## Highlights - India had changed; it was not the good and stable country it had once been. In the days of the freedom movement, political workers, honouring Gandhi, had worn homespun as an emblem of sacrifice and service, their oneness with the poor. Now the politician’s homespun stood for power. With industrialization and economic growth people had forgotten old reverences. Men honoured only money now. The great investment in development over three or four decades had led only to this: to ‘corruption’, to the ‘criminalization of polities’. In seeking to rise, India had undone itself. - These overseas Indian groups were mixed. They were miniature Indias, with Hindus and Muslims, and people of different castes. They were disadvantaged, without representation, and without a political tradition. They were isolated by language and culture from the people they found themselves among; they were isolated, too, from India itself (many weeks away by steamboat from Trinidad and the Guianas). In these special circumstances they developed something they would never have known in India: a sense of belonging to an Indian community. This feeling of community could override religion and caste. - In the torrent of India, with its hundreds of millions, where the threat was of chaos and the void, that continental idea was no comfort at all. People needed to hold on to smaller ideas of who and what they were; they found stability in the smaller groupings of region, clan, caste, family. - ‘There is a place called Bhiwandi, about 25 kilometres from here. When India lost a cricket match to Pakistan, they used to let off crackers in the marketplace, the Muslims there. When I was small I could do nothing about it. But now I can’t bear it. There used to be groups of Muslims who used to come over from Bhiwandi to Thane here. The local people were so full of resentment against those Muslims that they had clashes with them in 1982, and they broke open the Muslim shops and sold the goods to the people. They sold towels for two rupees. The Muslim shops have come back now, but they live in fear. The Shiv Sena is very powerful. I will tell you: the Muslims even give donations to the Shiv Sena.’ - Alienation: it was the common theme. Mr Patil was triumphant now; but his blood still boiled. Even now he felt that his group might sink, and that others were waiting to trample on them. It was as though in these small, crowded spaces no one really felt at home. Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege. - The old man said there were thefts every day. And there were quarrels every day. The quarrels were worse. A lot of the quarrels came about because of the children. People hit other people’s children, and the parents became angry. - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">I felt that if I had been in their position, confined to Bombay, to that area, to that row, I too would have been a passionate Muslim. I had grown up in Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, a member of a minority, and I knew that if you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were.</mark> - I had noticed in other people this Indian use of the word ‘service’. In one way it was related to ‘civil service’; in another way it was related to the old-fashioned English use of ‘service’, meaning domestic service. The meaning of the word in India lay somewhere between the two. ‘Service’ in India stood for employment; but it also meant working for somebody else, working for wages, being dependent. - Whether arising out of a love marriage or an arranged marriage, it was the eternal conflict of Hindu family life, a ritualized aspect of the fate of women, like marriage itself or childbirth or widowhood. To be tormented by a mother-in-law was part of a young woman’s testing, part, almost, of growing up. Somehow the young woman survived; and then one day she became a mother-in-law herself, and had her own daughter-in-law to torment, to round off a life, to balance pain and joy. - ‘At the back of our minds we always have this idea that following religion or rituals is not going to harm us at all. So why not do it? - The chawls, many of them decades old, from the very beginnings of the Indian industrial revolution, were originally attached to mills, and were meant to accommodate mill workers. Technically, the mill owners still owned the chawls; but (because of rent-control laws) the mill owners no longer looked after the chawls, had virtually abandoned them; and tenants were nowadays free to sell the lease of the rooms they held. - One of the things that had thrown me at the beginning – apart from the light and the number of people in the room – was the idea I had had, perhaps from a misunderstanding of something Ajit had said, that the people I was among were Muslims. I had begun to talk to them as though they were Muslims, and had then found out that they were Hindus, with their own ways of communal feeling. - The poetry side was a surprise to me. It was surprising that, in the small spaces of Bombay, and with the crowd and frenzy, there was a living Marathi literature, with all the high social organization that such a literature implied: the existence of publishers, printers, distributors, critics, buyers. It was as surprising to me as the idea of the Maharashtrian gymnasium had been, when I had heard about it from Mr Raote. - I was beginning to understand that very little Mallika did was casual, that in everything she did, or had some control over, she aimed at prettiness or elegance: in her dress, her walk, the colours of the room, the big colour photograph of the white baby, and even in her dogs - South Indians, brahmins especially, had a better grasp of English because they were more exposed to it, and they would get jobs as secretary, stenographer, or even typist. These were probably the most widely followed professions for the South Indian or Tamil brahmins in British times – and this is something that has changed only in very recent years. Otherwise, as a class, South Indian brahmins worked as teachers or as priests or as petty clerks. Or, if they were lucky enough, they would take up a job in one of the government departments. These were the days when a 10-rupee-a-month government job was a most prized thing – it was the ultimate aspiration of the bulk of the Tamil brahmins who had done some schooling. - Things brightened up the next year, 1957, when I ran into a friend who said he could fix me up in a job in a Marwari concern. The Marwaris were taking over from the British in Calcutta, and were then the principal business people in the city – and they continue to be so. They were taking over the jute mills, the tea gardens, the coal mines, etc. - the political situation in Bengal was becoming turbulent. Labour was unruly. The leftists had more or less gained control of the unions and the state. And the physical conditions in the city also started deteriorating. More and more firms were coming under the control of the Marwari capitalists. And then there was the oil crisis of 1973. I was in charge of procurement of oil for the factory. I really faced a rough time. Plus the power shortages, the difficult transport, and the labour militancy I had to put up with as part of the management staff. You might say I had found the right kind of job, but at the wrong time. I hated going to work in the mornings. - The pilgrimage was essentially a Hindu affair; but the pilgrims to Ayappa were also required, in an unlikely way, to do honour to Vavar, an Arab and a Muslim, who had been a friend and ally of Ayappa’s. - The royal family of Mysore had been known not only for their great wealth, second only to the fabulous but idle wealth of the Nizam of Hyderabad, but also for their responsibility as rulers, their pride in their state and their people. They had been known as builders of colleges and hospitals and irrigation systems, planters of roadside trees and big public gardens. - Out of that confluence – the new education, the purohit or brahmin’s difficult, abstract learning, the concern with the right performance of complicated rituals, the stillness that went with the performance of some of those rituals – there had come a generation of scientists. - ‘Up to a point that is why Hindus are a-historical. If you look at what Indian culture remembers – we preserve our books on mathematics, astronomy, grammar. We preserve Bhaskara and Charaka.’ Seventh-century scientists. ‘Among the things which are preserved are not the names of kings or their battles – that is not part of our tradition. We know Bhaskara and Shankaracharya.’ Shankaracharya, a ninth-century philosopher who travelled all over India, revitalized Hindu philosophy, set up religious foundations (which still exist) in certain places, and is thought to have died at the age of thirty-two. ‘But if you ask, “Who ruled this part of the country in 1700?” people wouldn’t know, and basically they wouldn’t care. - The prime minister’s science adviser was saying the other day that the trouble with Indian science is that it is too much a brahmin science, and that we needed a more lower-caste kind of science. But the fact that so many brahmins are in science is only a development of history.’ - My father is seventy-six, and his back is still straight. But with my father the chanting of the mantras has been, in quotes, “degraded” from a livelihood to pleasure. Oral pleasure, if you like; nostalgia; a protection against fears. A gamut of feeling – all this I call pleasure, since it’s done out of volition. - ‘Our people, because of the long tradition of the rajas and maharajas and feudal lords, they always look with awe and fear on the seat of power, and at the same time they nourish a dislike and hatred towards the seat of power. But there is a dichotomy. They like an accessible, simple, compassionate, benevolent man in the seat of power. But at the same time they have a mental picture of power – of pomp, pageantry, authority and aristocracy. These things don’t go together many times. - And then in Madras it was different. The restaurants and hotels that were vegetarian were clean (though the popular non-vegetarian or ‘military’ places, as they were quaintly called, were as bad as anything in the North). The cleanliness and the vegetarianism were connected; they were both contained in the southern idea of brahminism. At the Woodlands Hotel I stayed in a clean room in an annexe, and ate off banana leaves (for the sake of the purity, and the link with old ways) on marble tables in the air-conditioned dining-room. - For the journey itself my family gave me idli and dosas and fried eatables. They gave me too much. I had to throw away the surplus. Their thinking was that the train might get stranded, and they didn’t want me to suffer if that happened. It is even today the normal South Indian family way with travellers. - His father was a tailor. Tailoring was an ‘imported’ profession (the way coffee was ‘an imported item’), and so it wasn’t associated with a particular caste, like weaving. - ‘Like the administration of the British Empire itself, the commercial empire, which was an extension of the first, separated a handful of Indians from the rest and made them into an integral part of the system of governance. The object was to make them identify more with British interests than with Indian interests. This was done in a very subtle way. The British would unhesitatingly serve Indian officers whether in political administration or commercial administration. I don’t think this happened with other empires, and it still doesn’t happen with foreign companies operating in India. French or American or Japanese companies almost never have one of their nationals serving under an Indian. - These jobs were more or less sinecures. So they would humiliate you by taking away certain visible symbols of authority and leaving you without any work. I’ve seen people go day in, day out to the office and just sit there, and then go back home – Oxford and Cambridge graduates who, if they had gone into other jobs, might have used their capacities better. The whole office would know about this humiliation. It was made very visible. But for many people resignation was unthinkable. It would have been like being thrown out of a warm and well-lit room into the middle of a winter in northern Sweden. - The college was for drop-outs, he said, ‘defeated soldiers’ (though they looked active enough and healthy enough in the small college yard). They were people who couldn’t get into other colleges. Their chances of getting a job were small – a BSc. degree didn’t get you a job anyway – and they were not motivated. The girls at the college were better motivated. They didn’t have the great need to achieve that the boys had; they didn’t have that pressure; and, paradoxically, they made better students. The college wanted more girls. The fees were 30 rupees a month, £1.20, which even in India wasn’t a great deal. - You must understand that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata rule the everyday religious code of the Hindus, just as the Koran does for the Muslims, and these are books which extol killing for a greater purpose. I should think that, like any other other Indian, I had no sense of ethical outrage in advocating killing for a cause.’ ‘Gandhi?’ ‘Of the many ideals of Gandhi which the Indians didn’t accept, ahimsa, non-violence, stands out most.’ - Stage by abstract stage, from a raw, humiliated concern with the poor and India, to cultural and economic suicide, new compulsions and violations, and a cause far removed from the peasant’s hunger. - ‘My shock was on two counts. One, it was so close to murder. But this I rationalized: it’s not murder, it’s execution. People weren’t going to be killed just like that. The individual killings were going to be discussed and agreed upon by the group. The second shock was that virtually all the gurus of Marxism had warned against terrorism. And this sounded like terrorism. - ‘At the other end of the spectrum you have the red-flag-waving unions constantly playing cat-and-mouse with the management. The union leaders themselves don’t do any work at all. The unions represent what ultimately the true Bengali is like: he is indolent, doesn’t want to work, but he wants something for nothing, and he must protect his dignity at all costs. He will publicly despise the Marwari trader, but he wouldn’t be able to do the same job himself. - For years and years, and even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it had been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining. But Calcutta hadn’t died. It hadn’t done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy had been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They didn’t die with a bang; they didn’t die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because they feared the suffering of the travel; when no one had clean water or air; and no one could go walking. Perhaps cities died when they lost the amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered. - There was a point in the bazaar when you crossed over from the mixed Hindu-Muslim area to the area that was purely Muslim. The cross-over point was clear enough to Rashid; it wasn’t so clear to me. The crowds beyond that point were denser, Rashid said, and the people were smaller; they were undernourished and stunted. And I did see, when I had got my eye in (or thought I had), that many of the children in this part of the bazaar were thin and wizened, with staring eyes, and often had some kind of skin infection. - She wanted to go into ‘secular’ politics; and she meant that she wanted to go, as a Muslim woman, into the politics of the state. This ambition in no way diluted her religious faith. Certain aspects of the Muslim faith were ‘the law’, she said: they couldn’t be discussed. Such an aspect was the aspect of women’s rights. Women enjoyed many rights under Islam. They didn’t need to have their rights – which were in any case ‘the law’ – amended by the state. They enjoyed the right, for instance, of inheriting property from their parents; Hindu women had no such right. Whatever was given to a Muslim wife during marriage was hers to keep; that wasn’t so with western women. When a marriage was arranged a man undertook to pay a woman a certain sum if he divorced her. That was enough; the idea of maintenance was repugnant to a Muslim woman. When a woman became a wife, it didn’t mean that she had become a servant. After a divorce a husband became a stranger, and there was no question of a woman taking money from him afterwards. Other countries or communities could think of modifying the rights of people according to the needs of the time. But the Koran had laid down the law for Muslims for all time. - The Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 was a watershed not only in Muslim lives, but also in Hindu-Muslim relationships. The myth of Muslim superiority was all finished. Here was India playing a decisive role in the sub-continent. Every Muslim had a soft corner in his heart for Pakistan, and everyone was sad that the experiment had failed after less than 25 years. The dream had died. Then the Pakistani soldiers were prisoners of war for two years. That was a constant reminder. ‘I would feel a change taking place in personal relationships. My Hindu friends started lecturing. “What are Muslims doing with themselves?” They started becoming reformist about the Muslim faith and what they saw as our archaic practices. “How long are you Muslims going to carry on like this? How long are you going to be so dependent on your mullahs, your mohallas?” The sad fact was that there was a lot of truth in what they said. I was hurt, but we had to take it.’ - One of the first things I heard from my father – which I later understood to be one of the teachings of Ali – was: “You will not find abundant wealth without finding by its side the rights of people that have been trampled.” And: “No rich morsel is eaten without there being in it the hunger of those who have worked for it.” ’ - ‘I felt relief to be back here. That sense of belonging, which I had in India, I knew I couldn’t find anywhere else. Yet I also know that I can never be a complete person now. I can’t ignore partition. It’s a part of me. I feel rudderless. If there had been no partition I might have been a married man with all the paraphernalia of a middle-class Muslim existence. But I’ve lived all my life so far as a bachelor, and it’s now too late for me to change. The creation and existence of Pakistan has damaged a part of my psyche. I simply cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. I cannot pretend that life goes on, and I can have the normal full emotional life, as though what had been here before is still around me.’ - Like Gandhi among the immigrant Indians of South Africa, and for much the same reasons, I had developed instead the idea of the kinship of Indians, the idea of the family of India. - The women who read Woman’s Era are really intimidated by magazines. They’d rather pick up magazines like Woman’s Era that don’t make them feel uncomfortable. But I’m optimistic that that kind of reactionary woman’s journalism will be on the way out. When we’ – she meant Eve’s Weekly – ‘write about bride-inspecting, we get all het-up. And we tell the woman, the girl, that she doesn’t have to go through this. But she can only revolt if she is educated enough to be economically independent at some later stage.’ - ‘That’s glamorizing the Woman’s Era reader a bit. It’s the elite voice talking.’ Nandini herself was just a generation or two from traditional and small-town life. ‘Every day I change two buses and take a train to come to office. And I get up early. But I don’t read Woman’s Era. I cook at home and I come to work, and I don’t find it a drudgery. That’s a skyscraper view. The person who says that probably has a lot of servants at her fingertips.’ - There would have been a more general wish as well to get even with the Muslims. And it was historically fitting that the Sikhs should have helped to bring about the extinction of Muslim power in Lucknow and Delhi, because it was out of the anguish caused by Muslim persecution of Hindus that the Sikh religion had arisen, in 1500. - Of all the prophets, if you ask me who is the prophet nearest to the Guru, I would say Mohammed. Our idea is different from Islam in only one aspect: the dominant element in our concept of godhead is justice and kindness. The Islamic God appears to me to be a little harsh – if you see the punishment renegades got at the hands of Mohammed himself. And when you see the manifestation of sovereign power in Islamic states, there is an element of cruelty, a bit of oppression. We view God as a liberator. Ranjit Singh ruled the Sikh kingdom for 40 years, and he never sentenced anyone to death. This, I think, is the spirit of Sikhism. This is our concept of God as kindness.’ I said, ‘There is no such conception of God in Hinduism.’ ‘Everything is violent in Hinduism. Do you see the Devi strung with skulls around her neck? If you ask me, Hinduism is the most violent of religions.’ - And there is the position of the Harijans, the scheduled castes. That has changed. One day, when I was a child, I had water from a well in the village. I didn’t know it was the Harijans well. My uncle didn’t allow me to enter the house. I had to sit there in the entrance, and the village granthi – the reader of the Sikh scriptures – was called, and he gave me some water, to purify my misdeed. Today the same uncle has Harijans working in his kitchen. They cook for him. - How did he define the Sikh 19th-century system? ‘A secular system, a socialistic system also, a Sikh socialistic system. The main point is having the Sikh religious and political system along with the socialism. Religion and spirituality are intrinsically inseparable parts of the human personality. Similarly, the urge to dominate, to have political power, is also part of the human personality. This is so in animals, in birds also. And why not in human beings? Animals have got their leaders, the birds have got their leaders. Similarly, Khalsa the Sikh brotherhood, as established by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 wants to be the leader of the world, as it has got the inseparable elements of that leadership in its character.’ - In 1962 I had had tea in the lake pavilion one day with Karan Singh and his wife. Karan Singh had a great appetite for Hindu thought, and at that tea he had talked of the ninth-century Hindu philosopher Shankaracharya, who, born in the South, had, in a short life of 32 years, walked to the four corners of India (while India was still itself, before the Mohammedan irruptions), preaching and setting up the religious foundations that still existed.