Notes and References

Notes and References 1. THE ENGLISH INDIAN NOVEL: KIM AND MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN 1. The absolute number of Indians who have a good command of English is very large, around 13 million, but this represents only 2 per cent of the population. 2. This is, I am aware, a tactless thing to say: India is a secular state. But - whether we blame it on Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan, or see Jinnah responding to what he recognised as an inevitable historical logic, or whether we prefer to blame the British and their perverse desire to fragment the country that they were about to abandon - I find it impossible to doubt that India is a Hindu country, a country in which Hindus are in a huge majority, and in which they monopolise all real power. This is at any rate the view forcefully argued by Nirad Chaudhuri in his The Continent of Circe (Chatto and Windus, 1965). 3. Angus Wilson brilliantly observes as a recurrent feature in Kipling's work 'that transformation of a small space into a whole world which comes from the intense absorption of a child'. See his The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (Secker and Warburg, 1977), p. 1. 4. Bengal, the Indian province in which education was most widespread, was also the first province in which nationalist politics took root. 2. THE INDIAN ENGLISH NOVEL: NATION OF FOOLS AND THE MAN-EATER OF MALGUDI 1. See V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (Andre Deutsch, 1964), p. 232. 2. It is Nataraj's assistant Sastri who identifies Vasu as showing 'all the definitions of a rakshasha'. He goes on to define a rakshasha as 'a demoniac creature who possessed enormous strength, strange powers, and genius, but recognized no sort of restraints of man or God'. But such a creature only 'thinks he is invincible, beyond every law... sooner or later something or other will destroy him: Sastri recalls several examples to prove his point. The case closest to Vasu's is that of Brahmasura 'who acquired a special boon that everything he touched should be scorched, while nothing could ever destroy him'. In the end he was deceived by Vishnu into touching his own head, and was 'reduced to ashes that very second'. 3. See Graham Greene's introduction to R.K. Narayan The Bachelor of Arts (Heinemann, 1978). 195

196 Notes and References 3. RIDING THE BEAST: RUTH PRAWERJHABVALA IN INDIA 1. All quotations in which Ruth Prawer Jhabvala speaks in her own person are from her autobiographical essay 'Myself in India' in How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories' (Penguin, 1981). 'Rose Petals', 'The Housewife', 'In a Great Man's House' and 'Suffering Women' are also included in this volume. 'A Young Man of Good Family' is one of the collection of stories entitled A Stronger Climate (Granada, 1983). 4. THE QUIET AND THE LOUD: ANITA DESAI'S INDIA 1. Victoria Glendinning, The Sunday Times, 31 August 1980, p.32. 5. THE POLITICS OF R.K. NARAYAN 1. See V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (Penguin, 1979), pp. 18-27 and 37-43. 2. Srinivas does work. He edits a paper. But it is journalism of a peculiar kind, for Srinivas never finds time to leave his office. He offers his readers a kind of extended meditation rather than reporting. By all accounts Narayan's own efforts as editor of the short-lived Indian Truth had something in common with Srinivas's. 3. The Painter of Signs was serialised in the Illustrated Weekly of India before its publication in book form in 1976, so that Naipaul could have read it, at least in part, during his visit to India. It is probable, of course, that the whole or a large part of the novel was written before the formal Declaration of Emergency in June 1975, but the declaration was little more than a name-giving ceremony for a state of affairs that had already been in existence for two years. 4. A point also made by Salman Rushdie. In Midnight's Children Gonathan Cape, 1981) the son of the child of midnight is born at the moment of the Declaration of Emergency. 5. See;, for example, Gandhi's advice to Bharati on how to spend her time in prison: 'Wherever you may be with a copy of Ramayana and Gita, and a spinning wheel, there you are rightly employed.' 6. The Indian National Army, largely recruited from Indian prisoners of war. Chandra Bose believed the Germans and the Japanese to be India's natural allies in their struggle against the British. He planned to invade India with the cooperation of the Japanese, oust the British, and establish an independent government. 7. I do not claim that Narayan misrepresents Gandhi here or elsewhere. It would be possible, I believe, to document each of the utterances Narayan ascribes to Gandhi from Gandhi's own writings.

Notes and References 197 It is just that Narayan consistently resolves or minimises the paradoxes that lie at the centre both of Gandhi's character and his achievement. Compare, for example, the brief appearance of Gandhi in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (Wishart Books, 1935). It seems to me clear that the less talented novelist has a firmer and truer grasp of these paradoxes than does Narayan. 8. The funeral of Sriram's aunt, during which she wakes up, seems a delightful comic interlude unrelated to the novel's main development, but, if I am correct, it offers in miniature a version of the novel's major theme, the miraculous triumph of continuity over the threat of sudden, abrupt change. 9. A technique noticed by William Walsh: R.K. Narayan A Critical Appreciation (Heinemann, 1982), p. 156. 10. Compare Rosie in R.K. Narayan, The Guide (Heinemann, 1980): 'Why did she call herself Rosie?... She looked just the orthodox dancer that she was: Rosie implicates Raju in her vocation, just as Daisy implicates Raman in hers, with similar disruptive results. 11. An exactly similar bag is carried by Raju's uncle in The Guide. 12. At the beginning of the novel Raman prides himself on being a rationalist, a mocker of superstitious credulity. He reads promiscuously in Indian and Western literature. His contact with Daisy forces him to accept that his boast of rationalism is a mere posture. By the end of the novel he has given up the attempt to lay himself open both to Indian and Western culture, and has retreated into his Indianness. In other words, his new sense of the sublimity of minding one's own business is implicated with a larger cultural isolationism. 13. Shiva Naipaul, The Emergency and the Meteor', The Observer, 11 January 1981, pp.25-6. 14. Despite occasional liberal disclaimers, Naipaul seems on the whole to approve of the Emergency, largely because he understands it as a belated governmental recognition of the cultural crisis that his book is concerned to diagnose. The means by which he seeks to undermine his Western readers' prejudice against the exercise of totalitarian power are sometimes outrageous. The bulldozing of squatter settlements in Delhi is described as an example of urban renewal. Its opponents are represented by a middle-class woman who complains that domestic servants in Delhi are now hard to come by. Censorship of the Indian press is said to have improved its quality - by diverting its attention from trivial political quarrels to important social issues. 15. Walsh, R.K. Narayan A Critical Appreciation, p.88. 16. Naipaul characteristically presents himself as a moral rather than a political commentator, but the stance from which he looks at the world is rational, utilitarian, individualist, an attitude now associated with radical Toryism, but which in the nineteenth century was thought to be typical of liberalism. Naipaul and Narayan might, then, both be described as conservatives, but, if so, they are conservatives of very different, indeed incompatible, kinds.

198 Notes and References 6. INDIAN TRAINS 1. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1977), p.335. 2. The Cambridge History of India, ed. H.H. Dodwell vol. VI, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932), p.344. 3. Colonel Robert J. Blackham, Incomparable India Tradition; Superstition; Truth (Sampson Low, Marston, 1949), p292. 7. INDIAN FUGUES 1. V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (Penguin, 1979), pp.102-4. 2. See V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (Andre Deutsch, 1964), pp.205 and 209-16. 8. AN AREA OF DARKNESS 1. V.S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (Penguin, 1985), p.70. 2. Ibid, p. 69. 3. Naipaul, as one might expect, has a sympathetic understanding of the difficulty of autobiography for those who have been radically separated by a Westernised education from the culture into which they were born. See, for example, his account of the difficulties experienced by the Indonesian poet, Sitor, in his attempt to write an autobiography in Among the Believers (Penguin, 1982), pp. 286-96. 9. INDIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1. See Robert Payne: The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Bodley Head, 1969), p.234. 2. See V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (Andre Deutsch, 1964), pp.76-81. 3. A Royal Commission headed by Sir John Simon was appointed by the British Parliament in 1927 to investigate the workings of the 1920 Constitution for India, but its true purpose was, it was believed by the Indian Congress, to furnish evidence that could be used to justify the continuance of the Raj. 4. The five are Daddyji (1972), Mamaji (1979), Vedi (1982), The Ledge Between the Streams (1984), and Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986).

Notes and References 199 10. SEX IN THE INDIAN NOVEL 1. In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories (Penguin, 1981). 2. In the work of R.K. Narayan I can think of only one example of an inter-racial sexual relationship. In The Vendor of Sweets Jagan's son Mali returns from America with a Korean girlfriend. Jagan sees the two sitting together in the back seat of a car, their legs pressed together. He averts his eyes. So does Narayan. He has no interest in their relationship beyond a general sense of its unseemliness. Anita Desai is a friend of Ruth Jhabvala's, and has clearly been influenced by her, but this, Ruth Jhabvala's central theme, rarely catches her attention. Nayantara Sahgal is at least as interested in the relationship between the East and the West as any of the European novelists that I discuss. In Rich Like Us, Rosie, a rather unconvincingly imagined Cockney, becomes the second wife of Ram, an Indian businessman. But Nayantara Sahgal is uninterested in their sexual relationship. Her most recent novel, Plans for Departure, concerns the experience of a young Danish girl, Anna Hansen, in the months she spends in a small Indian hill station. For the European reader the most remarkable aspect of her experience of India is that she remains throughout this time entirely chaste. 3. Edward Said, Orientalism, (Penguin, 1985), p.203. Said is quoting Nietzsche. 4. In fact, and significantly, only half-indian. 5. J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday An Indian Journal (Penguin, 1983), p.273. 6. Forster's convention survives. In Andrew Harvey's One Last Mirror (Jonathan Cape, 1985), which is set in Ceylon, the English protagonist is a homosexual. Christopher Isherwood seems to think that the convention is firmly enough established to be played with. A Meeting by the River (Methuen, 1967), concerns an encounter in Bengal between two English brothers, one a film producer, the other about to become a Hindu monk. It is the film producer who has had an affair with an American called Peter. But the point is that his claims to take a sympathetic interest in his brother's religious beliefs and to be deeply in love with Peter are equally fraudulent. When his plane takes off from Calcutta, he retreats at once from Indian spirituality to Hollywood wheeler-dealing, and from Peter to the safe heterosexuality of his marriage. 7. The least expected exponent of this craft is Forster's Superintendent McBryde who is at one point reported by Mrs Callendar to be patrolling the bazaars of Chandra pore 'disguised as a Holy Man'. 8. In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Stronger Climate (Granada, 1983). 9. In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories (Penguin, 1981). 10. There are, of course, even in Ruth Jhabvala's novels, exceptions to

200 Notes and References this rule; notably the marriage between Judy and Bal in A Backward Place (Penguin, 1980), and the relationship between the narrator and Inder Lal in Heat and Dust (Futura, 1976). 11. THE HILL OF DEVI AND HEAT AND DUST 1. Ackerley discreetly alters the name of the state and its ruler to Chhokrapur. 2. On 21 December 1927, the Maharajah's son fled from Dewas and sought the protection of the Assistant Governor-General. He claimed that his father had been trying to poison him. Forster disbelieves the story, but there were bullet holes in the car in which the young man made his escape. 3. Forster recounts the anecdote in 'Notes on the English Character' in Abinger Harvest (Edward Arnold, 1936). 4. Malcolm Darling, Apprentice to Power India 1904-1908 (The Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 180. 5. Ibid, p. 242. 6. The text of the broadcast is given in The Hill of Devi and other Indian writings, ed. Elizabeth Heine (Edward Arnold, 1983), pp.237-40. 7. Darling, Apprentice to Power India 1904-1908, p.253. 8. Ibid, p. 131. 9. I find it significant that not long after Darling came to Dewas he wrote letters to the Times of India and the Tribune of Lahore protesting against the deportation to Burma of two anti-british agitators. The letters are honourable, but could only have been understood by Darling's fellow civil servants as a betrayal. His comment on the political agent responsible for Dewas is also illuminating: 'neither I nor H.H. had any doubts about Spence: we both felt at home with him from the start'. He seems to assume that he and the Maharajah had exactly the same requirements of a political agent. 10. Darling, Apprentice to Power India 1904-1908, p. 183. 11. In Heat and Dust the Nawab sometimes treats the English people that he despises with 'that exaggerated courtesy that Olivia had learned to recognize as his way of expressing contempt'. 12. The story is told by P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster A Life, vol. 2 (Secker and Warburg, 1978), pp.28-9. Furbank's conclusion is more cautious than my own: 'Whether a word was spoken to the Maharajah is not clear; if it was, it had no effect.' 13. The manuscript is published in Forster, The Hill of Devi and other Indian writings, pp.31o-14. 14. Typical, it seems, of Indian princes. Ackerley, speaking to the Maharajah of Chhatarpur's prime minister is told, 'You may be sure, for instance, that he knows very well that you are walking with Babaji Rao and me at this moment.'

Notes and References 201 12. A PASSAGE TO INDIA 1. In Forster's broadcast 'Three Countries'. See Forster, The Hill of De vi and other Indian writings, p.298. 2. See Malcolm Bradbury, 'Two Passages to India: Forster as Victorian and Modem' in Aspects of E.M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Edward Arnold, 1969), pp.123-42 3. See Gillian Beer, 'Negation in A Passage to India', Essays in Criticism, vol. XXX (1969), pp.44-58

Index Ackerley, J.R., 152-3, 159-169 passim, 175 Anand, Mulk, Raj, 86, 197 Beer, Gillian, 188 Blackham, Colonel Robert J., 81 Bose, Sub has Chandra, 63-4, 188 Bradbury, Malcolm, 187 Cambridge History of India, 79 Chatterji, Bankim Chandra, 5, 139 Chaudhuri, Nirad, 2, 86, 119, 135-41, 195 Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 135-41 The Continent of Circe, 86, 195 Hinduism, 119 Connolly, Cyril, 179 Conrad, Joseph, 71 Dalhousie, Lord, 75 Darling, Malcolm, 161-75, passim Desai, Anita, 45-58, 73, 87, 105, 199 Clear Light of Day, 52-5, 57 Fire on the Mountain, 48-52, 57, 105 In Custody, 55-8 The Village by the Sea, 45-8, 57 'Pigeons at Daybreak', 46, 57 Dickens, Charles, 37, 55, 110 Dyer, General, 131 Einstein, Albert, 117 Eliot, George, 55 Eliot, T.S., 55 Firbank, Ronald, 32 Furbank, P.N., 200 Forster, E.M., 2, 4, 46, 85, 98, 147, 152-4, 157-9, 161-94, 199 The Hill of Devi, 161-76 A Passage to India, 4, 85, 147, 152-4, 157-9, 166, 173-4, 177-94, 199 Gandhi, Indira, 8, 9, 14, 67, 76 Gandhi, M.K. (Mahatma), 1, 67-74 passim, 80-8 passim, 93, 118-27, 127-135 passim, 145 An Autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 118-27, 145 Gandhi, Sanjay, 67, 71 Ghosh, Makunda Lal, see Yogananda, Swami Gibbon, Edward, 136 Glendinning, Victoria, 45 Gokhale, G.K., 80, 82 Grass, Gunther, 5 Greene, Graham, 32 Harvey, Andrew, 199 Hesse, Hermann, 88 Indian National Army, 63, 194 Indian News, 75 Illustrated Weekly of India, 198 Iqbal, Muhammad, 55 Isherwood, Christopher, 199 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 2, 8, 34-45, 81-3,87,89-91,98-101 passim, 105, 147, 150-63 passim, 174-6 A Backward Place, 41, 42-3, 83, 155 Esmond In India, 38, 41, 147, 150-2, 156-7 Get Ready for Battle, 81-2 Heat and Dust, 35-7, 39, 89-91, 98-101, 105, 147, 153, 161-3, 174-6 The Householder, 41 In Search of Love and Beauty, 34-5, 40 'A Course of English Studies', 155 'An Experience of India', 147, 158-60 The Housewife', 40 202

Index 203 'In a Great Man's House', 40 'Myself in India', 34-44 passim 'Rose Petals', 38 'Suffering Women', 43-4 'A Young Man of Good Family', 39, 155 Jinnah, M.A., 195 Kaye, M.M., 148-57 passim The Far Pavilions, 148-53, 155-7 Khanna, Balraj, 18-33 Nation of Fools, 18-25, 28, 33 Kipling, Rudyard, 2, 4-17, 73-4, 105, 145-6, 153 Kim, 4-17, 74, 105 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes', 13-14 Le Corbusier, Pierre, 19-20 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 5 Marx, Karl, 68, 79 Mehta, Gita, 118 Mehta, Ved, 2, 78-9, 141-5 Mommsen, Theodor, 136 Myers, L.H., 88 Naipaul, Shiva, 71 Naipaul, V.S., 2, 23, 59-61, 69, 72-97, 99-100, 102-13, 126, 197, 198 Among the Believers, 198 An Area of Darkness, 99-100, 102-13, 126 Finding the Centre, 103, 112 India A Wounded Civilization, 59-61, 69, 97, 197 Narayan, RK., 2, 24-33, 55, 59-74, 77-8, 84-5, 91-6, 101-2, 197, 199 The Bachelor of Arts, 91-6, 100-1 The English Teacher, 55 The Guide, 67, 70, 77 The Man-Eater of Malgudi, 24-33 Mr Sampath, The Printer of Malgudi, 59-61 My Days, 77 The Painter of Signs, 61, 66-73 Swami and Friends, 77-8 A Tiger for Malgudi, 59 The Vendor of Sweets, 60-1, 93-6, 101-2, 199 Waiting for the Mahatma, 61-8, 84-5, 94 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 4, 19-20, 28-9, 81, 86-7, 127-35, 145 An Autobiography, 127-35 Nehru, Motilal, 128-31 Payne, Robert, 198 Premchand, 5 Pym, Barbara, 57 Roy, Rammohun, 139 Ray, Satyajit, 75-6, 85 Rushdie, Salman, 4-17, 22-4, 45, 52, 73, 136, 196 Midnight's Children, 4-17, 22-4, 45, 52, 136, 196 Sahgal, Nayantara, 199 Said, Edward, 147, 166 Scott, Paul, 84, 87, 147, 153-5, 158 The Raj Quartet, 84, 147, 153-5, 158 Staying On, 87 Simon, Sir John, 128, 198 Singh, Khushwant, 84 Spark, Muriel, 52 Stokes, Doris, 114 Tagore, Rabindranath, 32, 139 Trollope, Anthony, 55 Vivekananda, Swami, 119-20, 139 Walsh, William, 72, 197 Wilson, Angus, 195 Wodehouse, P.G., 32 Yogananda, Swami, 114-20, 131, 145 Autobiography of a Yogi, 114-20