Trips to India in childhood were rare, so my sense of being Indian emerged in other ways. Dip didn’t dress like other mothers. She wore a sari. In America, friends’ moms slouched around in sweat pants while Dip glided in colourful silk. Our food was different too. Obviously, I was never going to eat those evil floaty eggs, so once Shirin and I started dining with the grown-ups, prawn and egg curry made way for koftas. These balls of lamb steeped in a cardamom-infused gravy became the staple party food.
Morsels of India periodically came in the post. In the late spring every year for three decades, Anup shipped us two dozen mangos. In Crawford Market she would select the best of the Alphonsos. Their dark orange flesh and rich creamy flavour – something like peach, apricot, melon and honey melded together – delighted us. We would gather round as Charles prised open the crate and Dip lifted them out of the straw. To us they were pure gold.
Otherwise, to the extent that I felt Indian, it was because most of my family was Indian and lived in India. Dip’s siblings, Amarjit, Anup and Priti, each had three or four children, so I was lucky to have plenty of cousins.
Throughout my childhood these relatives criss-crossed our lives and we grew close. After Anup’s husband died, my cousin Raji was sent, aged eighteen, to stay with us in Washington. He fitted happily into our domestic routine for a number of weeks, collecting us from school and shopping at Giant Foodstore, but my father decided he should see America and sent him off on a Greyhound bus. A handsome youth (Cat Stevens in a turban), with a huge heart, he had the time of his life.
Every summer, until 2008 when she could no longer travel, Dip’s sister Anup would escape the rains and spend a month with us in Sussex. She loved to stretch out on the window seat with a book, warmed by sunshine and calmed by birdsong. In Bombay (Mumbai after 1995), she ran a huge household and exhausted herself. For years, the apartment in Cuffe Parade housed both her sons, their strong-willed wives and two children apiece. So trips taken with Dip and Charles to the Mediterranean, visiting art galleries and drinking red wine were a good break.
In time, my cousins had families of their own. In the Indian way, I consider their children my nieces and nephews, and they too are an intimate and welcome part of our lives. We joined many of their weddings, spanning days of ceremony and celebration, sometimes outside the Cuffe Parade mansion, curtained in lights; on Pami’s farm just outside of Delhi; in Kerala visiting temples and leaping about in towering waves.
When introducing my children to such a large clan, I feared they would muddle up who was married to whom and make embarrassing gaffes. To avoid this, I drew up a family tree, then issued instructions. The starting point, I said, was to remember my eleven cousins: Amarjit’s four – Pami, Sati, Tejbir (known as Jugnu) and Geeta; Anup’s three – Subhag, Kamalbir and Raji. So that’s seven, plus Priti’s four – Deepa, Simmi, Karan and Gayatri. Easy. After that, we’d work our way down to their generation, to my twenty nieces and nephews.
I have always, unambiguously, loved my Indian family. But India itself? As a child, I found that less simple. Brought up in a sanitised part of the United States, I found arriving in India overwhelming. Outside the terminal building it was bedlam, throngs of men shoving, shouting, staring. Driving from Bombay airport into the city, the stench was incredible. If we reached Cuffe Parade by day, we would step from the car and be besieged by beggars – barefoot girls with matted hair and dirty ragged clothes. Arriving by night I was haunted by the sleeping figures lining the pavements, whole families living in filth.
Once inside the mansion building, the contrast was stark. There were huge spacious rooms, beautiful things and – the epitome of opulence – servants. I liked being brought Nimbu Pani but I was unsettled by servants. The word itself jarred. Apparently, you didn’t smile or say thank you. Their faces displayed little emotion, but I worried what they were thinking. Were they hurt or enraged? What did they think of us? Rich (comparatively) and idle, I assumed.
Shiva intrigued me. He was from an old era, an era of deference. Straight-backed, dressed all in white with a neat trimmed moustache. Before Independence he worked for a British Army officer who bequeathed him a military manner and sent a cheque from England every Christmas. Other servants stepped out of line at their peril. So did my cousins. Dip recalls Shiva giving Kamalbir an earful for calling my father ‘Charles’ rather than ‘Uncle’. ‘Every Tom, Dick and Harry you call “Uncle”,’ protested Shiva. ‘Why do you not show respect to your real uncle?’
Pre-teen, I refused to eat Indian food. In Cuffe Parade I had my own special menu. Tomato sandwiches. Shiva would present them to me in tidy triangles, crusts removed, on a covered platter. It felt very regal. Recently, Raji remembered the platter and rushed to the cupboard to find it. He brought out something plastic and small. I was astonished. Somehow Shiva had made it feel like the Queen’s best silver service.
That was a long time ago and the view of a child. India has changed and so have I. On each trip I grew more familiar and comfortable with my surroundings.
Poverty has not been eradicated, but there are fewer truly desperate people. The drive to Cuffe Parade, over Mumbai’s impressive Bandra–Worli Sea-Link bridge, is now painless and quick. Most of the family still live in Delhi, mainly clustered in Sujan Singh Park or the Golf Links enclave. At Delhi airport, Subhag, will wait for me outside Costa Cofee, dressed in a stunning salwar kameez, whatever the hour (often 3 a.m.)
On my recent trips to India, I enjoyed being with family, of course, but I also went to research. I hoped to fill in some gaps in Dip’s story and explore the legacies of the Independence struggle and Partition. And it was my chance, finally, to get to the Punjab. My head spun with questions and there was a lot to take in.
Seventy years after Independence, India seemed to be undergoing a profound transformation. In this, the legacies of Empire, the Independence struggle and Partition were very much in play, but to my eye, the India that Dip described was vanishing fast.
Outside Papa-ji’s old Golf Links house, the multi-tasking guard sat on a plastic chair sanding the legs of a table. I announced myself with a nod and reached up to undo the latch on the gate. I had come to see Deepa, my cousin, who as a child used to creep up to rummage in Dip’s top-floor barsati. She brought up her own family here, and now, in a wheelchair, she has the ground floor. It was sunny, but the air had a bite, so we settled ourselves inside. Through glass doors I could see the small square of garden where Dip and Charles held their wedding reception. Seven-year-old Deepa had been there, in a pale pastel party dress and a pony-tail.
We talked about the past. Deepa once took me bangle shopping. On our return my forearms clinked with bright-coloured glass. ‘You came from abroad, so Papa-ji would not have said so, but he didn’t like us wearing them. Sweepers wore bangles he said. And he was horrified when I had my nose pierced!’
I recognised this trait from Dip’s account. Papa-ji had strong views, Deepa said, but he was a loving, doting grandfather. ‘He lost everything, but every day he gave us treats. He was awake when we went to school and he gave us coins and sweets and biscuits. He said he would teach me Punjabi and I could teach him Hindi.
‘Papa-ji was so fond of flowers. He had a beautiful yellow rose outside, a climber. A Marshall Neil?’ I looked it up. Maréchal Niel is a French variety with fragrant golden blooms.
‘I know he had a huge garden in Sargodha and the stables there were the size of this house, but he didn’t talk about it.’ At this point, Kuku, Deepa’s husband, appeared. He is a large man with a soft voice. He said they used to have a framed photo of Papa-ji ‘with his cronies’ outside the house in Sargodha. He said Gayatri now had it. This was very welcome news. I asked Gayatri, but she said that she didn’t. After toing and froing I concluded there was a framed photo but it wasn’t of the house. It was of the opening of the Sargodha Female Hospital in 1938. There was still no picture of the Homestead.
Satwant, Priti’s widow (and Deepa’s mother), lives upstairs, as do my cousin Karan and his family. From the start, Karan was keen on a family memoir. He said there might be useful papers in boxes kept in the barsati, but unfortunately it was rented out and they were in dispute with the tenant. Eventually, the tenant left and I thought of the boxes.
I went upstairs with Karan. He said when Dip lived here it was just a room, but now it’s a flat. There was very little furniture and the tenant had left it a mess. I found I couldn’t conjure Dip’s presence. Putting on her sari. Painting her nails. Feeding her captured squirrel. Missing out on the wine Papa-ji sent back to the Spanish Embassy. And there was no sign of the boxes. Probably, said Karan’s wife when we reappeared, they were thrown out. Lots was, after a white beetle infestation.
The search concluded, I sat down for tea and looked about. To accommodate the multiplying households the house had been extended and divided many times over. It is ingenious. The first-floor reception room is light but compact. The tree outside strokes the bay window. On the walls Papa-ji’s framed medals are on display. In the stairwell there are two Sanads. I got up to inspect them behind cloudy glass. One medal hung from an orange ribbon. It was George VI in profile circled with the words ‘For God and the Empire’. It was the OBE.
Of all the possessions Papa-ji left behind at Partition, these medals and Sanads are what he managed to retrieve. They were his treasures. I asked the obvious questions about when and for what he was awarded each commendation. Initially, I was taken aback by the vagueness of the response. But then I came to see that this was an uncomfortable heritage. These relics of the Raj have a whiff of ‘collaboration’. They are on the wall because they were important to Papa-ji and Papa-ji is our family.
Before I arrived I sent my nieces and nephews a questionnaire to canvass their views on Empire, the Independence struggle, religion and the modern Indian state. Once in India I found opportune moments to continue the conversation.
The survey was unscientific and the sample small, but I was left with the impression that the fact that Britain once governed India and suppressed the nationalist movement matters less to this generation of my family than to their parents and to the politicians. The Raj is long gone. In school they are taught that the British ruled by creating division among communities, a policy of divide and rule, but outside history lessons it doesn’t really impact on their lives. They all have young children and are concerned about immediate things. Like schools and the environment. The air in Delhi is appalling. The son of my nephew Kabir and his wife Aishwarya suffers from asthma and they agonise about whether it’s fair to keep him there.
Perhaps in this generation of my family anger about Empire has dissipated because, let’s face it, Britain is less important than it was. With a population of 1.3 billion, close behind China, India is a rising world power. It may also be because my nephews and nieces have spent time in Britain and Britain has changed. It is multi-racial. They feel comfortable in London – a global city where things run well and the air is comparatively fresh.
Down the road from Papa-ji’s house is Amarjit’s old house, where Geeta, Nayan and Pami now live. A few things have changed – the prayer room is now a study – but mostly it is the same. Geeta sits at the head of the breakfast table, like her mother did, distributing toast.
One breakfast time I mentioned the survey and some replies I had got. I reported a ripple of indignation about Thomas Babington Macaulay and his 1835 Minute on Education, which I hadn’t heard of before. ‘Yes,’ Nayan said, passing me a slice of papaya and lime. ‘But Macaulay was more India-loving than most people think.’ I looked up Macaulay and his notorious Minute.
In it, Macaulay advised the government that East India Company funding should be diverted from classical studies in Arabic and Sanskrit to a Western curriculum in English. ‘No scholar’, he wrote (in a passage for which he has been reviled), ‘could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ Ouch. He was prepared to concede that ‘works of imagination’, such as poetry, were evenly matched, but in recording facts or investigating principles, European ‘superiority’ was ‘immeasurable’.
Some say that in promoting English, Macaulay was responding to demand, catering to middle-class parents who wanted their sons to master the language to advance. They point out that Macaulay didn’t aim to keep the population in submission. Who knows, he wrote, where this education will lead? It may develop the notion of self-rule. And that is what happened. The fathers of Indian Independence developed their political ideas in English. Mostly they spoke to each other in English. Then they turned to their erstwhile ‘masters’ and exposed the hypocrisy and illegitimacy of colonial rule.
An online article by India Today advanced some of these arguments and advised readers to consult the Minute, then make up their own minds whether Macaulay ‘was an angel or a villain’. I support going back to the original text, but ‘angel or villain?’ Why this binary choice? And when readers consider their verdict, should they imagine Macaulay’s words being uttered today or recognise that they were expressed nearly two centuries ago?
I decide to see what Dip thinks. ‘I don’t know much about Macaulay, but have you looked at what Curzon did later?’ I hadn’t, but I do.
In 1904, as Viceroy, Lord Curzon introduced a right to education, expanded primary schools and promoted ‘modern’ subjects such as agriculture and teacher training that focused on getting children to think, not just rote-learn. He also insisted children be taught in their own local language. This was why, Dip says, she was taught in Urdu at school in Sargodha. It was the vernacular language of the majority Muslim population. At school she also learnt English, and at home, Punjabi. She grew up loving Urdu poetry and Western (especially Russian) literature. She saw English as a window to the world and the key to expanded horizons.
When we were young, Dip would sometimes joke about Indians being civilised ‘while your lot were still in trees’. The implication was that Western superiority was misplaced and Indian (and Persian) learning was older and more established.
The Brahmins in India, I discovered, did indeed preside over extraordinarily advanced learning. Especially in astronomy and mathematics. They invented zero and used the infinite series in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, long before the invention of calculus in Europe. But they kept it all to themselves. Young men dubbed ‘orientalists’ in later years disseminated (and credited) much of this, using the printing press to spread ideas, allowing educated Indians (of all communities and castes) to become acquainted with their own sacred texts and new trends in Western science and philosophy.
Social reformers like Rammohan Roy (the first Indian Liberal according to Ramchandra Guha) embraced European enlightenment ideas to challenge traditional social structures and loosen the ‘constraints of kin, caste and religion’. On the death of Roy’s elder brother, his widow was forced to commit sati, by throwing herself on his funeral pyre. When sati was abolished in 1829, credit went to the British Governor-General, but Roy had paved the way for the reform by showing that sati was not a religious duty sanctioned or upheld by Hindu scriptural tradition.
It comes as no surprise to find that my younger relatives feel great pride in the achievement of Gandhi, Nehru and others, Dip’s ‘pin-ups’, who fought for the freedom of India. But mostly they get on with their lives: running a business, supervising homework, smoothing over a marital tiff. In the public arena, meanwhile, politicians and historians rewrite the textbooks, appropriate a legacy, or spar over the past to advance a current political aim.
For over seventy years, the Mahatma has been the undisputed Father of the Nation and many still consider him a saint. Not Khushwant. In The End of India, he wrote:
Here we see as great a man as any the world has seen, but also full of human frailties. Not one of his four sons got on with him; one even embraced Islam to spite him. He was vain, took offence at the slightest remark against him, and was a fad-ist who made nubile girls lie naked next to him to make sure he had overcome his libidinous desires.
Khushwant’s point was that it wasn’t helpful to deify Gandhi. Putting him on a pedestal made him impossible to emulate. He was an ‘important historical personality who did good to humanity. No more than that.’
The huge model charka (spinning wheel) outside Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is a striking reminder of the campaign for Swaraj – self-rule and self-sufficiency. It was a powerful message, but Gandhi’s brand of village economics never caught on. Nor did his suggestion that, having won independence, Congress should disband itself. Looking around, Gandhi worried that power was corrupting, but what office-holder wants to hear that? More than anything though, non-violence, the principle for which Gandhi is best known, seems out of place in India today.
On 31 January 2018, the seventieth anniversary of Gandhi’s murder, my son Theo and I were in Delhi. The rickshaw dropped us outside Birla House, where we hoped to join some kind of commemoration, but we found it closed to the public. There was an invitation-only VIP event. This seemed a shame, out of place even, given Gandhi’s affinity with the common man. He would, we mused, have taken a dim view of the arrangements.
Some days later, at Jaipur airport, I lifted a black-covered book from the rotating stand. Why I Assassinated Gandhi was the title. It was the full text of the assassin’s statement, banned at the time of his trial, with explanatory commentary. Roughly speaking, this was the line: Gandhi obstructed Independence by standing in the way of armed resistance. Bhagat Singh was a true hero, whose execution Gandhi did not try hard enough to prevent. Gandhi appeased Muslims and only condemned violence committed by Hindus. Killing Gandhi rightly ended ‘non-violence’, paving the way for the Indian Army to move into Muslim-majority Hyderabad, under the direction of Sardar Patel, and secure its accession to India.
The group behind the killing, the RSS, was outlawed in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death. But now it is back. Indeed, it is linked to the BJP, the ruling party of government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Despite the gulf between the BJP and Gandhi’s worldviews, when expedient, the government will milk the affection and respect that most Indians still feel for the Mahatma. His face is on posters all over the country to promote the Swachh Bharat (‘Clean India’) campaign. It is a laudable effort to fight filth and instil good habits of hygiene. It was a cause Gandhi championed, so it seems reasonable to co-opt his face. But some suggest that using Gandhi like this serves another purpose of the BJP government. It undermines the role of independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the rival Congress Party.
When he died in 1964, it could fairly be said that Nehru was India. But for years now the totemic principles around which his idea of India was based – socialism and secularism – have been in retreat. In fact, in modern India his entire legacy seems to be under attack.
The Bhakra-Nangal dam, where Dip and Charles admired the turbines, was a symbol of the socialist dream. By becoming an industrial giant, India was supposed to eradicate poverty, inequality and want. But the dream turned sour. Instead of socialism, Nehru built statism. The economy was controlled through a system of permits and licences, known as Licence Raj, and it was closed. I remember this time. The shops in India were spartan. Some relatives, I feared, would strip Oxford Street bare. At the end of such trips, if you tried carrying their luggage to the car, you would put out your back.
Facing bankruptcy and an IMF bailout, the country changed tack. It liberalised the economy and opened it up to foreign trade and investment. The results were dramatic. The decade from 2004 saw 8 per cent growth and the start of a process of profound change.
In Mumbai I sat with two bright and articulate nephews who helped me understand that process of change. You can no longer see the sea from the veranda in Cuffe Parade – in the 1990s a shanty town grew up between the beach and the house – but when you open the shutters, a sharp fishy smell reminds you it’s there. After Anup became frail, Rano took over running the household and freshened up the furnishings. The veranda’s now all pink and lime-green paisleys, hand-printed fabrics from The Shop (Kabir and Aishwarya’s business). All in all, it is a pleasant place to sit and be educated about India’s economic outlook.
Anand did his degree in the US and is now a financial services advisor. He married Kanika, a soft-spoken former banker with whom he has two small children.
Disillusionment with Congress was gradual, he said. Nehru’s daughter Indira (who took her husband’s name Gandhi, but was not related to the Mahatma) wasn’t groomed to take over. But after she did, the Congress crown largely stayed in the family. Corruption crept in. Politicians and businessmen reportedly siphoned off billions from state assets in mining and telecoms. The political class seemed remote from ordinary Indians and deaf to the plight of the poor.
This gave Narendra Modi, the former chai wallah (tea-vendor) who sold his tea on the railways, a powerful appeal. Anand talked about the people who pour into Mumbai from the suburbs each day on dirty unreliable trains, then trudge back having earned a paltry wage. Modi promised to end corruption, modernise and create jobs. I heard wildly differing views about how effective he had been, but initiatives like ending open defecation suggested to many he cared about improving the lives of the masses. People would say, ‘I’m no fan of Modi but, unlike Congress, he understood there were no toilets outside of Delhi.’
Anand recommends I read James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj. This confirms that Nehruvian socialism is gone. In its place, Crabtree writes, a rapacious kind of capitalism has taken hold and inequality is even more extreme. Mukesh Ambani’s vertical palace of steel and glass symbolised the rise of the Mumbai super-rich with its 25 tonnes of imported chandeliers, basement sports pitches, temples and ballrooms. Years ago, when we drove past, its opulence seemed shocking in the midst of so much poverty. Today, under the Billionaire Raj, there are lots of aspiring Ambanis. People want to make money, and crony capitalism helps them to do so.
My other nephew, Karam, studied economics at the University of Chicago, then attended Paris’s Business School, INSEAD. He has worked in the UK, the US and with Amazon in Luxembourg. I asked him about tax, building a welfare state and the experience of Muslims in India.
Modi wildly over-promised and under-performed, he said, but he probably widened the tax base a bit. Karam didn’t see a Western-style welfare state working any time soon, so the key would be in jobs. In good jobs the Muslim population is under-represented. For decades that much has been clear. But there is a separateness in business, Karam said, to which Muslims and non-Muslims seem wedded. Many people, he said, will only transact with their community and a lot of households won’t employ staff from another community. India, he fears, is becoming a majoritarian country and the votes of people like him don’t really count.
In 1947 a strong Hindu lobby argued that Muslims belonged in Pakistan. During their lifetimes, Gandhi and Nehru held this impulse at bay. But since then, secularism has eroded and more and more politicians in India today are ready to use religion as a political tool and exploit communal tensions.
The dispute over Ayodhya epitomises this. Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, is said to be the birthplace of Ram, hero of the Hindu literary epic The Ramayan. In the sixteenth century the Babri Masjid (mosque) was built there, on the spot, it is claimed, where a temple had once stood. In the early 1990s political opportunism and television whipped up a movement to ‘liberate’ Ram and replace the mosque with a temple.
Using axes and hammers, a mob of ‘volunteers’ tore down the mosque. One by one the three domes fell and in six hours it was rubble. Waving saffron flags, the vandals shouted victory slogans. The mosque’s destruction, on 6 December 1992, sparked a wave of communal rioting. Some disturbances were started by Hindus, others by Muslims, outraged by the desecration. Some of the worst violence was in Mumbai.
During the weeks of rioting, Anup would call to let us know they were safe. Safe but deeply disturbed by the horror unleashed in the city. Anup generally employed Muslim drivers. (She said she felt safe with them because they didn’t drink.) During the riots she forbade them from venturing out. She gave them meals and kept them safe in her home. Anup often spoke about how moved and nostalgic she felt hearing the Muslim call to prayer. ‘Freedom of worship is in the Constitution,’ she would declare. We knew it but she would still repeat, ‘I am secular to the core.’
After Ayodhya, fewer people seemed to feel that way. Hindu revivalists began saying that in Hindu-majority India it was Hinduism, not Islam, that was in danger. After thirty years of secularism, caste Hindus began to see themselves as the victims. The ideology of Hindutva took hold, an ideology that defines Indian culture as Hindu.
Do you remember Dip’s portrait painter from the 1950s? M.F. Husain, who surreptitiously captured her image while she sipped tea? Things did not end well for Husain and that’s a tale it is important to tell. Husain, once a Bombay progressive, became ‘the godfather of Indian contemporary art’. His extraordinary, original work was shown all over the world.
Husain was brought up a Muslim in an India alive with multiple faiths. These inspired his work. Hindu goddesses appeared in the nude. A painting showed the contours of India (Bharat Mata) in a woman’s form, semi-clothed. In the mid-1990s, in the new climate, Husain fell foul of Hindu fundamentalists, who ransacked his home in Mumbai, disrupted exhibitions and ripped his canvasses to shreds. Lawsuits accused him of offending public decency and desecrating the faith. He received death threats and court orders were attached to his home. (He would never, it was said, have dared depict the Prophet in any such way.)
He left India aged ninety-one. In 2007 a judge upheld his ‘constitutionally protected’ right to freedom of expression. Nudity and sex had ‘an honoured place in Indian art’, said the judge, ‘including on the walls of its Temples’. But a court judgment doesn’t protect you from mobs.
In London, Usha Mittal (married to the steel tycoon Lakshmi) became a patron and confidante. She understood that Husain wanted to celebrate Hindu art, not defile it. Panels she commissioned on the theme of Indian civilisation were shown at the V&A. Husain died in London, but longing, according to his son, to return to India, if just for one afternoon.
Hindutva is alive and kicking in India today. Just think of the cows. If you have travelled by road in India, you’ll know – the car suddenly swerves, throwing you into an unwanted embrace, to avoid hitting one. If luck isn’t with you, you may hit a scooter or truck. Or the traffic just stops and there is not a thing you can do.
For centuries, cow killing was a source of communal tension, especially during religious festivals. In 1893, when some Muslims sacrificed cows during Eid, it prompted serious riots. With the cow at the heart of the rural economy and considered by millions to be the mother of the (Hindu) nation, Gandhi championed the cause. On Independence, Nehru resisted pressure to write cow protection into the Constitution and the matter was devolved to the states.
Modi, by contrast, rose to power pledging to defend the gau mata (cow mother). In his home state of Gujarat, killing a cow (even an old unproductive one) can earn you a lifetime in jail, or worse. Vigilante mobs have killed and lynched with impunity. Transporting or trading cattle, usually the preserve of Muslims or Untouchables, can also attract the mobs. Congress – the party that created secular India – seems to be muted. For fear of being portrayed as anti-Hindu or in hock to minority interests, they often mimic the BJP line.
My cousin Geeta used to teach at Yale. Now she lectures at Ashoka University just outside Delhi. She tutored me on modern India by sending me ‘think pieces’ from the Indian and international press. In one, the writer, Aatish Taseer, confessed he grew up with an aversion to Nehru. In the 1990s, Taseer explained, a new India emerged that was more ‘culturally intact’. He found Nehru ‘embarrassingly Anglicised’ and scorned his ‘Oxbridge accent and speeches about trysts with destiny’. But as Modi and the BJP pursued ‘a culture war against westernised Indians and India’s 170 million Muslims’, Taseer read Nehru’s writings for the first time. On nationalism Nehru wrote about the ‘anti-feeling’ that feeds on hatred towards other national groups. Modi’s appeal is his ‘authenticity’, his Indian-ness, pondered Taseer, but maybe India’s genius is its ability to throw up ‘dazzling hybrids like Nehru’.
On one of my trips I discover that not everyone is experiencing Nehru nostalgia.
My son Milo and I go into a shop. He describes what he is after. A jacket with a rounded collar and buttons down the front. The lithe and youthful shopkeeper leaps onto the counter. He steps onto the only space not piled with packaged clothes and reaches for the highest shelf, crying out in recognition, ‘A Modi jacket!’
‘Isn’t it called a Nehru jacket?’ I suggest from below.
‘Now,’ he pronounces, looking down at me, ‘it is a Modi jacket.’
In October 2018 I found three good reasons to visit Kasauli. It was where Dip’s brother, Bakshi, died of TB, so was an important place in her life; it was hosting the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival; and it was said to be lovely.
My cousin Pami and I travelled by train from Delhi to Kalka. Outside the station we piled into a taxi with other festival-goers. As the road climbed into the Himalayan foothills, the air became sharper and crisper. It was a slow journey. In many places, the rocky hillside had given way and boulders encroached on the newly built road. There was still plenty to admire – many varieties of pine tree and cacti, wild flowers and colourful shrubs. I spotted an orange and pink one that reminded me of summer holidays spent in Sardinia.
Six thousand feet up, Kasauli is perched on the hillside. It is an army cantonment with a lingering colonial feel. In the small central square, we passed Jakkimulls, the town’s oldest and most famous shop. We drove on, up a steep slope, past a line of small shops and stalls, until we arrived at a bungalow estate on the top of the hill where we were staying. It was a relief to step into the sun (I was open to going home looking slightly less pallid than when I arrived). A gentle breeze animated some Buddhist chimes, just out of view.
Our generous hosts had laid on drinks and a lunch. There I met Raj. He was a charming, elderly gentleman whose father, it turned out, was Medical Superintendent of the Lady Linlithgow Sanatorium where Bakshi was treated. I am so pleased by this surprise I accept a double gin and tonic as I reach for my notebook.
Raj’s father originally came from Kasauli but practised as a doctor in Lahore. When the sanatorium was established in 1941, he was invited to run it. His deputy was a Hungarian. At Partition, the non-Muslim family were on the ‘right’ side of the border. Raj promises to give me a tour of the sanatorium during a lull in the festival programme.
After lunch an excursion was organised, but I peeled off to explore the town on my own. There was a stunning view over the hills. I am framing the scene for a photo when I feel an almighty shove in the rear. I am shocked (how unfriendly!) but regain my balance just as a large monkey pushes past and disappears into the undergrowth. It turns out that they – and their kin – are prolific. At my next stop, Heritage Market, grey monkeys with black faces leap about and glare. They are small but menacing. Should I glare back or will that provoke an attack? I decide to postpone shopping here, pending advice.
With time in hand, I wandered to the army barracks on the other side of town. Military-themed posters lined the route. Most honoured individual soldiers – many Sikhs – who died in conflicts like the ‘Sino–Indian War of 1962’ in places unknown to me: the Sirjap Valley, Tongpen and Rezang. One poster featured a line of soldiers, camouflaged in dense forest, pointing their machine-guns. ‘Indian Army – May God have mercy on our enemies’, the text read, ‘because we won’t.’ Another showed the ‘Siachen warriors’ on a snow-swept mountain – ‘Our flag does not fly because the wind moves it. It flies with the last breath of each soldier who died protecting it.’
The festival was held in the club. It is a venerable institution founded in 1880 and housed in a collection of low-rise buildings with red corrugated-iron roofs. At the entrance a long list of regulations, painted in white, contains a dress code and a myriad of warnings. In case there is any doubt, domestic staff aren’t welcome, members are told.
Opposite the club buildings there are tennis courts. These are no ordinary tennis courts, not just because of their spectacular mountain setting, but because in her teens Dip learnt to play tennis here. To take a picture I sat on a small wall, to minimise the risk of assault from behind. I was excited to be there, but thinking of Dip as a tennis player required some mental adjustment. Dip is polished and poised. A tennis player strains, swears and even sweats. That’s not how I see her, but I accept she had a life before I was born.
Dip said she played there with the Maharaja of Kashmir. As a child this confused me. I thought the British ruled India, not princes, and anyway how could a Maharaja play tennis? Wouldn’t he trip on his robes? That fog has lifted at least. Dip’s tennis partner was the son of Maharaja Hari Singh, Karan Singh, who became Regent of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1949, aged eighteen, and is now a Congress politician.
Through the club building, in a courtyard overlooking the valley, a mini version of the Jaipur Literary Festival was set up. Instead of multiple colourful shamianas hosting a variety of sessions, there was one tent. Kasauli is way off the beaten track, so the festival-goers tend to be older people with time on their hands.
Pami and I listened to a session about Jallianwala Bagh. Kishwar Desai, a former protégé of Khushwant, and founder of Amritsar’s Partition Museum, was promoting her book Jallianwala Bagh 1919: The Real Story. Dyer has taken the blame, she said, but this was a ‘pre-planned’ operation in which ‘1,000 had to die’.
As far as I was aware, this was a novel historical view, so when a power cut forced a break in the session, I raised the matter with Pami. The general view, I ventured, was that Dyer went rogue in giving the order to shoot, and I wondered what new evidence Kishwar Desai had unearthed after one hundred years, to turn this view on its head.
Pami didn’t see it that way. He said he was very interested to learn what ‘really happened’. ‘Your problem,’ he declared, ‘is that you don’t think the British are capable of such cruelty.’ I denied the implied allegation of bias and muttered about evidence and facts. We slogged it out for a while, then decided that while we could comfortably continue to argue, a better plan might be to get a (complimentary) whisky and defer discussion until we had looked at the book (not available at that point).
After breakfast the next morning I walked with Pami to find Dromer Lodge, the house where Dip and her family used to stay. The modest bungalow had been rebuilt and the caretaker wouldn’t let us in, so we walked around the garden instead. It could have been England. There was a swing seat on a trimmed green lawn, a border of dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a badminton court overlooked by a magnolia tree.
Later, Raj took me to see the sanatorium. It, too, was a collection of simple, low-rise buildings with green tin roofs, scattered on the hillside. While Raj told me some facts – the sanatorium had 240 beds, 50 reserved for the military – I took in the surroundings. Trees, mainly. Dark pines and trees with wispy silvery leaves. Many looked old. I wondered if Bakshi, during the two years he was here, looked out at these same trees. I love seeing trees when I wake up. I love their majesty and intricate beauty. But what if, like Bakshi, you are sick, if you fear you will die and lose what you love? Would this beauty become a torment instead? TB was once a prolific killer, Raj was saying, but after the advent of antibiotics, the rationale for the facility faded.
On the way back to the club, I learnt that before Independence membership was open to Indians but only by invitation. Raj’s father was invited to join, but he declined. I asked why and he intimated tactfully that his father considered the British club-goers his social inferiors. It was pure Jewel in the Crown. The class-obsessed (oppressed) British brought their baggage with them out here. The ‘lower orders’ liked to big themselves up and lord it over the Indians.
In the late afternoon I made it to Jakkimulls. There, in monkey-free surroundings, I bought a beige woollen stole. Nicely wrapped up, I crossed the square to Christ Church. This is an imposing, grey-stone, Gothic-style Anglican Church with a green shack roof. It has a clock tower and is built in the shape of a cross, set among pines. Inside it was cool. Stained glass filtered the light. At first, I think I’m alone, then I see three teenage boys in a pew. I’m not convinced they are worshipping, but they do nothing to puncture the peace. I walk to the altar and light a candle for Bakshi.
After the festival closed, Pami and I hopped in a car and made for the railway station at Dharampur. Descending the hill, we found ourselves sparring about Shashi Tharoor’s polemic on Empire.
Dr Tharoor is a Congress MP and former United Nations diplomat who took part in an Oxford Union debate and demanded Britain pay ‘reparations’ to India for colonial wrongs. His witty and eloquent speech was viewed some 5 million times. Narendra Modi enthused that it ‘reflected the sentiments of the citizens of India’. On the back of this success he wrote Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (sold in India as An Era of Darkness), which, as the titles suggest, is a scathing attack on colonial rule.
In essence it reworks the ‘drain theory’ advanced in the early twentieth century by Dadabhai Naoroji (the first Indian MP at Westminster and a hugely influential figure) that Britain sucked away India’s wealth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tharoor wrote, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent. By the time the British left India, it had dropped to 3 per cent. Therefore ‘Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India’. Some economists, such as Professor Tirthankar Roy from the LSE, reject the drain theory. Others, like Gurcharan Das, posit different reasons for India’s (relative) decline, focusing on technological progress that transformed Western economies.
Next, Pami turned to the law and Tharoor’s thesis, which blames chronic delays in the Indian courts on a British-imposed adversarial system. ‘Complete nonsense,’ I offered. ‘The reason it doesn’t work is corruption and weak case management.’ Pami was on a roll. ‘I even learnt from Shashi,’ he continued, ‘that things we thought were a great legacy, like the railways, actually weren’t.’
We arrived at Dharampur station, where I hoped the facts might speak for themselves. We were taking the Kalka–Shimla railway line down to the plains. It is a UN World Heritage site. A large plaque on the platform describes its construction in 1903 as an ‘exceptional technical achievement’. Ninety-six kilometres of railway line passes through 102 tunnels, 988 bridges and 917 curves, many as sharp as 48 degrees. All this, the sign says, was built through difficult terrain, at high altitude and in ‘difficult climactic conditions’.
Pami’s grandfather, Sir Sobha Singh, and great-grandfather, Sujan, were a part of this successful collaboration. In fact, they built the line. It was their first large and lucrative government contract before they hit gold with the Lutyens New Delhi commission.
A long drawn-out whistle diverts our attention. We turn to see the toy train come into view pulling six dinky red and yellow carriages. The journey down is enchanting. I sit while Pami stands by the open door. It’s too noisy to speak and we are some feet apart, so we just soak up the beauty.
On the train I mentally replayed my discussion with Pami and thought of what Dip had said to me. ‘India’s encounter with the British was not all bad. Of course, they were not there for India’s benefit, and there was economic exploitation, but they helped drag India into the modern world and left behind foundations for the working democracy we have today.’
The same, I feel, could be said of the railways. India’s huge network of railways was not a generous gift from colonial rulers to enable the population to enjoy the flowering shrubs. Most was built after the 1857 rebellion to mobilise troops at speed. But it is an asset, now used by millions of Indians to travel vast distances across their extraordinary country. Should we judge history by the motives of its protagonists or by their results? It seems to me that without the other, neither paints an accurate picture.