of all the prevarication that’s been going on these last ten years or more. But I think they’re a lot to blame for the delay themselves. The Congress says it represents all India, but it doesn’t. All this disagreement among themselves about who represents what just plays into the hands of the kind of English who don’t want to give India up—the kind of people my father always assumed would get their way. On the whole I think he was probably right. For instance now that the Congress ministries have all resigned most of the provinces are back under old-style rule of a Governor and a council, which seems to me the very sort of thing a sensible party would have wanted to avoid because it puts them back years politically. But then I have never been and probably never will be able to make sense of Indian politics. As for the effect of the war on the English here, so far as I can see there hasn’t been any. Frankly, it’s something that seems to be taking place in almost another world—if you can say that it’s taking place anywhere. To judge from the news nothing much is happening, is it? The English here say that Hitler now realizes he’s bitten off more than he can chew and will end up by being a sensible chap and coming to some arrangement with France and Britain. Some Indians say that their own leaders, Nehru especially, have been warning the West for years about the threat Hitler has always represented.”

Apart from a short letter from Colin which was written over the Christmas of 1939, a Christmas which Colin had spent at home, after completing a course of training as an officer cadet, Hari heard nothing for nearly a year. A note from Mr. Lindsey in the spring of 1940 informed him that Colin was “somewhere in France” and that Hari’s last letter had been forwarded to him. He said that the best thing for Hari to do in future would be to write to Colin at Didbury so that the letters could be sent on to wherever he happened to be.

Hari could not help remembering the attitude Colin’s father had taken in 1938, an attitude he had begun to see during the past two years as proof that the man had stopped trusting him. “What will he do with my letters?” he asked himself. “Read them? Censor them? Not forward them if I say anything he thinks might upset Colin, or if I say something he doesn’t personally like?” The shadow of Mr. Lindsey fell across the notepaper whenever he wrote. Here was a further disruption to the even flow of thoughts going out to his old friend. The belief that he and Colin were growing further and further apart as a result not only of circumstances but also of the intervention of the powerful force of the malign spirit that had driven his father to death and himself into exile, now took hold of him, but the letter he eventually received from Colin in the August of 1940 seemed to show that between them nothing had fundamentally changed. The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure; and when Hari attempted an analysis of his friendship with Colin he found it healthily straightforward. It was an attraction of like for like that had long ago outgrown whatever initial morbid or childish curiosity there had been in the colours of the skin and the magic of the genes. Colin’s letter turned back the years. Here was the authentic voice of his friend Lindsey. Reading between the lines Hari understood that Colin had not had an easy passage. This pegged them level again. The letter gave him little general information. Young Lindsey had been at Dunkirk, and since then “in hospital for a bit, not because I was badly hurt but because it took rather a long time to get the proper treatment and dressings, and things went bad on me, but are all right now.” The letter was written from home on a spell of leave between leaving hospital and returning to his unit.

“It was a bloody shambles if you ask me. It amuses me when I hear Dad say to people his son was at Dunkirk, as if that was something to be proud of. My lasting reaction is one of anger, but undirected anger because no one person or even group of persons could be held responsible more than any other person or any other group. I suppose it was our old friend Nemesis catching up with us at last. I lost one good friend. I went to see his sister the other day. Ridiculous how one gets involved in these trite melodramatic situations. We both hated it. When I got back from hospital Dad gave me a couple of letters from you that he’d saved up. We had a bit of a row about that. I was worried what you’d have been thinking, not getting any answers. At first he said he hadn’t wanted
to bother me, and that you’d understand anyway that I was otherwise engaged. Then he admitted he’d read them and thought them full of a lot of ‘hot-headed’ political stuff. Hari, I only tell you this so that if you ever write letters to me care of home again you can bear in mind that they might be read. He’s promised not to do that ever again, and sees that it was wrong, but he’s got some funny notions in his head nowadays. I don’t want to hurt the old boy but in lots of ways he seems like a stranger to me. And that’s a cliché situation too, isn’t it? So cliché that I almost distrust my reactions to it. But there are so many things he says and does that get on my nerves. He keeps a
Times
wall map, and sticks pins in it like a general. The pin that’s stuck in Dunkirk has a little paper union jack on it. I have an idea it represents me. Write and tell me some sensible things.”

Sensible things? On the day Hari received this letter he had been in the District Court listening to the appeal against conviction of a man accused and found guilty in the Magistrate’s Court at Tanpur of stealing another man’s cow and selling it to a man who had given it away as part of his daughter’s dowry. The accused man said that the cow had become his property because its owner refused to stop it wandering onto his land and it had fed constantly free of cost and consumed fodder in excess of its market value. The appeal was based on the grounds that the Tanpur magistrate had not admitted the evidence of two witnesses who would swear to the fact that the convicted man had given the original owner repeated warnings of his intention to sell. Judge Menen dismissed the appeal and Hari then left the court because the next and last case was an appeal against imprisonment under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code, and Hari’s editor never published reports of such controversial matters.

“Sensible things?” Hari wrote back to Colin. “I suppose that in wartime especially you can reckon it sensible if not actually fair to imprison a man for speaking his mind. But this is not a purely wartime measure. It is a long-standing one provided for in a section of the criminal procedure code. Section 144 enables the civil authority to decide for itself that such and such a man is a potential local threat to public peace, and thus to
order
him to stay quiet on pain of arrest and imprisonment. If he disobeys the order he gets prosecuted and punished under section 188. I believe he can appeal as far as the provincial High Court if he has a mind to. I was at the District and Sessions Court on the day your letter came. I left the court just before the Judge (an Indian) heard such an
appeal, so I know nothing of the actual proceedings. But I saw the prisoner on my way out, waiting with two constables, and recognized him as a fellow called Moti Lal. He recognized me too and said, ‘Hello, Coomer,’ and was then hustled in through the door prisoners enter the court by. The last time I saw this man he was working as a clerk at my uncle’s depot at the railway sidings. I made inquiries when I got back to the office. It seems my uncle sacked him a few months ago, ostensibly for inefficiency. But I guess from what my editor told me that the real reason was that my uncle heard from someone that Moti Lal was mixed up with what you could call the underground side of the Congress Party. I asked my uncle’s lawyer, a Brahmin called Srinivasan, what Moti Lal had actually been arrested for. It seems he was always ‘inciting’ workers and students to strike or to riot and had disobeyed an order prohibiting him from giving a speech at a meeting of senior students at the Technical College. He was also suspected of being the leader of a group of young men who were printing and distributing seditious literature, but no evidence was found. Anyway, he got six months. And his appeal was dismissed. An ex-colleague on the
Gazette
—a fellow called Vidyasagar who now works for a radical newspaper called the
Mayapore Hindu
—told me about it when I met him in court yesterday.

“Vidyasagar is a pleasant chap whom I rather like but have a bad conscience about. The first few weeks I worked on the
Gazette
the editor sent me round with him practically everywhere, and then sacked him. Vidya took it well. He said he guessed what was in the editor’s mind when he was detailed to show me the ropes. He said, ‘I don’t hold it against you, Kumar, because you don’t know anything.’ He chips me a bit whenever we happen to meet and says that given time I might learn to be a good Indian.

“But I’m not sure I know what a good Indian
is.
Is he the fellow who joins the army (because it is a family tradition to join the army), or the fellow who is rich enough and ambitious enough to contribute money to Government War Funds, or is he the rebellious fellow who gets arrested like Moti Lal? Or is the good Indian the Mahatma, whom everyone here calls Gandhiji, and who last month, after Hitler had shown Europe what his army was made of, praised the French for surrendering and wrote to the British cabinet asking them to adopt ‘a nobler and braver way of fighting,’ and let the Axis powers walk into Britain. The nobler and braver way means following his prescribed method of nonviolent non-cooperation. That sounds like a ‘good Indian.’ But then there is Nehru,
who obviously thinks this attitude is crazy. He seems to want to fight Hitler. He says England’s difficulties aren’t India’s opportunity. But then he adds that India can’t, because of that, be stopped from continuing her own struggle for freedom. Perhaps then, the good Indian is that ex-Congress fellow Subhas Chandra Bose who makes freedom the first priority and is now in Berlin, toadying to Hitler, and broadcasting to us telling us to break our chains. Or is he Mr. Jinnah who has at last simplified the communal problem by demanding a separate state for Muslims if the Hindu-dominated Congress succeeds in getting rid of the British? Or is he one of the Indian princes who has a treaty with the British Crown that respects his sovereign rights and who doesn’t intend to lose them simply because a lot of radical Indian politicians obtain control of British India? This is actually a bigger problem than I ever guessed, because the princes rule almost one third of the whole of India’s territory. And then again, should we forget all these sophisticated aspects of the problem of who is or is not a good Indian and see him as the simple peasant who is only interested in ridding himself of the burden of the local money lender and becoming entitled to the whole of whatever it is he grows? And where do the English stand in all this?