The other India

Amit Roy

'We can't show breasts,' Vinod Mehta, editor of Debonair, India's first 'girlie' magazine, said despairingly.

The Bombay-based monthly had been persuaded to drop its nude photographs under Mrs Gandhi's state of emergency. 'The country was being cleaned up, and we were also part of that cleaning-up process.'

For weeks previously the magazine had been advertising that its December issue would carry revealing photographs of Katy Mirza, an exceptionally well-endowed Indian 'actress'. And then the tragic blow fell.

'One fine morning I got a letter from the censor who told me that everything would have to be pre-censored. Eventually I met the Minister concerned, and he said, "You have been a naughty magazine": We were sitting in a Bombay seaside café by the Gateway of India, a monument built to mark the visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911.

'Our ethos,' he confided, 'was very Indian. If we were going to have pornography, we were going to have Indian pornography.'

Although the magazine was not without literary merit, Mr Mehta admitted, 'It would not sell if you took the pictures out.' Debonair's success had undoubtedly stemmed from Mr Mehta's ability to persuade Indian women to unwind their saris in the cause of circulation. The effect of dropping the photographs was immediate. Circulation slipped by more than a third. But Indian censors were not heartless creatures, and he had been allowed his pictures back on condition that he displayed a certain amount of restraint. 'That means no breasts. From now on we will have to show women in bikinis and things. I thought that frontal nudity was below the belt.'

Circulation had nevertheless returned to normal. 'We were on the right path,' observed Mr Mehta, with all the accummulated wisdom of his thirty-four years. 'Sex plus intelligent reading makes a good brew.'

Sex was, of course, the principal sport of the Indian princes. Their harems frequently housed hundreds of wives. Some maharajahs, among them the legendary Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, died of exhaustion before they could get round to saying Hello to all their women. Now the maharajahs have gone, banished from Mrs Gandhi's brave new India, but their sprawling palaces remain. Those who saw the writing on the wall began converting their palaces into hotels. Nowhere has this been more successful than at Udaipur and Jaipur, two of the most noble houses of Rajasthan.

In Udaipur, the 200-year-old summer palace in the middle of Pichola Lake has been turned into the Lake Palace Hotel. Transport between mainland and the white marble hotel is by ferry which is free and operates round the clock. The humming of the crickets and the chug-chug-chug of the ferry traversing the moonlit waters of the lake are the only sounds that break the stillness of the tropical night.

And in Jaipur—known as the 'pink city', as all buildings in the older part of town are washed in that colour—the Rambagh Palace Hotel is set in perhaps the loveliest garden in India. One evening I caught a glimpse of Rambagh's one-time mistress, Gyatri Devi, the former Maharani of Jaipur, as she passed by, whistling softly to her greyhounds. Her celebrated looks seemed unimpaired through being detained in prison at Mrs Gandhi's pleasure, after tax officials had discovered undeclared jewels and gold and silver bullion worth millions of pounds in one of her palaces.

The main reason why the two palaces are so well run is that they are managed by Tata, the private group which appears determined to prove that a thing need not be inefficient simply because it is Indian. The group's showpiece is the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay.

The real Taj is, of course, in Agra. It is ironic that what is said to be the most beautiful building in the world should be set in one of the most disagreeable Indian cities. Now it has emerged that the white marble of the Taj Mahal, built as a mausoleum by the Moghul Emperor Shah Jehan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and which is the country's greatest tourist attraction after Mrs Gandhi, should be threatened by possible pollution from a proposed oil refinery at Mathura, thirty-five miles from Agra.

Why anyone should want to build a refinery at Mathura is a mystery. The oil will travel hundreds of miles from Bombay High, an offshore field in the Arabian Sea. Also, Mathura is a place of pilgrimage, sanctified as the birthplace of Lord Krishna, the fun-loving Hindu God who has been adopted by Hare Krishna freaks in the west as their mascot.

Fortunately, someone realised in time that sulphur dioxide fumes from the refinery, borne by the wind towards the Taj and dissolved in rainwater to form sulphuric acid, would react with the marble (calcium carbonate) to form calcium sulphate. Which would not do the Taj much good.

Italian experts were called in, and the final location of the refinery will be based on their advice and reports from the Government's Department of Archaeology and the National Environmental Engineering Institute.

However, the test tubes, wires, thermometers and wind instruments strapped to the Taj at strategic points did little to stem the eloquence of Mr 0. P. Saxena, an Indian Government Tourist Officer with a weakness for writing discourses on Hinduism. 'The Taj is like the body of a beautiful woman, draped in many veils. As you walk slowly closer and closer to it,' he said, matching words to action, 'the veils begin to lift and you become aware of the beautY within.'

Across the River Jamuna from the Tal stands the Red Fort, from where the Moghul emperors ruled India until Shah Jehan moved the capital to Delhi. The British, who succeeded the Moghuls as rulers of India, first established their capital in Calcutta, but in 1911 they too switched to Delhi.

Although British influence in India is being steadily eroded, a powerful reminder of the Raj remains in Lutyens's magnificent sandstone structures: the presidential palace and the houses of parliament. An odd link with the Raj is the fact that Indians still feel more at ease with those Englishmen who were, so to say, born into the ruling class. No better specimen of this species of Englishman survives than Mr Harold Macmillan, who was on a ten-day business trip to India. There was an air of expectancy at his crowded press conference in New Delhi.

'We followed your example,' he offered, when quizzed about Mrs Thatcher. Flattery was getting him everywhere, judging by the beams all round. 'Politics', added Mr Macmillan, who was dressed impeccably in a double-breasted grey suit with matching silk tie, 'is still an honourable profession in Britain.'

'I was particularly pleased', he went on, `to have dinner next to the Prime Minister, and to renew an old friendship. When 1 came as Prime Minister in 1958 Nehru was Prime Minister and Mrs Gandhi ran the house and so forth.'

There was an air of sadness in the room as Mr Macmillan, now eighty-two, leant slightly on his stick and said: 'For the last time in my life I have come to see old friends in India, with which I and my familY have been connected for many years.'

Next morning the Indian newspapers gave him the splash treatment.

As outsiders, the British were able to look at India with fresh eyes and often notice things that simply escaped the locals. For example, Kipling, in his Jungle Book, call' tured the spirit of the Indian woods better

than anyone else I can think of. Listening to jackals in the night at the Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary at Bharatpur was proof that Kipling's India had not completelY vanished.

The 7,000-acre sanctuary, which contains more than 350 species of birds, was once the shooting reserve of the rulers of Bharatpur, formerly one of Rajasthan's twentY

two princely states. Records reveal that on I December 1902 Lord Curzon's seventeengun viceregal party bagged 540 birds. On 9 February 1903, the Duke of Connaught, With nineteen guns, shot 780. But the record was established on 12 November 1938, When Lord Linlithgow, with thirty-nine guns, shot 4,273 birds.

Dawn is the best time to watch the birds. Hukkum Singh, the sanctuary's headguard who took us punting on the lake, pointed out, among others, the cormorant, egret, kingfisher, snake bird, golden woodpecker, Purple moorhen, heron, jacanah, painted stork, crested pochard, ring dove and the song bird. The Indo-Soviet friendship treaty had also attracted clusters of Siberian cranes and geese.

On dry land, spotted deer and antelope abound. Finding pythons was trickier, but We located two enormous ones sunning themselves in a ditch, until our footsteps made them slither back into their hole.

Nothing evoked Kipling's world and the opening poem in The Jungle Book more strongly than watching the eagles later Wheeling against the setting sun. When I got back to London, I looked up Kipling's Night-Song in the Jungle':

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free— The herds are shut in byre and hut, For loosed till dawn are we. This is the hour of pride and power, Talon and tusk and claw. Oh, hear the call !—Good hunting all That keep the Jungle Law.