(2) I have had a letter from Lili Chatterjee, and gather it is from you that she got my address. She tells me that at the end of your stay in Mayapore this year, she delivered into your hands, as well as two letters, a journal written by Miss Manners during the time she lived with her aunt in Kashmir, awaiting the birth of the child. Lili Chatterjee tells me that for some time she kept the existence of the journal secret from you, and that she would not have handed it over unless she had finally made up her mind that your interest in what you call the Bibighar Gardens affair was genuine. I gather that she received the journal from Lady Manners several years after the events it describes, and that Lady Manners, herself then approaching death, felt that of all the people in the world whom she knew Lili Chatterjee alone should take possession of it. Lili tells me that the journal makes it clear exactly what happened.
I gather that your concern with this affair arose from a reading of Brigadier Reid’s unpublished book, which came into your hands as a result of your known interest in this period of British-Indian history. Lili tells me that you have been to some trouble to trace persons who would be in a position either to describe from personal experience, or to comment on, on the basis of informed personal opinion, the events of those years in Mayapore. I gather for instance that in an attempt to ‘reconstruct’ the story of Miss Crane, the Mission School superintendent, you visited, among other places, the headquarters of the organisation to which she had belonged, and browsed among her unclaimed relics. I met Miss Crane once or twice, and my wife knew her quite well in connection with local committee work. I also met Miss Manners on a number of occasions, but I’m afraid I knew almost nothing of the man Kumar. I met him only casually, twice at most. Jack Poulson would have been able to tell you more about him because after the arrests I gave Poulson the job of conducting the various inquiries. Unfortunately I can’t help you to trace Poulson. He emigrated to New Zealand, I believe, and I have not heard of him for many years. However, Lili tells me that you have traced and talked to a friend of Kumar’s in England, a man called Lindsey – the same Lindsey, perhaps, who according to Reid’s account applied for a transfer from the Brigade Intelligence staff in Mayapore? My recollection is that Kumar was originally sent to the jail in the provincial capital, but if as you say his aunt left Mayapore years ago and not even his old uncle or Srinivasan have heard of him since then, it looks as though upon his release he began an entirely new life somewhere in India or, perhaps, in Pakistan.
In view of what Lili Chatterjee has told me I am willing – subject to a prior understanding that my memory cannot be absolutely relied upon – to have a talk.
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(3) Thank you for having given me the opportunity before we meet to read a copy of the short extract from Daphne Manners’s journal in which she describes what actually happened in the Bibighar, and the letter she wrote to her aunt about Merrick’s ‘proposal’. Thank you too for letting me see what you call the deposition of the man Vidyasagar. I did not know this man at all, and at this distance his name means nothing to me. I do remember Laxminarayan and the newspaper. I was interested to hear that Laxminarayan is still living in Mayapore, and I’m glad he was able to put you in touch with Vidyasagar before you left India. Miss Manners was obviously telling the truth (I mean, writing the truth, in her journal) and if Vidyasagar’s ‘deposition’ is also true – and there seems small reason to doubt it since there could hardly be much point in his lying at this stage – then I can only express a deep sense of shock. One’s own responsibility isn’t shrugged off lightly. I feel perhaps that I should balance any adverse picture by explaining the ways in which I thought Merrick a responsible and hard-working officer. However, I gather from what you say that on the basis of the various documents – Reid’s memoirs, Miss Manners’s journal and letters, and Sister Ludmila’s recollections, not to mention Vidyasagar’s deposition – you have pretty well made your mind up about the central characters in the affair and particularly about the kind of man Merrick was, and that my own contribution to your investigations should be confined to more general matters. A reading of these documents – which I now return – has certainly had much of the effect on me that you suggested it might. I find myself remembering things I have not thought of for years, and so perhaps, after all, I can be of some help.
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(4) Verbal Transcript
Areas of dangerous fallibility between a policy and its pursuit? Yes, that sounds like Srinivasan. Is it this sort of dangerous area you want to try and map? Not only? I see. Very well, let’s concentrate on the association between Reid and myself. But you’ll have to ask the questions.
Well, I made one or two notes about inaccuracies in Reid’s account, but what struck me finally was that quite apart from Reid’s simple soldier attitude which antagonised me again just as much on paper as when we met face to face, he had somehow managed to make everything that happened look logical in his own terms, and I remembered more and more clearly the feeling I myself had in those days of not being able to rehearse the sequence of events that had led to a situation that seemed to be logical in itself but jolly well wasn’t.
Every time Reid came into my office with that look on his face of being ready and eager to straighten us all out I felt like a man who had been playing a fish that might turn out to be either a minnow or a whale, and Reid’s entrance, or even a telephone call from him, or from one of the officers on his staff, was just like someone suddenly tapping me on the elbow in midstream and telling me, quite inaccurately, what I was doing wrong. He had a genius for smothering any but your bluntest instincts, which is why I once lost my temper and told him rather rudely to leave me alone. He didn’t bring that out in his book, but I’m not sure that this particular omission couldn’t be traced to the fact that he had a hide like a rhinocerous and my show of temper had as much effect on him as the bite of a gnat. I know that his book gives an impression of a not insensitive man, but he was sensitive, broadly, only to major issues and grand emotions. In his daily contact with other human beings he did tend to bear pretty much the proportional weight of a sledgehammer to a pin.
When I first met Reid I saw him as a man it was going to take a lot of patience and energy to restrain. As so often happened when a man was taken from behind a desk, he had formed an opinion about what he was always calling his task or his role – as if it were pretty well cut and dried and took precedence over anyone else’s, and I thought that having formed his opinion of his task he was also determined to carry it out in toto, however irrelevant some of its aspects turned out to be. I remember saying to my wife that if the Indians didn’t start a rebellion Reid would be forced to invent one just so that by suppressing it he would feel he’d done his whole duty. She told me I’d better treat him gently because, as we all knew by then, his son was missing in Burma. I think I hoped as much as he did that the poor boy would turn up, and was even more concerned than he by the news that young Reid was a prisoner-of-war in the hands of the Japanese.
You could say that my association with Reid was fairly typical of the conflict between the civil and the military, so perhaps I was no less guilty of conforming to a generalised pattern of behaviour than he was.
No, you’re quite right to correct me. I don’t mean at all that the Civil were always progressive and the Military reactionary. I’ve fallen into my own trap, haven’t I? Let me put it right. The drama Reid and I played out was that of the conflict between Englishmen who liked and admired Indians and believed them capable of self-government, and Englishmen who disliked or feared or despised them, or, just as bad, were indifferent to them as individuals, thought them extraneous to the business of living and working over there, except in their capacity as servants or soldiers or as dots on the landscape. On the whole civil officers were much better informed about Indian affairs than their opposite numbers in the military. In the later stages of our administration it would have been rare to find in the civil a man of Reid’s political simplicity.
Put my f
inger on the main weakness of Reid’s analysis of the political situation in India from the beginning of the ‘thirties –? No, because analysis is the wrong word. He had an attitude, that was all. We all had an attitude but his struck me as pretty childish. It was emotional and non-analytical. But I was always taught that politics were people, and a lot of Englishmen thought as Reid thought and felt as he felt, which was why even when he was getting my goat most with his talk of Indians and Englishmen having to sink their differences in order to beat the Jap I recognised the force of his attitude. After all the Japanese were practically hammering at the door, and even though what Reid meant by Indians and English sinking differences was the Indians doing all the sinking, calling a halt to their political demands and the English maintaining the status quo and sinking nothing – one couldn’t help admitting that the situation was very similar to the one a quarrelsome household would face if they looked out of the window and saw burglars trying to get in, or a gang of hooligans preparing to burn the house down. The head of the house would immediately feel obliged to take a lead and stand no nonsense from inside.
But straightforward as that situation might look – just a question of ceasing to squabble and presenting a united front to repel Japanese boarders – its straightforwardness depends on the nature of the squabbling in the house, doesn’t it? On the whole I dislike analogies, but let’s pursue this one a bit further. Let’s imagine that the people in the house are a pretty mixed bunch, and that those who have the least say in how things are run are those the house belonged to originally. The present self-appointed owner has been saying for years that eventually, when he is satisfied that they’ve learned how to keep the roof repaired, the foundations secure and the whole in good order, he’ll get out and give them the house back, because that is his job in life: to teach others how to make something of themselves and their property. He’s been saying this long enough to believe it himself but ruling the household with a sufficiently confusing mixture of encouraging words and repressive measures to have created a feeling among his ‘family’ that by and large he’s kidding, and that the only language he understands is the language he uses – a combination of physical and moral pressure. He’s also said he’ll leave – but stayed put – long enough to create factions below stairs among the people who hope to inherit or rather get the house back. He hasn’t necessarily intended to create these factions, but their existence does seem to suit his book. Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want. So he likes nothing better than to give private interviews to deputations from these separate factions and to use the arguments of minority factions as moral levers to weaken the demands put forward by the majority faction. He’s got into the habit of locking up over-vociferous members of all factions in the basement and only letting them out when they go on hunger strike like Gandhi used to.
We were in India for what we could get out of it. No one any longer denies that, but I think there are two main aspects of the British-Indian affair which we prefer to forget or ignore. The first was that we were originally able to exploit India because the first confrontation – to use Reid’s cant word – was that of an old, tired civilisation that was running down under the Moghuls and a comparatively new energetic civilisation that had been on the up-grade ever since the Tudors. English people tend to think of India as a Victorian acquisition, but it was originally really an Elizabethan one. And you only have to consider the difference between the Elizabethans and the Victorians to get an idea of the changes that took place in our attitude to our prize and therefore of the second aspect of the affair which we forget or ignore – the confusion surrounding the moral issue. The moral issue is bound to arise eventually and grow, and finally appear to take precedence in any long-standing connection between human beings, especially if their status is unequal. The onus of moral leadership falls naturally on the people who rank as superior, but just as a people over-endowed with power can explain that power away as God-given and start talking about morality and the special need to uplift the poor and ignorant – the people they have power over – so can a people who have had too long an experience of what today is called underprivi-lege pass the buck to their god. At almost precisely the same time that the English were developing their theories of the White Man’s burden to help them bear the weight of its responsibility, the Hindus and the Muslims were taking a long hard look at their religions, not to explain their servitude but to help them to end it. A lot of nonsense has been talked, you know, about the communal problem in India as if we waited in vain throughout the centuries of our influence for the Hindus and Muslims to settle their differences, but the communal problem never really became a problem until Hindu and Muslim revivalists and reformers got to work in the nineteenth century, in much the same way our own did, to see what comfort and support and ways forward could be found in these old philosophies. I think the English, however unconsciously and unintentionally, created the division between Muslim India and Hindu India. More recently in Kenya we shrieked accusations of barbarism at the Kikuyu for their Mau Mau rebellion, but hit a man in the face long enough and he turns for help to his racial memory and tribal gods. The Hindus turned to theirs, the Muslims to theirs. It wasn’t from social awareness that Gandhi identified himself with the outcastes of the Hindu religion. Untouchability was foreign to original Hinduism and in this attempted return by a subject people to the source of their religious inspiration it was bound to happen that untouchability should be chosen as the intended victim of a revival, and non-violence re-emerge as a main tenet of its revitalisation. The Muslims’ investigation of their religion was more dangerous, because Mohammed preached Holy War against the infidel. I think the English were perversely attracted to the idea of that danger. I always found it interesting that on the whole most English people were happier consorting with Muslims than with Hindus, but then fundamentally we’ve always been a bit embarrassed by the ‘weakness’ of Christianity. We saw the same weakness in Hinduism, but a sort of Eastern version of muscular Christianity in the religion of Allah.
In those days I was intensely puzzled by Gandhi. On the whole I distrust great men. I think one should. I certainly distrusted Gandhi – but not in the way Reid, for instance, distrusted him. I distrusted Gandhi because I couldn’t see how a man who wielded such power and influence could remain uninhibited by it, and always make the right decisions for the right reasons. And yet I always felt his appeal to my conscience behind even my severest doubts about his intentions.
There’s one story about Gandhi that I didn’t know at the time, and it’s particularly interested me since. Perhaps you know it too?
Yes. That’s it. Do you think it relevant? It strikes me as fundamental to an understanding of the man. I mean to be declared outcaste by his community merely because he expressed an intention as a young man to go to England to study law! And did you know this, that the leaders of his community declared in advance that any fellow going to see him off or wishing him good luck would be punished with a fine. Something like a rupee each. And think how long he was abroad between first departure and return. Nearly a quarter of a century altogether. I wonder what he thought of India when he eventually got back to it after all those years in England and all those years in South Africa? Do you think his heart sank? Even though he-returned a hero because of what he had done for the Indians in South Africa where he first initiated satyagraha. I mean India is far from what Brigadier Reid called salubrious. Perhaps Gandhi took one look at it and thought, Good God, is this what I’ve been longing to return to? I mention this because presently we come to the important question of doubt in public life.
I suppose it’s also relevant that he returned to India just at the time when friendly co-operation between the British and the Indians was reaching the peak of its last notable phase, early in the First World War. If I remember correctly he sailed from South Africa to England in the summer of 1914 and got there just abou
t the time we declared war on Germany. He told Indian students in London that England’s predicament was not India’s opportunity – a healthy opinion which Nehru borrowed twenty-five years later – and all through the Great War, in India, he was in favour of the recruitment of young Indians to the services. By and large India really went all out to help and not hinder us in that war. There was a strong smell of freedom for them in the air, and of self-government or measures of self-government which they could earn by helping to fight Britain’s enemies, which they seemed happy to do anyway. It was in 1917, wasn’t it, that we actually declared specifically that the goal for India was Dominion status? I think Gandhi got back to India early in 1915, and rather crossed swords – as Reid would have said – with people like Annie Besant. But even as early as this he proved himself to be something of an enigma. In his first public speech he said he was ashamed to have to speak in English in order to be understood by a largely Indian audience. Most Indian leaders prided themselves on their English. He criticised a prince who had just referred to India’s poverty, and sarcastically pointed out the splendour of the surroundings – they were laying the foundation stone of a new University. Benares? Yes, the Hindu University in Benares. Then he said there was a lot of work to be done before India could think of self-government. That was one in the eye for the politically self-satisfied! At the same time he pointed at Government detectives in the crowd and asked why Indians were so distrusted. That was a snub to the Raj. He referred to the young Indian anarchists and said he was also an anarchist, but not one who believed in violence, although without violence he admitted the anarchists wouldn’t have managed to get the decision to partition Bengal reversed. What a mixture of ideas this seemed to be! Mrs Besant tried to interrupt but the audience of students asked him to continue. The fellow in charge of the meeting told him to explain himself more clearly and he said what he wanted to do was to get rid of the awful suspicion that surrounded every move made in India. He wanted love and trust, and freedom to say what was in the heart without fear of the consequences. Most of the people on the platform left – I suppose they felt compromised or outraged or just publicly embarrassed – so he stopped speaking and afterwards the British stepped in. The police ordered him out of the city.