Book
Review
Mofussil
Junction: Indian Encounters 1977-2012 by Ian Jack (Penguin/
Viking, 2013, 323 pages, Rs 599. ISBN 978-0-670-08644-3)
For the past decade or so, the ‘India story’ has
become the flavour of the season with writers and publishers. An expanding
economy, a burgeoning middle class hungry for gizmos and consumer goods, the IT
industry and Bollywood have captivated the imagination of the reading classes.
It wasn’t always like that. After the glamour of the
Raj wore off, India was relegated to the Third World league—not quite the hell
hole of some sub-Saharan country but a land that could, at best, have an
association with romanticised poverty. For Western diplomats, India was
undeniably a hardship posting; and for the foreign correspondent it meant
schmoozing the features editor to get yet another story on the last memsahib in
Ooty or the train to Darjeeling on page 14 of the Sunday paper. India was
exotic in a distant sort of way, but it wasn’t sexy—at least not until the
hippies, backpackers and gap year do-gooders made it so. “I am delighted”,
Daniel Patrick Moniyan, the departing US Ambassador, remarked with undiplomatic
candour, “to be departing a country whose principal export is communicable
export.”
India was a niche interest that attracted a small
clutch of writers who were taken over by it. There was Mark Tully who had
turned native; there was V.S. Naipaul who came in search of his roots and
offended the mother country by suggesting that Indians defecate everywhere; and
there was Ian Jack, yet another Scot who fell in love with India, an Indian and
its functioning anarchy.
As Ramchandra Guha, my contemporary at St Stephen’s
College, writes in his introduction to Mofussil Junction, we first met Jack in
our impressionable years and we are still reading him. The reason is simple:
Jack is both an insider and outsider. He can write with ease and feeling about
the railway journeys, the minute differences between the metre and broad gauge,
the graveyard of river steamers in Balagarh and the decaying Anglo-Indians of
McCluskiegunge—subjects that still interest the Home Counties. At the same
time, he can draw evocative pen portraits of India’s lovable eccentrics and
even venture (with less success) into the infuriatingly complex world of Indian
politics.
Where Jack stands apart from the tribe of media
paratroopers who descend on the Gangetic plains to be overwhelmed by the latest
Kumbh Mela is his ability to link the present with the past. The tale of the
Anglo-Indian settlement goes beyond impressions and amusing conversations with
deeply colour-conscious biddies: the story is considerably enriched with a
sketch of Sir Henry Gidney, “the most powerful politician and lobbyist the
Anglo-Indian community ever produced”.
“Gidney”, writes Jack in an essay first published in
February 1991, “was a military surgeon, another son of an Irish railwayman and
another dandy. With spats and a monocle and an orchid in his buttonhole, he
would take to the dance floors of Indian clubs and hotels and there present his
audience with what his biographer described as ‘a fascinating example of the
Argentinian tango’. Womanizing made him notorioud—there were jokes about his
ever-changing series of companions, always described by Gidney as ‘my nursing
sister’—but, as Gidney was fond of pointing out, ‘God never intended one’s
wedding bells to be one’s funeral bells.’”
Jack is at his people describing and assessing
people. An encounter with Nirad Chaudhury, once described as the “last
Englishman” is impish in tone: “He has never managed to conceal his delight in
learning or in himself. Step inside his house and you risk perpetual
bombardment by heavy cultural artillery: salvos of grand opera on the
gramophone, followed by readings from Ronsard and Pascal, interspersed with
light machine-gun fire in the shape of recitations of the best years for
claret, or the highlights of the Peninsular Campaign, sometimes (an odd finale)
the songs of Johnny Cash”.
Jack is both impressed and bewildered by this
Victorian and Edwardian oddity from Bengal in the heart of Thatcherite Britain.
He can’t resist a parting shot: “His ego’s route to the next world must lie in
the promising, but treacherous eye of the setting sun.”
Nirad Chaudhury, a legendary show-off, never failed
to generate great copy—and I say this from personal experience. But the
Mehtas--Sonny the iconic publisher and his wife Gita, the archetypal cosmopolitan—are
more challenging to profile. Jack does
it with exemplary craftsmanship, something that distinguishes him from the
run-of-the-mill hack.
Sonny, a self-confessed “sybarite” whose “idea of
outdoor activity is watching an international cricket match, preferably played
between England and India”, is a man of few words: “Sonny listens to his
guests, Gita talks to them.” Rather than being underwhelmed by his “laconic”
and self-effacing conversation, decorated with period features (‘kind of… sort
of’) or being overwhelmed by the ready wit and vivaciousness of Gita—the author
of Karma Cola, a demolition job of the starry-eyed, guru-loving, post-Woodstock,
India-lover—Jack locates the couple in a context: “The first thing that strikes
strangers about (Sonny) is that he comes not so much from a country, India, as
an international time zone where the clocks stopped in 1968.”
Then he places the Mehtas in the context of a
quasi-Bloomsbury setting in Belgravia and Manhattan: “Neither Mehta nor his
wife drives. They are at home in taxis and restaurants, flicking cigarette
lighters and keeping yawning waiters from a good night’s sleep. A friend who
has known him for twenty-five years, since they were both students at Cambridge
University, remembers him for his ‘enormous langour’…’Laid-back’ is a word
that, sooner or later, is bound to crop up in any conversation about Mehta.
“Reptilian’ is another; several friends have compared him to a lizard, asleep
and not yet asleep on a rock.”
Jack has the great ability to re-create an ambience.
But he is at his most penetrating best when blending a romantic past with a
grim present. The long essay on Serampur, the former Danish settlement on the
banks of the Hoogly river is, by any reckoning, an absolute masterpiece in
prose. In painting a portrait of William Carey, the impoverished shoemaker from
the Midlands who came to Bengal to spread the gospel and rescue heathen souls
from eternal damnation, Jack ties in the story of Mr Tiwari, a
second-generation Christian convert, who teaches theology at Serampur College,
a venerable institution that has seen better days. Juxtaposed between the
fascinating life of Carey and the existential dilemmas of Tiwari and his
father, a retired professor who was an unlikely Brahmin convert, Jack tells the
troubled story of Christianity in India.
The younger Tiwari had mentioned that the new breed
of theology students, many of them tribals from Assam and Jharkhand, had no
interest in learning Sanskrit—“They identified it as the language of caste
oppression. They hated it…”; they wanted dollops of certitude. “That was how
Christians had come unstuck in India, he said. They had paid no attention to
etiquette, to the rules of Hindu society. They had clumped into houses in their
buckled leather shoes, attacked pieces of meat with knives and forks, sweated,
not washed enough, talked too much and too confidently, baptized anyone who
asked to be baptized…The result had been that intellectual, exclusive Brahmin
India disdained them: they had succeeded mainly among the lower castes and
tribes, and that limited success had only made their work among the higher
castes.”
This was, of course, a partial view but, as Jack
observed, Christianity could never circumvent caste: “But caste and religious
belief, social position and the individual spirit, these are different things
and to change one does not necessarily, or in India even usually, alter the
other; just as class differences in England would not be resolved by issuing
the poor Old Etonian ties. If you collect sewage for a living and become a
Christian you do not stop collecting sewage: all that happens is that you become
a Christian sewage-collector.”
This distrust of radical change, of sharp ruptures,
permeates through nearly all the essays of this collection. Jack is fascinated
by the old-world eccentricities of a R.P. Gupta in Calcutta, the measured
Anglophilia of G.D. Birla and the reclusive intellectualism of Sham Lal who, in
today’s world, would probably have been drummed out of journalism. He looks
back with nostalgia at a time when Indians travelled great distances on train
and struck up short-lived friendship as they unrolled the bedding. And he is
distrustful of a new age where shopping malls and cheap flights rule the roost.
Most of all, Jack mourns the passing of India’s post-Independence innocence
built on endemic shortages. Read these essays if you seek to rediscover that
lost world.
----Swapan Dasgupta
BIBILIO, July 2013
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