SIR,—I hope many of your readers were angered, as I
was, by the contempt for India gratuitously expressed by H. M. Champness in the unseemly introduction to his review " Travels in India " on January 8th. He is, of course, entitled to his aesthetic prejudices,'but he is surely to be condemned for extending his personal dislike of Hindus and Hinduism to make it appear an English characteristic.
If it is true that " most " English soldiers in India during the Second World War " detes- ted the distinctively Indian things in her civilisation" it was because they made no effort to understand them or to become friendly with Indians. If they had niade that effort, they would have discovered Indian people not " unmeetable except on rigorously defined terms "—but friendly, hospitable, cour- teous and attractive, and much of their art and civilisation exciting and admirable.
Mr. Champness has evidently not made that effort himself. The estrangement between England and India which he confidently, almost proudly, asserts, and which did not and could not exist between Indian and English individuals who made any attempt to under- stand each other, was surely caused by such attitudes of complacent sahibism as your reviewer displays.—Yours faithfully,
P. C. BAYLEY
University College, Oxford
[Our reviewer writes: In my review I deliberately quoted certain views on India which I believe to be pernicious, but which I know to be widely held, and for attacking which I congratulated the author. Though Mr. Bayley's grasp of the obvious is alarmingly weak, I welcome his heated if inadvertent support k for my own opinion.—Editor, Spectator.]
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