"There’ll Always Be An India"

[magecaster]

While surfing the internet I came across this essay by the late Christopher Hitchens which I thought would be of interest to many members of this forum. The essay was written in 1997 (following or during his journey through Asia). By 'India' in the title Christopher is referring to the cultural India (which includes Pakistan and Bangladesh). It covers among many other things British Imperialism, India and Pakistan's independence from it, the partition, corruption, religion, Indians living in Hong Kong etc. etc.

"Why are you so keen to get rid of us, Munshi sahib?”

“Because, Morrison sahib, we wish to order our own affairs. We shall not order them as efficaciously as you do, my God, no, but then efficacy is not important to us, you understand. . . .”

“It’s your fault. You will insist on the British leaving.”

“Partly because we do not like being spoken to in that tone of voice.”
—Simon Raven, Sound the Retreat.

One can half appreciate the annoyance of the British officer cadets in Raven’s novel. Having been trained to rule India, and sent all the way out there, they find that independence is coming and that it’s closing time in the playgrounds of the West. Just 50 years ago, to put it shortly, the last rays flickered on that empire on which it was said (by its balladeers) that the sun never set and (by its detractors) that the blood never dried. As the munshi, or teacher, says, it’s largely a matter of tone.

The British Raj—meaning rule, which had been in place for nearly two centuries—actually came to an end several decades earlier than that, a few yards from where I began writing these words. The town of Amritsar, in the northern Punjab, is the site of the fabulous Golden Temple and constitutes the Jerusalem of the Sikh religion. It lies athwart the Grand Trunk Road, that imposing trade route that runs all the way from Peshawar on the North-West Frontier Province to Calcutta in distant Bengal. Rudyard Kipling’s father was curator of the museum in nearby Lahore, and Kipling’s boy-hero Kim met with all of his adventures on the Grand Trunk Road—including being thrown off the train at Amritsar. And it was to save British control of the Punjab, “Land of the Five Rivers,” that on April 13, 1919, General R. E. H. Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on a crowd of unarmed Amritsar civilians, who were packed into a no-exit public garden, or bagh, named Jallianwala. He wanted to set an example. But he got the tone all wrong. Not content with killing about 400 protesters and maiming many hundreds more, he had objectors flogged in the streets and issued an order that all Indians had to crawl on their bellies when passing the site of an alleged attack on an Englishwoman. This was too much. Huge numbers of Punjabis had just finished fighting for the British in the First World War and were no longer to be treated as serfs and sweepers. The Amritsar massacre provoked the great Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabin-dranath Tagore into renouncing the

Like many Indian cities, Amritsar is full of statues and monuments. Some of these date back to the Victorian epoch—the heyday of the commemorative sculptor specializing in jubilees—and some are more recent. As I skidded toward the bazaar in the back of a yelping and burping three-wheeler taxi, I was suddenly brought up in my decrepit seat by a rapid deceleration. It wasn’t the driver braking for a cow (though that does happen a lot). It was him stopping to show me a statue. There on the plinth was a turbaned Sikh, rather incongruously wearing a suit and tie and flourishing a concrete revolver. I think the statue was made out of concrete. It may have been asbestos. Anyway, this was Udam Singh, who in 1940 strode into a hall in Westminster, London, and gunned down Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the ex-governor of the Punjab who had approved the 1919 massacre. The name “Singh,” which is attached to every Sikh male as an honorific, means “lion.” Everybody hereabouts is a citizen-soldier, at least potentially. The driver gestured toward old Udam, who, having crossed half a world to exact vengeance, had been hanged for his pains. There was absolutely no rancor or resentment, still less triumph, in the driver’s attitude. He just guessed that, as a visiting Englishman, I would be interested.

General Dyer was mildly censured by a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry. But back “home,” the House of Lords passed a truculent resolution in his favor, and in India itself the more benighted colonials launched an appeal fund in his support. Scott’s haunting “Raj Quartet” has the theme of Amritsar running through it from beginning to end because his heroine, the soldier’s widow Mabel Layton, declares her own independence by sending money to the Indian victims instead. As I exited from the beautifully kept memorial garden at the Jallianwala Bagh, where the centerpiece is a huge well into which panicked citizens fell, or were hurled, I rather self-consciously refused all offers of a ride from the numberless rickshaw drivers clustered outside. It didn’t seem entirely fitting to be tugged through the clotted streets by a human being who was, to all intents and purposes, between the shafts. The rickshaw pullers, of course, bawled me out as a sentimental idiot who was keeping his money in his pocket—money that might have made their day.

One of the puzzles of the end of empire is this: As recently as a century ago, the destinies of the world’s two most populous civilizations—India and China—were largely in the hands of pink-faced men from a small, rain-sodden, but somewhat talented archipelago in the North Sea. Often using Indian troops, the British waged a war for drugs—known to history as the Opium Wars, after the empire’s most profitable commodity—on the Chinese mainland, and managed to break open the Middle Kingdom while maintaining permanent enclaves on its coastline. The “Jewel in the Crown” was a subcontinental dominion, shaped like a huge uncut diamond or a rhombus, which extended from the Himalayas to the teardrop southern tip of what is now Sri Lanka, and took in Burma (and nearly Tibet) for good measure. Visiting Asia today, you can be smitten by one or both of two reflections. The first of these is the strong and continuing evidence of past British rule. The second is the elemental, unchanging, gigantic integrity of India and China. It is, I always find, the traces of the first which make you appreciate the second. “How can the mind take hold of such a country?” asked E. M. Forster in A Passage to India. “Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile.” Where indeed my grandfather ended up, after filling his retirement home with ornaments from the only culture that had ever come near to seducing him from insularity.

It’s absurd, of course, to think of India as celebrating its 50th birthday this year. The idea of India is at least as antique, in the European imagination, as the astonishing and quite well-recorded 327 B.C. collision between the Indus River Valley and the forces of Alexander the Great. Written language, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, architecture, literature, the drama—all have an unbroken lineage in the subcontinent. Delhi, where the British built their Washington-style imperial capital in 1931, is the site of at least five other historic imperial and capital cities. Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, also built magnificent palaces and monuments and mosques in Delhi and as far away as Lahore. Which of course is now in Pakistan. Kipling’s boy Kim could make the short journey from Lahore to Amritsar without leaving his home country. But in order to follow his progress along the Grand Trunk Road, I had to get a visa and pay bribes at checkpoints and be stuck for hours at a frontier post on one of the world’s most bitterly disputed borders. That is the second sense in which this August is not a proper birthday celebration. In order to be liberated, India had to be dismembered. The British Empire created a nation, and then subjected it to a brusque amputation. Following their division of Ireland between Catholic and Protestant, the British hastily mandated separate states for Hindu and Muslim as a means of covering their retreat. As former rulers and conquerors of Mughal India, the Muslim elite were not prepared to accept minority status. The two carved-out Muslim areas—the “east and west wings” of Salman Rushdie’s Shame—were separated by more than a thousand miles. The word “Pakistan” is an acronym for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind, and means, in Urdu, “Land of the Pure.” Those who had been awarded confessionally “pure” territory immediately set about expelling or slaughtering all those of the “wrong” religion in the “wrong” place. Mahatma Gandhi told the British that they should cut him in two before they partitioned the country. But to no avail. He was so upset by this betrayal—“divide and rule” degenerating into “divide and quit”—that he refused to attend the independence celebrations.

This is just the first page of the essay, for the rest of it click here