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India will always have a particular claim on the attentions of
the Western world. Among other things it is, as Ved Mehta remarks
in the concluding pages of his Portrait
of India, “a country where today one-sixth of the
world’s people and one-half of the world’s democratic
people live.” The largest nation in the Third World, up to
now it has been surprisingly unaffected by Maoist doctrines and
practices, except in regions of peculiar social tension like Kerala
and Bengal. An intensely traditional land, it contains the world’s
greatest reservoir of unrelieved destitution, yet more than any
other region preserves a village-dominated, as opposed to a city-dominated,
society.
Its features, in short, are cause for both hope and despair,
and it is hard for either an Indian or a foreigner to write of
the country without passion and commitment. To temper these emotions
so that perception remains true and judgement balanced is the
most difficult task of all, and because he has succeeded in this
I find Ved Mehta’s Portrait
of India one of the best books on the subject to appear
in recent years. I compare its tone with Arthur Koestler’s
fastidious repulsion, with Ronald Segal’s deliberately shocking
sensationalism, with the horror that haunted V. S. Naipaul when
he returned to the land of his ancestors, and I find in Mehta’s
mingling of compassion, knowledge and perception, in his cool
but relentlessly honest tone, an image of India far closer to
the one I carry in my own mind and memory after many returns there.
Portrait of India,
however, is not in strict terms a travel book. A collection of
New Yorker pieces Mehta wrote after a visit to India,
the impressions of things seen and experienced are, in the New
Yorker manner, blended with historical and other background information
intended to give depth to the reader’s view. The author traveled
over most of the land, from the little dependent kingdoms of Sikkim
and Nepal in the north down to Cape Comorin in the far south,
and visited all the problem areas of the 1960s from Kashmir to
Kerala.
Anyone who has read Mehta’s earlier and much slighter volumes,
Face to Face and Walking the Indian Streets, will be aware of
his peculiar relationship to his country of origin. Born in Lahore,
which is now Pakistani, his family suffered the upheaval of emigration
at the time of Partition, when he was in his early teens. At the
age of is, he came to the United States, where he spent three
years at a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, continuing his education
afterward at Pomona College, overseas at Oxford, and finally at
Harvard. For the last 10 years, Mehta has been on the staff of
The New Yorker.
His life has made him very much a man of two worlds. He knows
at least some Indian languages, and therefore can travel on the
subcontinent with a protective coloring that no European, and
not even a Trinidadian Indian like Naipaul, can assume. At the
same time, though, Mehta sees it all from the outside; no longer
tied to the world of his childhood, he observes it with a detachment
no writer still situated in India could achieve. Thus his judgment
is unclouded by the rather hysterical false patriotism that at
times can dim even the clearest Indian vision, and he is able
to see through the smoke screens created by that special vice
the Indians have shared so abundantly with their British conquerors:
hypocrisy.
Not that the eye he sees with is one of cold detachment; there
are times when the reader is aware of an extraordinary intuitive
understanding of some aspect of Indian life that otherwise seems
completely alien either to Mehta’s own personality or to
the Western way of existence he has elected. For example, when
he attends the great mela (festival) at Allahabad, the mass ceremonial
bathing in the waters of the Ganges, he perceives what motivates
the naked Indian sadhus (holy men) with a far clearer apprehension
than the naive Western occultists who go there imagining that
they are really participating in the ancient mysteries of the
East.
Indeed, Portrait of India
is not only one of the most honest works written about the country
in recent years, it is also something very different—a formidably
true book that employs a unique perception, without sensation
or bias of any kind. And to its informational value one must add
the quality of the prose. India has produced a number of excellent
practitioners of literary English, such as R. K. Narayan, Nirad
Chaudhuri and Bhalachandra Rajan. Mehta equals the best of them,
and in his latest volume he writes at the top of his form.
In arranging the book, Mehta does not use the journal method,
or the chronological approach of the ordinary travel book writer.
The needs of the New Yorker dictated a basically episodic structure,
which the author adapted in a quite skillful way to organize his
material thematically, and so take his readers on a compelling
journey from light toward darkness.
It is through the sublimities of art that we first enter the
Indian world, in a series of brilliant chapters on music and dancing.
From art, with its own relentless logicalities, we proceed to
the stranger world of Indian religion, so far in the sky, so deep
in the earth. There is the masterly description of the mela at
Allahabad, with its jolly hemp-sodden naked sadhus, and in the
center the merry Maharishi, dispensing wisdom for money-makers:
“I taught my simple method of meditation to a German cement
manufacturer. He taught the method to all his employees and thereby
quadrupled the production of cement.”
In India, the most Western-seeming politicians regularly consult
their astrologers, and horoscopes are indispensable preludes to
marriage; clearly, the barriers between politics and the great
amorphous realm of religion and pseudoreligion are very flimsy.
It is appropriate, then, that from the devoted throngs at Allahabad
the author should take us to Kashmir, ripe with the troubles that
were created; by “The Theft of Mohammed’s Hair”
in 1963. This curious incident of religious desecration set off
communal riots in other parts of India and led eventually to the
miniwar of 1965 between India and Pakistan. From here, Mehta guides
us to the international field, going back a few years to the fantastic
days of 1962 when the Chinese poured down out of Tibet onto the
edges of the Assam plains.
Mehta knew the right people to get him permits into the normally
forbidden sensitive border regions of NEFA (Northeast Frontier
Agency), Sikkim, and Ladakh. He went to remote military outposts,
saw rebel Naga leaders, and called on the breathless American
queen of Sikkim. He tripped rather superficially through Nepal
as well, and met the Dalai Lama for one of those highly informal
audiences that leave most visitors with an impression of slightly
nervous good humor.
It is in these chapters that one realizes how far Mehta has
in fact drifted from his background; I have come across no Indian
journalist—not even the formidable Frank Moraes— who
looks upon Indian government policy with quite so sharp an eye
for the specious. On Kashmir, for instance, he scrupulously presents
all the views that were presented to him. But the picture that
finally emerges is one of disingenuousness on the part of India’s
rulers, who deliberately went back on their promise to hold a
referendum to test local opinion and have made no attempt to devise
any real program of self-determination for the Kashmiri people.
The Kashmir question was the first of many tests in which the
Indian leaders’ sincerity was found wanting; even Gandhi
failed here.
Then there are the invasion of Goa, such anomalies as the imperial
attitude India still maintains toward Sikkim, and the insistence
in Delhi on holding on to the McMahon Line, the IndoTibetan border
so dubiously defended by the British. Although Mehta is ready
to hear every side, he never fails to point out what has always
impressed—and depressed—observant travelers to the sub-continent:
the contrast between the high moral tone Indian leaders, in imitation
of Gandhi, give to their utterances, and the low morals of ordinary
politics that often characterize their actions.
The situation, of course, is not as simple as I may appear to
suggest. We notice the defects of Indian leaders precisely because
Gandhi and Nehru were so censorious in their criticism of the
leaders of other countries. Moreover, much of what seems perfidious
to the outsider is nothing of the kind; it is, rather, the reactions
of politicians bred in a tradition where face must be saved. Finding
themselves confronted by situations that are insoluble either
absolutely or in terms of the higher politics the Congress party
once aspired to, they take refuge in lofty phrases and expedient
actions.
There are many illustrations of this mental process at work
in the second part of Portrait
of India, where Mehta takes us to the dark and shadowy
regions of Indian life: to the horrors of Calcutta, a dying city
(its harbor is silting up) filled with dying people, and the lesser
but more flamboyant miseries of Bombay; to the rampant overpopulation
of Kerala, and the endemic famine in Orissa and Bihar.
The Indians tend to point to the numerous famines under British
rule and boast that catastrophes of this kind no longer take place.
But as Mehta notes, it is mainly a matter of terminology: While
the British proclaimed a famine when there was evidence that one
person had actually died of starvation, the Indians talk of such
conditions as merely “food shortages.” This is not altogether
a matter of hypocrisy; it is also a defensive posture on the part
of politicians, who fear the panic that will follow if they admit
the truth. They are still prisoners of the fact that they built
their political careers on pretensions of having saved their land
from the suffering under the British.
But there are more powerful reasons for the decline of the Congress
party in recent years. Some unscrupulous politicians have used
it to grow rich through lesser forms of corruption (mere bribery),
and to profit from the sheer misery of he people. Mehta draws
this aspect of his theme into sharp relief when he takes us down
to the “cages” of Bombay, those appalling dens where
the cheapest of prostitutes trade their bodies for a few annas
a jump. The superpimps of Bombay are still as they were when I
first visited he city a decade ago—a gang of powerful Congress
politicians who have successfully prevented any genuine cleaning
up of the abuses that enable them to prosper.
The politicians cannot be blamed entirely for the country’s
condition, though, for too often they simply echo the urges of
their constituents. India is—and every page of Mehta’s
account underlines this reality—an intensely conservative
land. It rejects nothing, regards nothing as obsolete, and preserves
everything: from the British bureaucracy which served in the past
but now is hopelessly outdated, to the caste system laid down
before the Christian era in the Laws of Mani. Mehta actually found
new industrial towns laid out in such a way that untouchables
would live apart from the rest of he community, in mat huts appro-priate
to their social standing.
Portrait of India
ends on a positive note, but one with an ironic twist, for in
the final chapters Mehta tells of his search for the remnants
of Gandhi’s heritage. He finds it in the movement for village
communities Jayaprakash Narayan inherited from Vinoba Bhave. Here,
certainly, the pure spirit of the early Congress party survives,
supported by few thousand idealists, and bringing improvement
to the lives of a few hundred fortunate villages. Once Jayaprakash
Narayan was seriously considered as a possible heir to Nehru.
Now he is in his late 60s, far out of the running, and his venture
seems a forlorn hope in view of the mass of Indian misery.
Nevertheless, India may be the one place where a revolution
in life at the village level might eventually succeed, and in
the process create a new model of society. Long odds indeed, but
in India all the favorites have already run and been beaten. There
is no Western panacea that can solve the country’s problems;
of that one becomes more convinced than ever on reading Portrait
of India. Perhaps, in the end, Gandhi will be vindicated,
and India will save itself by using intelligently its greatest
resource—the peasantry.
When a study is generally as perceptive as Portrait
of India, one feels disinclined to point out its minor
flaws. Yet Mehta has on the whole done such good work in his historical
research, and has provided his book with so rich a background,
that I feel it almost a debt to point out that in two areas where
I have a special knowledge—Kerala and the northern Buddhist
fringe territories—there are some errors which should be
amended.
His account of the Christian sects of Kerala is very inaccurate;
he must have been informed entirely by Catholics, since he underestimates
the importance of the Syrian church, and did not even go to Kottayam,
the center of Keralan Christianity and the seat of the Catholicos
of the East. He claims, quite inaccurately, that the main religion
of Bhutan is the shamanistic cult of Bon, when in fact it is unreformed
Red Hat Lamaist Buddhism, with the Nyingmapa sect very powerful.
Finally, Mehta asserts that the Chogyal of Sikkim is the incarnation
of the Karmapa Lama; the present incarnation of the Karmapa Lama,
however, is the incumbent Karmapa Lama, a monk who is the highest
Buddhist dignitary in Sikkim.
But Tibetan Buddhists and Syrian Christians belong on the peripheries
of India. I have been unable to find any error of fact—or
for that matter, any important distortion of judgment—when
Mehta deals with the mainstream of Indian tradition and contemporary
life. For the traveler who intends to visit the country for the
first time, his new book is excellent preliminary reading.
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