Special Indias
FRANCIS WATSON
A Special India James Halliday (Chatto and Windus 42s) Gandhi and Modern India Penderel Moon (English Universities Press 15s) The Army in India (Hutchinson 55s)
Not to be missed, and hardly to be .forgotten by any western wanderer in India, are the multiple variations on the unfamiliar theme of dawn. 'I regret only,' writes John Morris, Everest mountaineer, Gurkha officer, BBC Third Programme Controller and at last a dis- cursive revenant between Himachal and Cape Comdrin, 'that it takes place-so early in the morning.'
It is one of the remarks that seem just right for that hour of dusk when the Indian air is traditionally at its most edible, when the subtleties of reverie and communication emerge from a pungent recipe to keep the strolling dialogue of friends just short of the serious but well above banality. It is a relaxing and reflective air, in which Mr Morris, consciously free of any kind of nostalgia for the former dispensation, can permit himself the mild generalisation that politicians in India 'tend to be more corrupt than in other countries' (my italics); in which he need not pretend an en- thusiasm for erotic Hindu sculpture or a tolerance for venal religiosity in order to dis- cover the personal rewards of courageous temple-trotting; and in which a friend who, as a professional organiser of game-drives, 'acquired a horror of killing. animals,' can be described without comment as solving his problem by taking a commission in the army.
To eat the Indian air, moreover, is to invite serendipity : and at its most literal when Ceylon itself pops up as the scene of the amusing fable that has long ascribed Bishop Heber's sense of the vileness of unevangelised man to the theft of his baggage at a port of call on his way to Calcutta. Sharing Mr Morris's 'soft spot for Bishop Heber,' I should feel inclined, if I were also sharing his meal of the Indian air, to interject that 'From Greenland's Icy Mountains' was written before Heber had gone, or even expected to go, `to the Ganges for a mitre.' The Bishop's test of contact, as Mr Morris appreciates, went much in favour of Indians as a species. It also went very much against the Abbe Dubois as their traducer, to whom this book pays the customary respects.
But the overt point of the digression is that Mr Morris, having put us in his debt as an elegiac pilgrim to that 'Territory- of Anjengo' which Sterne apostrophised as of no worth save as having 'given birth to Eliza,' saunters on to Tiruchirapalli (ci-devant Trichinopoly) to dis- cover, on the wrong day, that the bath in which Bishop Heber died is still available -for in- spection on Sundays. And the covert point, I take it, is that if the good man had indeed lost his luggage it would be just such an occasion for ill-temper as the honest traveller pauses to admit before pressing on with the addictive encounter which is India. And that is the kind of traveller, and the kind of India, which this book offers. It is no accident that Mr Morris feels at home with the travel-diaries of Edward Lear.
James Halliday is the pen-name of a: •man whose service in the les between 1926 and 1947 gave him the experience of A Special India in the particularly special -phase of changing its political masters. The myth that British officialdom in India devoted itself to obstructing the liberating policies of Parliament and public at home has had. a curiously long run against most of the evidence. These' are the reminiscences, a very fresh and pleasing exercise in an almost classic genre, of a mem- ber of a 'service family' who -felt the call at the age of ten, carried a motion in his house debating society at Cheltenham that 'India is now ripe for autonomy,' made the grade to his first posting, and a couple of decades later stood among the representatives of the old and new orders as the flags were changed. 'It was a moment charged with emotion—surpris- ingly similar emotion—for all. And when the thing was done, we looked at each other with incredulity, and relief.'
The thing had been done better than else- where—or so its officers insisted- with some justice—in the Bombay Presidency. From the tamarisk-scented near-deserts of Sind to the uplands of Maharashtra, Bombay gave Mr Halliday his successive jurisdictions, rural and urban, including a fruitful period of work for the Untouchables which placed him naturally upon Dr Ambedkar's side of the argument and not upon Gandhi's. His respect for Gandhi's character, friendship with Congress ministers, and affectionate amusement at certain mani- festations of their followers, will not be found untypical. Nor will the regretful feeling that Gandhi was in some unfortunate ways pushing at an already opening door.
Well, was he? The Mahatma's special India is not the easiest subject to summarise, but the task has been attacked with impressive skill by a contemporary of Mr Halliday whose les career lay elsewhere,. and was more afflicted by doubts and questionings: Sir Penderel Moon, who perhaps found his own answers by subsequent service with the independent Indian government, is prepared to examine the merits and defects of Gandhi's leadership as those of a personality 'without parallel in the modern age' who, 'though not the cause of India's freedom, decisively influenced the manner in which it was achieved.'
The defects are indeed easier to isolate than the merits. Residual effects of a radical—if 'non-violent—defiance of authority may stand out more sharply than the widespread infusion of a spirit of self-reliance and service. The Congress party—virtually Gandhi's creation as a national instrument—was to play a decisive, if unintended, role as a democratic structure for development before earning its present dis- repute. Mistaken approaches to the Hindu- Muslim problem give the author some convincing points in his study of human stature in a historical setting. It is a theme dogged and nagged by what might have been. But I don't think I have met an abler distillation of what was.
The National Army Museum, established at Camberley in 1960 as the counterpartvof the Maritime Museum at Greenwich (with the Im- perial War Museum taking over from both as from 4 August 1914, although the Army Museum has a section relating to the army in India down to 1947), pays The Army in India (1850-1914) the compliment of its first volume in a planned series of photographic records. Since the museum holds more than 100,000 photographs in the Indian section alone, this selection whets the appetite.
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