2
At last then we have alighted at old Madras. In our previous issue we carried our readers from London to the Spice Islands, and from the Spice Islands to Surat and Fort St. George; lingering however upon our way to gossip anent the Great Moguls who reigned at Delhi. But now that we have fairly crossed the surf, we will take the opportunity (whilst Mr. Day is building up his Fort for the protection of the Agency) to take a rapid glance at the world around us.
Among the writers on India who visited the country with Alexander, the following are the most prominent: ─
Ptolemy, the son of Lagus; who became the king of Egypt; Aristoboulos of Potidaia; Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander’s fleet; Oneskritos of Astyphaia, the pilot of the fleet; Eumenes of Kardia, Alexander’s secretary, who kept a court journal; Hieronymous, the countryman of Eumenes; Charles of Mitylene, who wrote anecdotes of Alexander’s private life; Kallisthenes of Olynthos, Aristotle’s kinsman, author of an account of Alexander’s Asiatic expedition; Kleitarchos, author of a life of Alexander; Androsthenes of Thasos, author of a periplus; Polykleitos of Larissa, author of a history of Alexander which is full of geographical details; Kyrsilos of Pharsalos; Anaximenes of Lampasakos; Diognetos, who, with baton, measured and recorded the distances of Alexander’s marches; Archelaos, a geographer, supposed to have accompanied Alexander’s expedition; Amyntas, author of a work on Alexander’s halting places. (J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India, its Invasion by Alexander the Great, and Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature)
It is a matter of great regret that the memoirs of all these writers are now totally lost.
The Macmillan editor, not interested in publishing my work, has nonetheless been kind enough to give me the address of someone in town who might be, a Mr. Ramakrishnan at 78 Royapettah High Road, director of CREA-Arts. A phone call is made, the appointment set for 10:30 am Thursday.
Wednesday evening I carefully pack my briefcase with books, flyers, manuscripts ─ careful not to overload it, careful not to leave out something that conversation might lead to. Will he himself be the publisher, or will he again be the one to lead me to the publisher? We shall see.
At 10:15 I catch an “auto,” wondering as the driver turns in the wrong direction but deciding to place myself in his hands. By an indirect route we reach Royapettah High Road. Having located number 81, I decide that’s close enough and descend. I find myself at an intersection, a “T.” The first house to the left is 81; the first to the right, 69. Inquiry leads me up the stem of the T (in Asia houses often numbered by proximity to the main road). With difficulty I discover a block of apartments numbered 71 to 78. “Upstairs,” then, as per instructions, to number 78. A Mr. Ramakrishnan here? No, but try the first floor. Back to 73. A Mr. Ramakrishnan, but no association with CREA. My slip of paper is scrutinized. Number 78, upstairs, I’m told. No, I’ve been there. Two neighbors have opened their doors. More consultation. A heated discussion in Tamil, fingers pointing in 3 different directions. “Ah,” says a fourth, inspired voice, speaking in English, having wrested the slip away, “this is the old number 78; you want the new.” The street has been renumbered. I return to the T, am misdirected north, but within 10 minutes am crossing the stem of the T, headed south.
New and old numbers are intermixed. Within 5 more minutes I’ve reached new number 76 (each number encompasses an entire building), the old number 92 still visible beside the new. But no sign of 78, which should, if the differential 16 hold, occur 2 buildings down at 94. What to do?
In the middle of the street, opposite the building that should be numbered 78, stands a policeman, directing ungainly buses past water buffaloes, moving pedi-cabs onto the curb to allow chauffeur-driven cars to get past street vendors who, here in front of the temple, have spilled out onto the street. Having exhausted all other advice, I struggle to the middle of the street, show him my slip of paper. He tacitly agrees to help, turning us in the direction of old 78. I think to question this, but how (he speaks no English)? And surely he knows better than I.
Within 5 minutes we have reached the T. Long conferences, with half the neighborhood. One by one drops of perspiration drip off the nose of the kindly policeman. Urchins, gathered about to stare upon the stranger, at the least provocation suddenly flash their smiles. “No,” says someone, it is new number 78 you want.” Back we go, consulting with half a dozen shopkeepers, bystanders, passersby. None has heard of CREA but everyone has opinions.
At old 94 we engage the problem in earnest. A half dozen interviews. Finally, upstairs to explore this 3-story building. At last, on the third floor, at the top of the stair, behind a locked grate, a sign: “Open 10:00 am to 5:30.” This must be it, the policeman decides. Shouting down into the street from the outside stairway we have climbed, he summons a 70-year-old man to trudge up the steps for consultation. Five minutes later he arrives to name the office’s occupant. It is not Mr. Ramakrishnan.
Back on the street the neighborhood watches, offers more advice. Then, a bright idea: the phone book! Into another shop ─ the photographer’s, one rich enough to have a phone. Please be seated. Gladly. Dusty desk and display case. The phone book being sent for. A corner of icons in faded colors: Rama, Ganesh, Krishna, Lakshmi. The book arrives. A gargantuan poster-ad for American film. There are 4 pages of Ramakrishnans. The policeman searches them one by one. A white girl in bathing suit teasing the viewer, glasses perched on the end of her nose. No Ramakrishnan listed on Royapettah High Road. I smile at the assembled personnel. We shake our heads. It is 12:05. I thank the policeman profusely, thank the photographer, grip my briefcase and hail another “auto.”
*
“British writers in India
Francis W. Bain, Professor of History for 27 years at Deccan College, Poona. For a long time it was thought that his cycle of Indian stories was translated from ancient Sanskrit legends, but he wrote the stories himself.
Bithia Mae Croker, wife of an officer in India, spent 14 years in the East. She wrote over 20 romantic novels dealing with India.
Ethel M. Dell, whose first book, The Way of an Eagle, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Maud Diver, born at a hill station in the Himalayas, educated in England, returned to India at the age of 16. Her companion on this trip was Mrs. Fleming, Rudyard Kipling’s sister.
E.M. Forster spent a short time in India in 1912 and returned there in 1921 for a somewhat longer stay.
Rumer Godden was born in Sussex but raised on the banks of the Ganges. When she was sent to England for her education she found life there dull and colorless.
Thomas Anstey Guthrie, writing under a synonym, created in his babus a type of character that has become a classic. He was associated with Punch from 1887 to 1930.
G.A. Henty was the greatest writer of boys’ books of his day, and through his glorification of the British Empire did much to popularize it. In 1875 he accompanied Edward, Prince of Wales, on his tour of India and with him travelled the length and breadth of the country.
Sir William W. Hunter compiled the statistical survey of the Indian Empire, which was published in nine volumes. Before his death in 1887 he was able to complete two volumes of his History of British India.
F. Tennyson Jesse, best known for her works on criminology, travelled to Burma, where she claimed to have seen files regarding the annexation, the subject of her novel, The Lacquer Lady.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father was a professor of architectural sculpture in an Indian school. Except for one short visit to England, Kipling lived in India until he was seven. After a typical Anglo-Indian education away from his family, he returned to India and worked for the next seven years as a journalist. In 1889 he left and, except for a brief return two years later, lived the rest of his life first in the United States and then in England.
Alfred Edward Woodley Mason, subsequently a Member of the House of Commons, went to India in the early years of the century to become known as an authority. His novel, The Broken Road, was praised by Lord Curzon for its accuracy.
Philip Mason, Director of the Institute of Race Relations in London, is best known for his The Men Who Ruled India.
Leopold H. Meyers developed the idea of writing novels based on the Mogul court from the publication in English of the Japanese classic Tales of Genji.
George Orwell was born in Bengal but left for England at an early age. In 1922 he returned to Burma where he remained until 1927 as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police. On his return to England he wrote the novel Burma Days to get Burma out of his system. He is also known for his essay, “Shooting an Elephant.”
Pierre Stephen Robert Payne, author of nearly a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects, is predominantly associated with Asia. He spent half his childhood in France, the Second World War in China, and has recently returned to the U.S.
John Sibly, wounded while serving in the Gloucestershire Regiment in Burma, recovered in an Indian hospital and from these experiences wrote You’ll Walk to Mandalay.
Harry David Walker served in the British Army in India from 1932 to 1936 and was later captured in France during the Second World War. These experiences are reflected in his novel Harry Black.”
*
Americans in Madras, I. An American colleague turns up, a specialist in communication theory and advertising. He vaunts his expertise and desirability. Has been lecturing widely in the U.S. Has been doing consultation and market research. Method: those infernal unsolicited phone calls. Expresses disappointment that such research will be impossible in Madras, where only the upper middle class or higher have phones, where the caller is simply hung up on.
With deliberate calm emphasis he pushes upon the auditor his steady self-confidence, his experience of India ─ he and his wife have agreed that the 4-stage gopuram at Khajuraho is “pure Maslow,” that these “dirty temples” are definitely worth the visit, that he would recommend them over the Taj Mahal. Steadily smoking cigarettes, which he tosses uncrushed into my ashtray, he holds forth, making a case for his enterprise in India (“Teaching them both theory and practice in one term won’t be easy”), for his 20 academic years (“My salary’s well above average but nationally it’s lagging $10-12,000 a year”), his domestic arrangements (“She lives in Forth Worth, but we collaborate ─ have already done 3 books, in fact are doing another one right now”). When it emerges that I have written novels, he returns the subject to himself. His book’s title? “Communication Theory,” or “Public Relations Writing”; “colon,” he adds; “Form and Substance,” or some such thing. “Writing comes hard for me,” he says.
Americans in Madras, II. Invitation to lunch by the Public Affairs Officer at the Consulate. Berkeley archaeology B.A., after dabbling in East Asian Studies. First post in Austria, from which forced to depart within 9 months, having gone to the trouble of learning German. Now, after 2 1/2 years in India, about to return stateside for 6 months of intensive Spanish, then a similar post in Caracas.
An intelligent fellow, a pleasant lunch, for which I am grateful ─ to say nothing of replacement for my malaria medicine lost by Pan Am. Here it is not the individual but the establishment that makes one wince. The ride from consulate to palatial estates conducted in air-conditioned van, Cultural Officer, new Public Affairs Officer, present (departing) PAO and Political Officer all being driven home for lunch. A bunch of sharp characters, all (except for the senior man) in their late 20s, early 30s. No introductions, no show of interest in the lowly lecturer. Talk runs to benefits, U.S. car allowances (“You can’t get much for $10,000,” says a 25-year-old).
Rich Madrasis, I. “The New York 400?” says the departing Public Affairs Officer, over toward whom I’ve sidled as the only friendly presence at the opening of “Our Towne ─ Ah, Madras.” “It’s the Madras 125,” he answers, in this “town” of 3.5 million (or 8 including suburbs). The show consists of tasteful miniatures, ranging from 1812 etchings done in London ─ superbly ─ from drawings made in “The Black City,” to recently ─ and again rather skillfully ─ done watercolors. The audience is polite, polished, and above all on intimate terms with itself. Since I’m here to close a real estate deal ─ the gallery owner the niece of the landlord from whom I would like to rent, I hang fire. The aunt and her husband, estranged for many years, build in the early ’60s, hiring a Spanish architect for the purpose, an extravagant ’30s movie set (one imagines Dorothy Lamour languorously entertaining in it). The house is divided into 2 apartments, one for him, one for her. The uncle then runs off with the aunt’s ladies maid. She remains; only recently moves out; will one day inherit the house, so it is said. Will I get the apartment? Will I take the husband’s place? Already she wants me to attend to water problems.
Settled in the ground floor courtyard now, awaiting her appearance, I balance my coffee cup. It is after dusk. A single light bulb illuminates the penny-loafered foot of a 19-year-old boy, the gauze of a lavish silk sari, whose 20-year-old occupant chats superficially with her mother.
Rich Madrasis, II. Dinner at the home of the Political Officer and his wife, the Public Liaison Officer, in honor of a smart-aleck New York sculptor who describes his mid-town gallery as “upmarket.” He has been using slave labor in the stone-cutting shops of Mahabalipuram and is disappointed to find that Madrasis can’t afford his Manhattan prices.
I arrive by auto-rickshaw, no question of change for my 10-rupee note when the driver observes the opulence of the setting. We pass through a gate to the compound, proceed up a private road to an estate marked “Bougainvilla,” where I descend, ringed by servants, who usher me in. The yard ─ 1930s garden furniture deployed across its expanse in conversational groupings ─ has been sprayed for mosquitoes. A high wall. The heavy humid air of mid-evening Madras.
Though it is 8:45, I am one of the first arrivals for this dinner, am introduced to other inexperienced foreigners: a Japanese businessman with Subimoto, someone from the German consulate with experience in Jordan and Swaziland. Finally the crowd arrives: the niece’s boyfriend, heir to an automobile fortune. He has been abroad, studying in England, where his girlfriend has visited, only to be snubbed for her dark skin. His manner is moneyed honey. I am teaching American literature and Chinese landscape painting? Semi-consciously he lets the “painting” drop to announce his own interest in “Chinese landscape.” “Actually” he has a Japanese boy doing the garden for his villa. “They are so clever.” He has been to Kyoto? “Oh yes.”
The Public Liaison Officer, a Detroit girl, negotiates the crowd adeptly, plays for the dinner hour a tape of Mo-town classics. Seated between the niece and the Vice-President of the Women’s Association, I turn to the latter, whose childhood in Singapore makes for interesting conversation.
Americans in Madras, III. American Consulate “Shopper’s Guide.”
─ Beauty Salons. “Do not expect the same level of hairdressing in Madras as you’re used to back home.”
─ Consumables. “Most everyone sent to Madras is authorized a consumable allowance of 2500 pounds. Typical items ordered from home: soap; paper products (toilet paper, dish towels, tissue, napkins, paper plates); toiletries; pharmacy needs (bug repellant, aspirin, birth control products, laxatives, sanitary products, upset stomach remedies). Also typically ordered is a good supply of canned and dry goods: fruit and vegetable juice, tomato paste and sauce, spaghetti, macaroni, western spices, pet food, kitty litter, and any other processed food normally used in an American kitchen. Good cleaning supplies are hard to come by in Madras, so most include a quantity of disinfectant, toilet bowl cleanser, ammonia and sponges. An artificial Christmas tree is a welcome addition, as local trees aren’t the hardy type Americans are used to.”
─ Junk Stores and Auctions. “Jamal’s Corner Shop. Located in an area characterized by dirt, dust and too many people. Bargain aggressively.”
─ Mini Commissary. “Situated in the Consulate basement and open every Wednesday morning, this is our lifeline for a variety of necessities. Stocks include fresh-frozen beef fillet, steak and hamburger as well as leg of lamb and lamb chops. Also soft drinks, beer and hard liquors. Membership costs $175.00 per household.”
Rich Madrasis, III. The imperious aunt, it is said, has had trouble with her last tenants, American tennis players/coaches, in Madras for a clinic. Since one could imagine the difficulty as issuing from either side, I push on. In view of the water problems, which I agree to attend to, the rent is lowered to Rs 3000 a month. This, it turns out, is only, however, a move to attract another foreigner to play with. After making him wait 10 days to conclude the deal, she raises the rent to the original Rs 3500 (“The 3000 was for the apartment; there is 500 more for the furnishings”). All right, how does 3300 sound? If you will take care of other problems. Well, I suppose so. She’s to be out of town, where she now disappears for the next 10 days. She returns. I must schedule an appointment. She invites me in, reviews the history of the house, her financial problems, her fame as youthful international tennis star. We sit down to sign. “3500,” she says (“3300 was only your idea”). I take a day to think it over, politely turn her down. The game is over.
Rich Madrasis, IV. I advertise in the paper. As an act of noblesse oblige (and a prudent hedge against squatters ─ the American professor will leave in 9 months), a well-to-do architect leases his sister’s apartment, problem-less and twice the size of the earlier one, for Rs 3000.
*
“Madras in the Reign of Merry King Charles ─ A Picture” (J. Talboys Wheeler again, from his Annals):
Brightly before the imagination rises up the Fort of St. George and the straggling town of Madraspatanam, under the presidency of the Honorable Sir William Langhorne, Baronet in the middle of the reign of merry King Charles. The same surf is rolling heavily upon the beach, and almost the same naked boatmen are laboring at the oar, amidst the deafening cling-clang of some old Tamil refrain; but only two, or perhaps three old-fashioned ships, are lying in the roads, with old-fashioned cannon peeping from their decks, and a still stranger old-fashioned crew dropping the anchor or taking in the sails. We will suppose them to be new arrivals from England, and that all is bustle and excitement. The sun is just rising over the Bay of Bengal and flashing its rays over the dark blue billows. Two or three sedate members of council have just taken their morning draught, according to the fashion of the time, and are being pushed off from the beach. They are arrayed in their best Sunday attire of gay doublets and enormous hose, and are endeavoring to assume courtly airs, which sit but ungainly on these rough and unpolished traders. Beside them is seated the Captain of the little garrison, in his best uniform, somewhat the worse for wear, and stained maybe with spots that might have been blood, but are far more likely to have been droppings from a flask of red wine. He too is brushed and buckled as if for parade, and carries as swaggering an air as a man may do who is being tossed and rolled about by a stiff Coromandel surf.
*
American Scholars in India. Among the Americans in India, in addition to the tourists and the consular staff, are the brilliant young scholars of Indian culture ─ Indologists, as they are called. Most are doing research for their doctoral degrees from institutions such as Chicago, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other schools with programs in South Asian Studies. For the most part they are people with rather peculiar backgrounds; children of missionaries, children of scholars, people from unusually complicated cultural matrices who find in this exotic civilization half way round the world something to complete their lives, an element otherwise lacking. Most have little interest in the rest of Asia and in this are much like the Indians themselves. Again like Indians themselves, these specialists divide between those concerned with North India and those concerned with the South. Many, though, have as well what the average Indian scholar lacks, a familiarity with Sanskrit, and so ─ unlike American sinologists, who lack the fluency of the native (and who cannot, like the native scholar, write Chinese; who read it with difficulty; who speak with a limited proficiency) ─ the professional Indologist often knows more about India, or is at least in a position to, than the native. For not only does he make it his business to, he also brings to the study of the subject the whole array of essentially Western analytic and synthetic techniques: cultural anthropology, archaeology, comparative religion, linguistics.
Unlike the educated Chinese, who prides himself in the mastery of the whole of Chinese culture, the educated Indian often feels no need to be conversant with traditions other than his own, and so he leaves room for these foreigners to generalize on the basis of research beyond his own capacities or inclinations.
In the fall I meet a professional American Indologist, a little younger than myself, who had first come to India to learn Hindi, having already studied Sanskrit, a language he now makes his living by teaching. After 10 years of returning to northern India for research he becomes interested in Dravidian culture, takes up Tamil and achieves a fluency in it as well. (In response to my question in Calcutta: “How many Bengali speakers would also speak Tamil ─ apart from Tamilian immigrants?” an Indian scholar tells me, “Perhaps a dozen.”) In the process of his studies this capacious American scholar has developed a profound interest in Jain culture (an ascetic sect which engages the devotion of but a small minority of Indians). In fact he has now translated one of the masterpieces of Jain epic literature, perhaps not surprisingly a work of eroticism. On being asked what it sounds like, he chants for me many lines, with much fervor and gesture.
An English Scholar in India. The original intercultural scholar of India was of course Sir William Jones, a late 18th-, early 19th-century Englishman of prodigious accomplishment. Said to have had a knowledge of 28 languages, he had done scholarly work in Greek, Latin, Persian and Arabic before he took up Sanskrit during his spare time as a judge in Calcutta, where he also founded the Society for Asiatic Research. It was he who laid the foundation for the study of comparative philology as well as comparative mythology. But he should speak for himself:
I have attempted to trace, imperfectly at present for want of ampler materials, but with a confidence continually increasing as I advanced, a parallel between the gods adored in three very different nations, Greece, Italy, and India, but which was the original system and which the copy, I will not presume to decide, nor are we likely, I believe, to be soon furnished with sufficient grounds for a decision: the fundamental rule, that natural, and most human, operations proceed from the simple to the compound, will afford no assistance on this point; since neither the Asiatick nor European system has any simplicity in it; and both are so complex, not to say absurd, however intermixed with the beautiful and the sublime, that the honor, such as it is, of the invention cannot be allotted to either with tolerable certainty.
Since Egypt appears to have been the grand source of knowledge for the western, and India for the more eastern, parts of the globe, it may seem a material question, whether the Egyptians communicated their mythology and philosophy to the Hindus, or conversely; but what the learned of Memphis wrote or said concerning India, no mortal knows; and what the learned of Varanes have asserted, if anything, concerning Egypt, can give us little satisfaction: such circumstantial evidence on this question as I have been able to collect, shall, nevertheless, be stated; because, unsatisfactory as it is, there may be something in it not wholly unworthy of notice; though after all, whatever colonies may have come from the Nile to the Ganges we shall, perhaps, agree at last with Mr. Bryant, that Egyptians, Indians, Greeks, and Italians, proceeded originally from one central place, and that the same people carried their religion and sciences into China and Japan: may we not add, even to Mexico and Peru?
Jones died at the age of 46, before he had the opportunity to press his tentative, brilliant, if naïve, research to the sorts of conclusions he might have articulated, limited as those doubtless would have been by his own ethnocentric bias. May he rest in peace.
An English Clergyman in India.
It may be for a lamentation to hear and see the horrid swearing and profanation in the name of God, the woeful and abominable drunkenness and uncleanness that so much reign and rage among the soldiery; and these not secretly or covertly, but as it were in the sight of the sun, and men refuse therein to be ashamed, neither can they blush. Some, after they have lived a long time in uncleanness, their whores persuade them to marry them, and several such have been married who within a little time have found them treacherous and adulterous and thereupon have either run away from them, or carried them along with them and sold them to the Infidels and Moors. Some unmarried persons keep whores in their houses, and some married whose wives are in England do the same. Most of those whores are popish Christians; and if those that marry them do not fall into the former inconveniences, they hardly escape being seduced by their wives and wives’ families into popery. There have not been wanting instances of this also. Since I entered into this place, I have constantly refused to celebrate any such marriages except one that I was urged into, and this not before she had solemnly and before several witnesses renounced popery, and promised to attend upon ordinances with us; but she had not been many weeks married when at the instigation of some popish priests here she perfidiously fell from those promises.
Recent Travel Accounts and Descriptions of India
Gerve Baronti, Twilight in India (1949)
Frank Harrison Beckman, Dust of India (1937)
Clarke Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977)
Alfred Egbert Blake, Convoy to India (1953)
Frieda Mathilda Das, A Marriage to India (1930)
Maurice Dekobra, The Perfumed Tigers: Adventures in the Land of the Maharajas (1930)
Kavalam Madhava Pannikkar, Common Sense about India (1960)
Peter Pinney, Dust on My Shoes (1951)
Edward Rice, The Ganges: A Personal Encounter (1974)