It must have been as it would be at a political meeting here, or in a television interview, if a well-known man actually got up or faced the camera and said exactly what was in his mind, without worrying how many times he seemed to contradict himself, and certainly without thinking of his own reputation, in a genuinely creative attempt to break through the sense of pre-arranged emotions and reactions that automatically accompanies any general gathering of people. In India that sense of pre-arrangement was always particularly strong because the Indians are normally the politest men and women in the world, which is probably why at a pinch they can be among the most hysterical and blood-thirsty. I suppose the widespread use of a foreign language has exaggerated their natural politeness. I’ve often wondered whether things wouldn’t have gone infinitely better for us if all our civil servants had been compelled to acquire complete fluency both in Hindi and in the main language of their province and forced to conduct every phase of government in that language. Gandhi was right, of course, it was shameful that in talking to university students he had to speak a foreign language. The reason he had to speak it wasn’t only because all the young men there had achieved their present status by learning and reading in English, but because it was probably the only language they all shared in common. We did nothing really to integrate communities, except by building railways between one and the other to carry their wealth more quickly into our own pockets.
Gandhi, you know, always struck me as the only man in public life anywhere in the world who had a highly developed instinct and capacity for thinking aloud – and this was an instinct and a capacity that seldom got smothered by other instincts. I’m sure it led eventually to the chap being completely misunderstood. People in public life are supposed to project what today we call an image, and ideally the image has to be constant. Gandhi’s never was. The phases he went through just in the years 1939 to 1942 were inconstant enough for history to have labelled him as sufficiently politically confused to rank either as a band-wagoner or a half-baked pain in the neck. But I think what he was actually doing was trying to bring into the open the element of doubt about ideas and attitudes which we all undergo but prefer to keep quiet about.
And don’t you think that can be partially traced back to the depression he must have felt way back in the nineteenth century at being able to leave his homeland only as an outcaste? Don’t you think that the element of doubt entered very strongly at that moment as well as on his return? ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ he must have asked himself. After all he was only nineteen or so. To go to England and study for the law was something he could only do by being publicly rejected by his caste-community. Caste probably had a truly religious significance for him in those days. Going to England was significant only in terms of his worldly ambition. No man is without ambition, but perhaps few men have been forced to doubt the power for good that ambition represents as much as Gandhi was forced to do. I felt in the end that he was working out a personal salvation in public all the time. And of course the kind of doubt a man has of himself, of his actions, of his thinking, plays a prominent but invariably secret part in the actual events of the day. It was right to bring it into the open for once. He was never afraid to say openly that he’d changed his mind or been wrong, or that he was thinking about a problem and would only express his views after he’d worked out some kind of solution.
What would have happened, I wonder, if I had publicly represented my doubts about the wisdom of imprisoning Congress leaders in August 1942? God knows. I can’t have been the only district officer who felt that it was the last thing it was wise to do or the only one to write long confidential memoranda on the subject to his commissioner. But I didn’t have the nerve to stand up in the open and rehearse in public the pros and cons of doing what I was instructed to do.
I sometimes wish that on August the 9th I’d gone to the temple square beyond the Mandir Gate bridge with a megaphone, called out to the people there and said, ‘Look, Government tells me to imprison X Y and Z because the Indian National Congress has endorsed the Mahatma’s resolution calling on us to Quit India and leave her to God, or to anarchy, in other words, so far as we are concerned, to the Japanese. But if I imprison these men, who will lead you? Will you be glad to be rid of them? Or will you feel lost? Congress talks about non-violent non-co-operation, but what does that mean? How won’t you co-operate? How will you withhold co-operation without defending yourselves against us when we try to force you to co-operate? We’ll try to force you because we believe we’re fighting for our lives. When you defend yourselves how will you do so without violence? If I threw down this megaphone and struck one of your young men on the face, what would you do? What would he do? If he does nothing and I strike him again, what then? What if I then do it again and again, until his face is bloody? Until he is dead? Will you just stand by and watch? The Mahatma says so, it seems, but do you say so?’
But of course I never did go to the temple square with a megaphone. Doubts and all I locked up X Y and Z. And I think it was wrong. The men who ordered me to lock them up had probably had similar doubts before initiating the policy, but once it was laid on none of us was left with any official alternative but to carry it out.
I suppose true anarchy in public life is inaction arising out of the element of doubt as opposed to action following the element of decision. And of course between the doubt, the decision, the action and the consequences, I suppose you find what Srinivasan calls the areas of dangerous fallibility. Well, that’s not a shattering discovery. We all know it. But Gandhi had the courage to operate openly on the ground of the dangerous areas, didn’t he? Is that what you’re getting at? Wise as we can be after the event, no one at the time pointed out that this was what he was doing: If he stepped too noticeably out of the acceptable line he was locked up, but released when it was thought his talents would be more valuable politically on a free rein.
What is clear to me beyond any doubt is that we turned him fundamentally into a power harmful to our policies when we resorted to the repressive measures of the Rowlatt Act, immediately after the Great War at a time when he and all Indians had every reason to expect a major advance towards self-government as a reward for co-operating so freely in the war with Germany. Were we mad? Or plain stupid? Or merely perfidious? Or terrified? Or just common-or-garden cocky after victory, thick-skinned and determined to give away nothing? What in hell was the good of declaring Dominion status as our aim for India in 1917 and not much more than a year later instituting trial without jury for political crimes and powers of detention at provincial level under the Defence of India Rules, ostensibly to deal with so-called anarchists but in practice to make any expression of free-will and free opinion technically punishable? What kind of a ‘dominion’ was that?
Well, you remember the result: riots, and then General Dyer at Amritsar and a return to distrust and fear and suspicion, and Gandhi emerging as the Mahatma, the one man who might provide an answer – but now it was going to be an Indian answer, not a British one. I’m sorry. I still get hot under the collar when I think about 1919. And I’m still deeply ashamed, after all these years.
No, I was too young at the time. I went out to India as a young civilian as we called ourselves in 1921. I had hardly a thought in my head. I’d done my swotting and passed the exams, and read all the the myth and legend. I wanted nothing better in those days than to get out into my first subdivision under the old pipul tree, puffing at a pipe and fancying myself no end as a promising administrator who would straighten out young and old and be remembered as White Sahib, become a legend myself and still be talked about fifty years after I’d gone as the fellow who brought peace and prosperity to the villages.
But of course I had to face reality at once. I simply wasn’t cut out for paternalism. My superiors were the last of that breed. I disliked my first district officer. He probably didn’t deserve it. But I hated India – the real India behind the pipe-puffing myth. I hated the loneliness, and the dirt, the s
mell, the conscious air of superiority that one couldn’t get through the day without putting on like a sort of protective purdah. I hated Indians because they were the most immediately available target and couldn’t hit back except in subtle ways that made me hate them even more.
And then one day, I remember it clearly, I was touring the district with the land settlement officer, going from village to village. On horseback, old style. I was fed to the teeth with village accountants who cringed and tahsildars who presumed and cringed all in the same breath, and I was critical of the settlement officer who obviously felt and acted like God going for a casual stroll, giving with the right hand and taking with the left. Then something went wrong with the camp bandobast We were bogged down in some god-forsaken village and had to spend the night in a mud-hut. I was ready to cry from frustration and from my own sense of inadequacy. The settlement officer was drinking toddy with the village elders still playing at Christ and the Apostles, and I was alone in the hut. My bowels were in a terrible state and I couldn’t face anything, let alone toddy. I was lying on a charpoy, without a mosquito net, and suddenly saw this middle-aged Indian woman standing in the doorway watching me. When our eyes met she made namaste and then disappeared for a moment, and came back with a bowl of curds and a spoon.
I was on my dignity at once, and waved her away, but she came to the bedside and spooned up a helping of the curds and held it out and made me eat, just as if I were her nephew or son and needed building up. She said nothing and I couldn’t even look at her – only at her black hands and the white curds. Afterwards I fell asleep and when I woke up I felt better and wondered whether I hadn’t dreamed it all, until I saw the bowl of unfinished curds covered with a cloth, on a brass tray by the bedside and a flower on the tray next to the bowl. It was morning then, and the settlement officer was snoring in the other bed. I felt that I had been given back my humanity, by a nondescript middle-aged Indian woman. I felt that the curds and the flowers were for affection, not tribute, affection big enough to include a dash of well-meant motherly criticism, the suggestion that my indisposition could be overcome easily enough once I’d learned I had no real enemies. I remember standing in the open doorway and breathing in deeply; and getting it: the scent behind the smell. They had brass pots of hot water ready for my bathe. Before the bathe I was sat down on an old wooden chair and shaved by the nai, the barber, without soap, just his fingers and warm water and a cut-throat. He scraped the razor all over my face and forehead, even over the eyelids. I held my breath, waiting for the cut that would blind me. But it was all gentle and efficient, a kind of early morning puja, and afterwards my face felt newly made and I went to the bathing enclosure and scooped water out of the brass pots of hot water that stood waiting. Brooke had the right word for it. The benison of hot water. Later I looked among the women but couldn’t tell which of them had come into the hut the night before and fed me as she would have fed her own son. There was another flower on the pommel of my saddle. It embarrassed me. But I loved it too. I looked at the settlement officer. He had no flower and hadn’t noticed mine. As we rode away I looked back, and waved. The people made no move in reply, but I felt it coming from them – the good wish, the challenge to do well by them and by myself. I’ve never forgotten that. I expect that afterwards the bowl and spoon I’d eaten from had to be thrown away.
No. One did tend to spend the whole of one’s career in the same province, but that village was not in the district where I eventually became Deputy Commissioner. Why? Did you think it lay close to Dibrapur?
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(5) Thank you for sending me the edited transcript of the recording of our interview. I see you have ironed out a lot of the inconsistencies and repetitions but haven’t been able to disguise the way that I kept leading away from the point. You were obviously right to end the interview when we got round finally to the business of Dibrapur, which probably needs more careful discussion than it would have got just then.
I don’t know about Mary Tudor and Calais as you put it, but I certainly remember Dibrapur. There was terrible poverty there, the kind you would get in any region where an old source of wealth has retreated farther and farther. In the nineteenth century it was the headquarters of the district. I don’t recall exactly when it was that they began to mine the coal, but gradually these particular veins were worked out and the adjoining district inherited the wealth and prosperity. Labour was still drawn from Dibrapur, but in decreasing quantities.
In any depressed area, anywhere in the world, you can assume that emotions and attitudes will be exaggerated. In one respect Reid was right and some kind of organised force was at work in Dibrapur, but how much was due to planning and how much to intelligent seizing of opportunity never was clear. Where he was wrong, I’m sure, was in attributing the force to an underground force of Congress, and I think Vidyasagar’s deposition bears this out, and where I was right, I suspect, was in believing that any force of Indian national life could have been controlled by the Congress. The majority of Indians (excluding wild young men like Vidyasagar ) have always respected authority – how else could we have ruled millions with a few thousand? Congress was the shadow authority. If we had not banned the Congress committees and imprisoned their leaders at the centre and in most of the provinces, I’m convinced that there would have been no rebellion of the kind that occurred. Gandhi, you know, didn’t expect to be arrested this time. Politically, ‘Quit India’ was a sort of kite he flew. Morally, it was an appeal like a cry in the dark. But even if in places like Dibrapur there had been rebellion I am equally convinced that to contain it I would only have had to appeal to a man like Srinivassan for instance to go there and talk to the people and exhort them to non-violent non-co-operative methods. Strikes, hartal, that sort of thing. I honestly believe that the Indian is emotionally predisposed against violence. That would explain the hysteria that usually marks his surrender to it. He then goes beyond all ordinary bounds, like someone gone mad because he’s destroying his own faith as well. We on the other hand are emotionally disposed towards violence, and have to work hard at keeping ourselves in order. Which is why at the beginning of our wars we’ve always experienced a feeling of relief and said things like, ‘Now we know where we stand.’ The other thing to remember about Indians, Hindus anyway, is that their religion teaches them that man, as man, is an illusion. I don’t say that any more of them believe that than Christians believe Christ was the son of God or was talking practical sense when he said we should turn the other cheek. But just as the Christian ideal works on our Christian conscience while we’re engaged in battering each other to death, or blowing each other up, so that we know that to do so is wrong, so I think when the Indians start battering each other they feel in the backs of their minds that the battering isn’t quite real. I think this partly explains why unarmed mobs were always ready to face our troops and police. They themselves weren’t real, the troops weren’t real, the bullets were never fired and people didn’t die except in a world that was an illusion itself. I agree that this doesn’t explain why in such a non-existent world it was thought worth while opposing the troops in the first place.
But of course for me the people in the Dibrapur subdivision were real. They were bad farmers and poor shopkeepers. It wasn’t their fault. The heyday of the coalmines was pre-Great War, but that heyday denuded part of the land permanently and led to unploughed fields, and the splitting up of families. There were several villages in that area where there were practically no young men. They’d all gone to the mining areas in the adjacent district. You know the sort of thing that happens as well as I do. We made special efforts there – I remember talking to Miss Crane about them once, because she had one of her schools near Dibrapur – but there was a lot of apathy as well as a lot of resentment. The young Indian I had out there in his own sub-divisional headquarters was an extremely intelligent and capable man. It was the toughest sub-division in the district. He had a lot of problems but also a lot of nous. The fellow who appoint
ed himself deputy commissioner was one of the local tahsildars who was also a local landowner. My own man had always had a lot of trouble with him. In his account Reid leaves a slight doubt in the reader’s mind about the Indian sub-divisional officer’s actual behaviour during the troubles. I know at the time people were going around saying that when it was all over the chap broke down in my office and spent hours crying and asking to be let off. No such thing. We talked the situation out quite unemotionally, and I was satisfied that short of sacrificing his life – which I wouldn’t have expected any sane man to do – the sub-divisional officer had made the best of a bad job, managed to restrain the self-appointed deputy commissioner quite a bit, in spite of the fact that as so-called Judge he was more or less kept prisoner. And he certainly saved a sizeable sum of money for the treasury. I expect the rumour about him crying arose from the fact that when we shook hands and parted there were tears in his eyes, and people probably noticed them as he left my bungalow. I hadn’t been kind to him, just fair, I hope, but Indians have never been ashamed of responding to fairness in a way an Englishman would be ashamed to.
But that is jumping ahead. I know there was a failure in our intelligence system to pinpoint in advance the men who emerged as local leaders in Dibrapur and succeeded in cutting the town off for several days. I suppose I did use the expression ‘needles in a haystack’ when talking about such people to Reid, but I don’t actually remember doing so. The police in the Dibrapur sub-division were – perhaps not unexpectedly in view of the toughness of their job – of a lower morale than elsewhere. Some ran away, and one or two constables took over and sided with the rebels. As you will have gathered, everything happened pretty quickly and our police – never numerous – were scattered very thinly in proportion to the area and the size of the population. I agreed to Reid sending troops on the night of the 11th in the hope that their prompt appearance at that particular moment would be as inhibiting as the appearance of troops usually was. Reid rather underplays the attempts made that day by the civil authority to get into Dibrapur with police and magistrates, and says nothing about the road blocks on the main road. There were no blown bridges on the main road, but there was a series of felled trees that denied the road to the full use of transport, and the police found that the nearer they got to Dibrapur the less helpful the villagers were in helping them to clear the road. On the night in question the message I had had from Tanpur was to the effect that one truckload of police had ‘disappeared’. It turned out later that they were locked up in the kotwali in one of the villages near Dibrapur. All the wires were down, of course, between Dibrapur and Tanpur.