In memoriam: Raven sahib

PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN

A barrack square of yellow sand under a yellow sun; in the middle of the square two pie-dogs, back to back yet still joined at the fundament, wheeling hysterically in their efforts to separate; watching them, a gaggle of smirking young men in khaki drill; and watch- ing these in turn a row of grave, white- smocked munshis, assembled on a long veranda ready for the day's Urdu lesson (con- ditional clauses). A bugle sounds in the distance. The munshis scatter to their different stations along the veranda. In groups of three and four the young men march, swinging their arms up level to their shoulders, to their respective instructors.

'Salaam, munshi sahib.'

'Salaam, officer cadet sahib. I am to tell you that this is the last lesson which we shall have together.'

'Last lesson? But why?'

'The British leave India next year. You will have no need of Urdu.'

'Then why did they make us start learning Urdu in the first place?'

'For that matter, sahib, why did they send you here in the first place?'

The munshi sahib had a sound point. For this was the OTS at Bangalore (Mysore State) in the last days of 1946. Its function, since 1940, had been to train gentlemen cadets to hold the commission of George, King and Emperor, in His Majesty's Indian Armies. But in a few months now those armies would be taken over in their entirety by native officers, and massive new intakes of Indian cadets were arriving at the OTS almost daily. Nevertheless, some hundreds of British cadets, of whom I was one, had also been posted here—had indeed been brought here all the way from England—only five weeks before. What on earth, one wondered, were we doing here, training for offices which we could never hold in an army which had already replaced us in a country whose people were counting the days till we were gone?

The official handout was, on the face of it, plausible. According to this, there was a shortage of officer cadet training units in the United Kingdom and we had therefore been sent to India to make use of facilities which were readily available there. As soon as we were commissioned (the official story went) we would be posted, not to the Indian Army, but to British units in India and the Far East. The only trouble with this sensible and economic explanation was that, when carefully con- sidered, it turned out to be misleading in every salient point. To begin with, there was not so much a shortage of ocrus in England as a surplus of cadets; in an army which was rapidly being demobilised there was a diminishing need for temporary officers of infantry and this need could be amply supplied by the re- maining ocrus at home, which were in any case failing one cadet in three.

The truth was that my companions and I were merely redundant, and in no place more redundant than in India, where (to refute the second point in the official version) facilities for training officer cadets, so far from being 'readily available,' were desperately needed-for the tens of thousands of Indian aspirants who must be commissioned before Independence. As for the third official claim—that we would be needed by British units in the east—this was thought by us to be utterly unfounded and was proved to be so when, after being com- missioned in May 1947, we were simply shipped back to England instanter and en bloc.

But that was still in the future. The main reason why we were aware, there and then, of the absurdity, the total unreality, of our situation in Bangalore, was this: the nature and scope of our training. For whatever the authorities might proclaim about our being destined for British regiments, every parade we attended, every lecture we listened to, every attitude recommended to us, was such as to fit us for the Indian service. Although the Raj was falling from under our feet, although everybody from Lord Louis in Delhi to the untouchable sweeper in the cadet rears knew almost to the second when the British were going to pull out, our entire lives were being ordered on the assumption that we were to become officers of the traditional Indian Army and must therefore be drilled in the military and social usages appropriate thereto.

True, Urdu was abandoned after we reached conditional clauses; but in all else we were being prepared for a world that had every Kipling ingredient from chota pegs to punish- ment stations. On the military side, we re- ceived detailed instruction in Indian scales of rank and pay. Indian chains of command up to divisional level, mule transport, the dietary and religious vagaries of twenty different types of sepoy, and how to deal with homosexual jealousies among Pathans and Sikhs. Our social education comprehended the correct deportment when faced variously with a pundit, a baboo or a maharanee, conduct on the polo field (here and here only it was permissible to swear at a colonel or even a major-general), the excessive rates of interest charged by moneylenders in the bazaar, the impropriety of dancing with Eurasian girls in public, and the degrees of deference due to the command- ing officer's wife, which differed, apparently, according as to whether one was in a canton-

meat, on shikhar or at a hill-station. By the time I had been in India two months, I wa, adept at such items as (e.g.) the marching pace of the Rajputana Rifles or the proper fashion of saluting the Vicereine should I chance to meet her when I was on horseback in undress and topee.

Not the least ludicrous aspect of all this was the contrast presented between our own condition and that of cadets who had been left behind in the ux. For by now word had fil- tered through to us from friends and cousins in English ocrus that they were being treated as felons and paid as privates, required (with- out servants) to reach guardsmen's standards of turnout, lodged forty to a Nissen hut, tor- mented by exercises which demanded unbeliev- able efficiency and endurance, and were being failed, as I have already mentioned, at a rate of 30 per cent. We, on the other hand, were being paid and lodged as sergeants, waited on by bearers, and subjected only to the most gentle manoeuvres, which were usually inter- rupted for about three hours at midday while a squad of Indians erected a marquee and served us with a hot meal of four courses.

Furthermore, it had now been revealed that since so much public money had been spent in transporting us to Bangalore the com- mandant there was positively forbidden to fail us, except in extreme cases, which in practice amounted to one of lunacy and two of death. Even a cadet who had contracted gonorrhoea, not once but three times, received a commis- sion with the rest of us—though he was warned, or so the rumour went, that a fourth bout would not be so easily overlooked.

What it came to, then, was that we, the surplus 400 whom nobody wanted and for whom there was no conceivable employment for thousands of miles in any direction, had been spirited away to a kind of military Cockayne, where we lived in the lap of idle- ness and comfort with every perquisite of the commissioned rank which we had not 'yet attained, which few of us probably deserved, and which none of us (unless we exceeded three doses of clap) could possibly be denied.

How this ever came about, through what grotesque quirk of somebody's humour or what monstrous process of somebody's negligence, I have never been able to discover. The plain fact remains that 400 spare adolescents were gratuitously enabled, at the very time that Empire was tottering to the ground, to enjoy to the full a life of imperial privilege and pleasure which was in no essential way different from what it would have been in 1910. In England there was austerity, rationing, denun- ciation, while socialist morality, compounded of high-mindedness and spite, crawled every- where like a smog. In Europe there was misery and devastation. In India itself there was up- heaval—fear of the future and hatred of the past. But in the ors at Bangalore the old world lingered on, if only for a few more months; the world of chukkas and punka- wallahs, the world of Kipling (with a dash of Louis Bromfield and a squirt of Ouida), the world of turbaned lancers behind the general's landau and huge, black statues of Victoria RI: the world in which the pimply eighteen year old Raven sahib (with his silly, wispy moustache) clapped his hands for the bearer to bring his chota hasri and pull on his boots for first parade. It was a little enclave out of time, and I still shed tears, quite un- repentantly, for its passing.