Imaginary Homelands Page 9

  British India had absorbed enough of Indian ways to call their Masonic lodges ‘jadoogurs’ after the Hindi for a place of sorcery, to cry ‘kubberdaur’ (khabardaar) when they meant ‘look out’, and to ‘puckerow’ an Indian (catch him) before they started to ‘samjao’ him—literally, to make him understand something, but, idiomatically, to beat him up.

  Strange, then, to find certain well-known words missing. No kaffir, no gully, not even a wog, although there is a wug, a Baloch or Sindhi word meaning either loot or a herd of camels. (Hobson-Jobson can be wonderfully imprecise at times.) I thought, too, that a modern appendix might usefully be commissioned, to include the many English words which have taken on, in independent India, new ‘Hinglish’ meanings. In India today, the prisoner in the dock is the undertrial; a boss is often an incharge; and, in a sinister euphemism, those who perish at the hands of law enforcement officers are held to have died in a ‘police encounter’.

  To spend a few days with Hobson-Jobson is, almost, to regret the passing of the intimate connection that made this linguistic kedgeree possible. But then one remembers what sort of connection it was, and is moved to remark—as Rhett Butler once said to Scarlett O’Hara—‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a small copper coin weighing one tolah, eight mashas and seven surkhs, being the fortieth part of a rupee.’ Or, to put it more concisely, a dam.

  1985

  4

  OUTSIDE THE WHALE

  ATTENBOROUGH’S GANDHI

  SATYAJIT RAY

  HANDSWORTH SONGS

  THE LOCATION OF BRAZIL

  OUTSIDE THE WHALE

  Anyone who has switched on the television set, been to the cinema or entered a bookshop in the last few months will be aware that the British Raj, after three and a half decades in retirement, has been making a sort of comeback. After the big-budget fantasy double-bill of Gandhi and Octopussy we have had the blackface minstrel-show of The Far Pavilions in its TV serial incarnation, and immediately afterwards the overpraised Jewel in the Crown. I should also include the alleged ‘documentary’ about Subhas Chandra Bose, Granada Television’s War of the Springing Tiger, which, in the finest traditions of journalistic impartiality, described India’s second-most-revered independence leader as a ‘clown’. And lest we begin to console ourselves that the painful experiences are coming to an end, we are reminded that David Lean’s film of A Passage to India is in the offing. I remember seeing an interview with Mr Lean in The Times, in which he explained his reasons for wishing to make a film of Forster’s novel. ‘I haven’t seen Dickie Attenborough’s Gandhi yet,’ he said, ‘but as far as I’m aware, nobody has yet succeeded in putting India on the screen.’ The Indian film industry, from Satyajit Ray to Mr N. T. Rama Rao, will no doubt feel suitably humbled by the great man’s opinion.

  These are dark days. Having expressed my reservations about the Gandhi film elsewhere, I have no wish to renew my quarrel with Mahatma Dickie. As for Octopussy, one can only say that its portrait of modern India was as grittily and uncompromisingly realistic as its depiction of the skill, integrity and sophistication of the British secret services.

  In defence of the Mahattenborough, he did allow a few Indians to be played by Indians. (One is becoming grateful for the smallest of mercies.) Those responsible for transferring The Far Pavilions to the screen would have no truck with such tomfoolery. True, Indian actors were allowed to play the villains (Saeed Jaffrey, who has turned the Raj revival into a personal cottage industry, with parts in Gandhi and Jewel in the Crown as well, did his hissing and hand-rubbing party piece; and Sneh Gupta played the selfish princess but, unluckily for her, her entire part consisted of the interminably repeated line, ‘Ram Ram’). Meanwhile, the good-guy roles were firmly commandeered by Ben Cross, Christopher Lee, Omar Sharif, and, most memorably, Amy Irving as the good princess, whose make-up person obviously believed that Indian princesses dip their eyes in black ink and get sun-tans on their lips.

  Now of course The Far Pavilions is the purest bilge. The great processing machines of TV soap-opera have taken the somewhat more fibrous garbage of the M. M. Kaye book and puréed it into easy-swallow, no-chewing-necessary drivel. Thus, the two central characters, both supposedly raised as Indians, have been lobotomized to the point of being incapable of pronouncing their own names. The man calls himself ‘A Shock’, and the woman ‘An Jooly’. Around and about them there is branding of human flesh and snakery and widow-burning by the natives. There are Pathans who cannot speak Pushto. And, to avoid offending the Christian market, we are asked to believe that the child ‘A Shock’, while being raised by Hindus and Muslims, somehow knew that neither ‘way’ was for him, and instinctively, when he wished to raise his voice in prayer, ‘prayed to the mountains’. It would be easy to conclude that such material could not possibly be taken seriously by anyone, and that it is therefore unnecessary to get worked up about it. Should we not simply rise above the twaddle, switch off our sets and not care?

  I should be happier about this, the quietist option—and I shall have more to say about quietism later on—if I did not believe that it matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it. I should also mind less, were it not for the fact that The Far Pavilions, book as well as TV serial, is only the latest in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East. The creation of a false Orient of cruel-lipped princes and dusky slim-hipped maidens, of ungodliness, fire and the sword, has been brilliantly described by Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism, in which he makes clear that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic. Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to counterpunch against the stereotype. If the TV screens of the West were regularly filled by equally hyped, big-budget productions depicting the realities of India, one could stomach the odd M. M. Kaye. When praying to the mountains is the norm, the stomach begins to heave.

  Paul Scott was M. M. Kaye’s agent, and it has always seemed to me a damning indictment of his literary judgement that he believed The Far Pavilions to be a good book. Even stranger is the fact that The Raj Quartet and the Kaye novel are founded on identical strategies of what, to be polite, one must call borrowing. In both cases, the central plot motifs are lifted from earlier, and much finer novels. In The Far Pavilions, the hero Ash (‘A Shock’), raised an Indian, discovered to be a sahib, and ever afterwards torn between his two selves, will be instantly recognizable as the cardboard cut-out version of Kipling’s Kim. And the rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens derives just as plainly from Forster’s A Passage to India. But because Kaye and Scott are vastly inferior to the writers they follow, they turn what they touch to pure lead. Where Forster’s scene in the Marabar caves retains its ambiguity and mystery, Scott gives us not one rape but a gang assault, and one perpetrated, what is more, by peasants. Smelly persons of the worst sort. So class as well as sex is violated; Daphne gets the works. It is useless, I’m sure, to suggest that if rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo-British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class. But not even Forster dared to write about such a crime. So much more evocative to conjure up white society’s fear of the darkie, of big brown cocks.

  You will say I am being unfair; Scott is a writer of a different calibre to M. M. Kaye. What’s more, very few of the British characters come at all well out of the Quartet—Barbie, Sarah, Daphne, none of the men. (Kaye, reviewing the TV adaptation, found it excessively rude about the British.)

  In point of fact, I am not so sure that Scott is so much finer an artist. Like Kaye, he has an instinct for the cliché. Sadistic, bottom-flogging policeman Merrick turns out to be (surprise!) a closet homosexual. Hi
s grammar school origins give him (what else?) a chip on the shoulder. And all around him is a galaxy of chinless wonders, regimental grandes dames, lushes, empty-headed blondes, silly-asses, plucky young things, good sorts, bad eggs and Russian counts with eyepatches. The overall effect is rather like a literary version of Mulligatawny soup. It tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra-parochially British, only with too much pepper.

  And yes, Scott is harsh in his portraits of many British characters; but I want to try and make a rather more difficult point, a point about form. The Quartet’s form tells us, in effect, that the history of the end of the Raj was largely composed of the doings of the officer class and its wife. Indians get walk-ons, but remain, for the most part, bit-players in their own history. Once this form has been set, it scarcely matters that individual fictional Brits get unsympathetic treatment from their author. The form insists that they are the ones whose stories matter, and that is so much less than the whole truth that it must be called a falsehood. It will not do to argue that Scott was attempting to portray the British in India, and that such was the nature of imperialist society that the Indians would only have had bit-parts. It is no defence to say that a work adopts, in its structure, the very ethic which, in its content and tone, it pretends to dislike. It is, in fact, the case for the prosecution.

  I cannot end this brief account of the Raj revival without returning to David Lean, a film director whose mere interviews merit reviews. I have already quoted his masterpiece in The Times; here now are three passages from his conversation with Derek Malcolm in the Guardian of 23 January, 1984:

  (1) Forster was a bit anti-English, anti-Raj and so on. I suppose it’s a tricky thing to say, but I’m not so much. I intend to keep the balance more. I don’t believe all the English were a lot of idiots. Forster rather made them so. He came down hard against them. I’ve cut out that bit at the trial where they try to take over the court. Richard [Goodwin, the producer] wanted me to leave it in. But I said no, it just wasn’t right. They wouldn’t have done that.

  (2) As for Aziz, there’s a hell of a lot of Indian in him. They’re marvellous people but maddening sometimes, you know … He’s a goose. But he’s warm and you like him awfully. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way—things just happen. He can’t help it. And Miss Quested … well, she’s a bit of a prig and a bore in the book, you know. I’ve changed her, made her more sympathetic. Forster wasn’t always very good with women.

  (3) One other thing. I’ve got rid of that ‘Not yet, not yet’ bit. You know, when the Quit India stuff comes up, and we have the passage about driving us into the sea? Forster experts have always said it was important, but the Fielding-Aziz friendship was not sustained by those sort of things. At least I don’t think so. The book came out at the time of the trial of General Dyer and had a tremendous success in America for that reason. But I thought that bit rather tacked on. Anyway I see it as a personal not a political story.

  Forster’s lifelong refusal to permit his novel to be filmed begins to look rather sensible. But once a revisionist enterprise gets under way, the mere wishes of a dead novelist provide no obstacle. And there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb. Britain is in danger of entering a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and to posture like a great power while, in fact, its power diminishes every year. The jewel in the crown is made, these days, of paste.

  Anthony Barnett has cogently argued, in his television essay Let’s Take the ‘Great’ Out of Britain, that the idea of a great Britain (originally just a collective term for the countries of the British Isles, but repeatedly used to bolster the myth of national grandeur) has bedevilled the actions of all post-war governments. But it was Margaret Thatcher who, in the euphoria of the Falklands victory, most plainly nailed her colours to the old colonial mast, claiming that the success in the South Atlantic proved that the British were still the people ‘who had ruled a quarter of the world.’ Shortly afterwards she called for a return to Victorian values, thus demonstrating that she had embarked upon a heroic battle against the linear passage of Time.

  I am trying to say something which is not easily heard above the clamour of praise for the present spate of British-Indian fictions: that works of art, even works of entertainment, do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and that the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context; and the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart of the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain. And no matter how innocently the writers and film-makers work, no matter how skilfully the actors act (and nobody would deny the brilliance of, for example, the performances of Susan Wooldridge as Daphne and Peggy Ashcroft as Barbie in the TV Jewel), they run the grave risk of helping to shore up the conservatism, by offering it the fictional glamour which its reality so grievously lacks.

  The title of this essay derives, obviously, from that of an earlier piece (1940) by 1984’s other literary phenomenon, Mr Orwell. And as I’m going to dispute its assertions about the relationship between politics and literature, I must of necessity begin by offering a summary of that essay, ‘Inside the Whale’.

  It opens with a largely admiring analysis of the writing of Henry Miller:

  On the face of it no material could be less promising. When Tropic of Cancer was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler’s concentration camps were already bulging … It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot. From a mere account of the subject matter of Tropic of Cancer, most people would probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that it was … a very remarkable book. How or why remarkable?

  His attempt to answer that question takes Orwell down more and more tortuous roads. He ascribes to Miller the gift of opening up a new world ‘not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.’ He praises him for using English ‘as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e., without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetic word. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it.’ And most crucially, he likens Miller to Whitman, ‘for what he is saying, after all, is “I accept”.’

  Around here things begin to get a little bizarre. Orwell quite fairly points out that to say ‘I accept’ in life in the thirties ‘is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders.’ (No, I don’t know what a Bedaux belt is, either.) But in the very next paragraph he tells us that ‘precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience, Miller is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive.’ Characterizing the ordinary man as a victim, he then claims that only the Miller type of victim-books, ‘nonpolitical, … non-ethical, … non-literary, … non-contemporary’, can speak with the people’s voice. So to accept concentration camps and Bedaux belts turns out to be pretty worthwhile, after all.

  There follows an attack on literary fashion. Orwell, a thirty-seven-year-old patriarch, tells us that ‘when one sa
ys that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.’ At first he picks easy targets—A. E. Housman’s ‘roselipt maidens’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’ (‘a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names’). But then the polemic is widened to include ‘the movement’, the politically committed generation of Auden and Spender and MacNeice. ‘On the whole,’ Orwell says, ‘the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.’ It is true he scores some points, as when he indicates the bourgeois, boarding-school origins of just about all these literary radicals, or when he connects the popularity of Communism among British intellectuals to the general middle-class disillusion with all traditional values: ‘Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline—anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes.’ In this vacuum of ideology, he suggests, there was still ‘the need for something to believe in’, and Stalinist Communism filled the void.

  Returning to Henry Miller, Orwell takes up and extends Miller’s comparison of Anaïs Nin to Jonah in the whale’s belly.

  The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult … a storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo … Miller himself is inside the whale, … a willing Jonah … He feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism.

  And at the end of this curious essay, Orwell—who began by describing writers who ignored contemporary reality as ‘usually footlers or plain idiots’—embraces and espouses this quietist philosophy, this cetacean version of Pangloss’s exhortation to ‘cultiver notre jardin’. ‘Progress and reaction,’ Orwell concludes, ‘have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process … simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt.’