The Sick Man of Asia

In order to construct this vast panorama, Mr Ved Mehta interviewed hundreds of people not only in all the Indian States, but in Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, which until recently was as inaccessible as Tibet. His book can be commended to all readers interested in its subject, including the Indians: it is no less informative than provoking. A Hindu from the Punjab, he left his happy home at the age of fifteen to study for over eleven years in the United States and at Balliol. Since then he has returned to India at least three times, but I think only as a visitor.

He seems to me entirely Western in his opinions, values and beliefs. I refuse to call him sophisticated – an odious term which until recently always meant “adulterated” or “falsified” (although now used by advertisers to praise their products and even their customers); but his book displays the uncommon abilities required by those who write for The New Yorker,the staff of which he joined on completion of his studies. That is to say that he is well-read, widely informed, brimming with curiosity; and a lucid narrator skilled in the choice of telling details.

What inevitably overwhelmed him on his visits to India was the poverty, constant and inescapable, that assailed him at every turn – the destitute in rags or almost naked, with no protection from sun, wind or rain, no place to rest, bodies thin as lines, children with the faces of the old, the old with the faces of children. The illiteracy, the lack of elementary hygiene (smallpox, cholera and plague are all of them endemic in Calcutta), the superstition, the cruelty of the caste system, the racial, religious and linguistic feuds – the survival of all these ancient evils is due to poverty, which in turn is caused chiefly by over-population, the death-rate, high as it is, being lower than the birth-rate.

The alternating droughts and floods that bring famine present an enormous problem. Even worse is the fatalism with which the poor and the rich alike usually accept the prevailing destitution, Hinduism being largely to blame. It teaches that every misfortune, including leprosy, blindness and starvation, is a punishment for sins committed in a previous incarnation. The Muslims and the Sikhs, however are also widely superstitious.

Six of Mohammed’s hairs are venerated by his followers in Kashmir; and when one of them was stolen in 1963, all shops and offices had to shut for eleven days, while the mob tried to burn alive a magistrate and a superintendent of police. Violence spread to Bengal, a thousand miles away. Then the hair mysteriously reappeared. Kashmir treasures also a Muslim fakir, a glimpse of whom is as highly prized as by the faithful as a glimpse at one of the hairs. He recited the names of all his ancestors from the Prophet onwards when he accorded an audience to Mr Mehta. The Sikhs indulge a similar passion for relics; and we can perhaps understand modern India better if we study our own Middle Ages, when monks sought merit by stealing holy bones from rival sanctuaries.

This book throws light upon almost all the current issues in India, including the Chinese frontiers in Ladakh and the North-East, the resistance of the Nagas and other tribesmen to absorption, the hostility in Kashmir between Muslims and Hindus (who got on quite easily in the bad old days of the Raj), and hundreds of matters I have no space to mention. Mr Mehta was duly impressed by the great Bhilai steel works constructed by Soviet engineers in the huge, backward State of Madhya Pradesh. Yet the Americans, he points out, have given far more aid; and he wonders whether the improvement of agriculture is not more urgent than industrialisation. He particularly admired in Calcutta the Missionaries of Charity, and Order of Nuns who run schools, orphanages, clinics for lepers and homes for men and women found dying in the streets – over half of whom recover. He enjoyed also the charm and the culture of the Bengalis. Otherwise he came across little that he could commend.

The highly educated being far fewer in India than here, the semi-educated are far more conspicuous. One can sympathize with Mr Mehta’s distaste for their ignorance, and smugness that no more than three per cent of his compatriots speak English, but the other day I read a letter about the quarrel with the BBC, which offered the grotesque estimate of 40 per cent. Indian English, moreover, is changing into a number of new languages, rather as Latin did into the various Romance languages.

The great trouble I found on both my visits to India was the difficulty of discovering quite simple facts. Hardly anything is simple. Mr Mehta interviewed a Hindu prince, and also the guru he had chosen, a Muslim who worships the goddess Devi, and says that his age is one hundred and twenty-six. In Cochin the few hundred Jews who remain are rigidly divided into three communities. The millions of Christians in the South are even more divided. Protestants, Syro-Chaldaic or Malabar Jacobites, and the Papists separated into three overlapping dioceses, each with its own archbishop and liturgy.

Again, take Benares. The Hindu pilgrims devoutly drink the Ganges water in which they bathe tight-packed. If you go in a boat to midstream, you not only see but smell floating, putrefying bodies done up in sackcloth. (They have been thrown into the river by people who cannot afford the firewood with which to burn their dead.) The water destroys all bacteria, and also rapidly dissolves the bones of any corpse or carcass – such at any rate is the story told to me in Benares, and more recently to Mr Mehta, is this just nonsense, or does the Ganges contain some antiseptic element, other than its holiness? I failed to discover and probably Mr Mehta did not even ask.

Similarly, Maharshi Mahesh said to him: “Through this method of meditation, the poor can become as rich as the rich and the rich can become richer.” The incongruities found in Benares can be amusing as well as exasperating. Mr Mehta reports what was said to him, usually without any censorious comment. Even so, his book seems likely to vex the Indian Government, which as we know, is at the moment all the more touchy because its situation is precarious.

In his delightful and moving early memoirs, “Face to Face,” (Harper Collins), Mr Mehta told us about the total blindness with which he has been afflicted since the age of three. His later books describe (sometimes incorrectly) the looks of people, their clothing and their furniture as if he could see them, not wishing us to make allowances for his infirmity. I must, however, mention it because what I enjoyed most about India (apart from the friends I made there) was what is hidden from him – the beauty of the landscapes, the inhabitants, their traditional attire and their architecture. Sighseers will therefore find India far more delightful than they could guess from this delightfully wise and instructive book.