The Golden Oriole

...More than one spy, as Trevelyan relates, met a bad end among the confusing jumble of tribes, with their conflicting allegiances, intertribal warfare, and distrust of outsiders...

...In search of Charles Trevelyan and Thomas Macaulay, Raleigh Trevelyan journeyed through the Punjab and to Bengal, to Delhi, Cawnpore, and Calcutta, " 'that city of palaces,' of porticoes, colonnades, piazzas, palms, and banyans, described by Bishop Heber as smelling like a greenhouse" (this before Mother Teresa's time...

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...But he never could shake his youthful memories of India, where, as Lowell Thomas wrote of Rudyard Kipling, "it was as an Anglo-Indian child that he grew up, surrounded by adoring ayahs, white-robed khitmatgars, hamals, bhistis and the rest of the innumerable native servants that make up a Sahib's household...

...And through those observations India itself speaks...

...N ow that the worship of Demon Colonialism has fallen out of fashion, people sometimes forget that the dirty imp affected its acolytes as strongly, sometimes as harshly, as it did those oppressed by them...

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...but as it grew it crept outside the cradle of the merely mercantile and began to look at India as a proving ground for the qualities it most admired: honor, sportsmanship, duty, self-sacrifice...

...First captain of the garrison of the penal colony at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, Walter and family were subsequently transferred to Gilgit in the province of Kashmir, near the Karkoram mountain range "where three empires meet...

...The nastiness of Cawnpore is brought out through letters written by its victims and by relatives who visited the site soon after the massacres...

...Trevelyan's father, Walter, a dutiful if drab husband, father, and officer, typified the military man of the British Empire's twilight in India...

...They did, however, engage in active pursuits so idealized by the ethos of the Raj...

...the country forms the medium in which the tesserae of Trevelyan's researches and journeysare set...

...If their interest in India had been based only on pecuniary greed, the British would not still be endeavoring to reconcile themselves with their subcontinental past...

...IN 46250 the existing connection, between the two such distant countries as England and India, cannot, in the nature of things be permanent . . . whether we govern India ten or a thousand years, we will do our duty by it...

...Take one of the most emotional case histories: that of the British in India...

...Although this sort of paternalism doesn't go over well nowadays, Trevelyan agrees that India brought out in many of its British overlords a sense of higher instincts...

...But, he added, if you must meet him on the ground, "face him like a Briton...

...There had also been a degree of selflessness among a great many who had served in India and given their lives to it...

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...And so R. C. Trevelyan: the Taj "far exceeded everything I thought possible...

...Ringed by the Himalayas, those "barren grey-ribbed mountains with violet shadows," the Trevelyans inhabited a dun-colored bungalow in a community that numbered nineteen Europeans and three pianos (one of them a baby grand...

...Trevelyan would probably not appreciate the comparison to KipJennifer Howard is an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books...

...Price Amount Hardcover $26.00 Paperback 9.50 Subtotal Indiana residents add 5% sales tax Total ^ Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...

...After serving in Italy in World War II (experiences that formed the basis for two previous books, The Fortress and Rome 44), Trevelyan embarked on a career in publishing...

...George Ir...

...Washington must now be acknowledged as a man of considerable political insight...

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...Forrest McDonald, L'niversitv of .1labarna "Professor Allen is to be congratulated for bringing together in a single volume those writings that reflect Washington's role in and contributions to the birth of our republic...

...And so Charles,writing to George Otto of his mother's reaction: "Mamma has had to confess that there is a beautiful thing in India—the Taj...

...Nevertheless, The Golden Oriole does not attempt to sidestep some of the messiest puddles in the large field of Britain's association with India...

...By governing well, and promoting to the utmost of our power the growth of wealth, intelligence and enterprise in its vast population, we shall be able to make India a source of wealth and strength, with which nothing in our past history furnishes any parallel...

...It had not all been hypocrisy, exploitation, lust and plunder," he writes...

...The result: autobiography and family history layered into essays on "what it was like to have lived in India at different times," with the physical India framing the whole adventure...

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...one hopes that it did not belong to Hindus...

...Like malaria, India has gotten into their blood, and periodic recurrences of this fever appear as films (Gandhi), TV series ("Jewel in the Crown"), and, naturally, books, The Golden Oriole being among the latest in a long line of titles given over to the subject...

...Seeking as they did to impose Western ideals on a non-Western population, Trevelyan and Macaulay inevitably came into conflict with the "Orientalists," who believed that the British should not try to improve the Indians' condition but instead increase the natives' awareness of their own glorious past...

...Taking a step back from The Golden Oriole's mosaic, one sees in it an image of the British as most quintessentially themselves when they held India, an impression captured in an anecdote of tiger shooting...

...Its author, Raleigh Trevelyan, was born in India (the Andaman Islands, to be precise) in 1923, making him a member of one of the last generations to grow up under the Raj--J-`a tribe," as he puts it, "that is becoming extinct...

...He also tracked-down the Trevelyan clan members who had preceded him in India, notably Charles Trevelyan, an administrator and reformer in the mid-nineteenthcentury British Civil Service, and Thomas Macaulay, best known as a writer of histories but also a high-ranking member of the British Civil Service and Charles's brother-in-law as well...

...So at Agra, Raleigh Trevelyan writes: "No photograph, no model, no watercolour by a zitella [spinster] can prepare one for the real thing...

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...He shot a domestic cow by mistake...

...Through his selections and organization, he reveals salient dimensions of Washington's status as 'father' of our country often ignored by contemporary scholars...

...In preparation for this journey, Trevelyan began to read accounts and memoirs of the Raj and "was struck by their intensity of feeling, something that is hardly to be found from other outposts of Empire...

...At the age of eight he went to school in England, and though he returned to India for the occasional family visit, he never lived in the country again...

...In some cases they took a dismissive view of Indian culture, as witness Macaulay's statement that he had "never found one among them [the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia...

...A strenuous, if not demanding, life...

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...Charles, for instance, wrote in On the Education of the People of India thatbook to slice through past and present simultaneously...

...Contrary to reputation, the Iritish in such "outposts" did not dress for dinner...

...To the south, in the more settled provinces that housed the heart of the British Administration, perils tended toward the bureaucratic (with deadly exceptions such as the Great Mutiny of 1857...

...British-instigated violence gets equal time, as when the accounts of family friends are quoted to evoke the horror of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, when British-led troops opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Sikhs gathered to visit the Golden Temple...

...T revelyan begins, logically enough, with his parents and their lives in the Gilgit Agency, part of the North-West Frontier Province then, and now part of Pakistan...

...Printed throughout in two colors with 15 illustrations...

...Discussing the frontier, Trevelyan notes the vigilance that was required of nineteenth-century Political Agents during the days of the most byzantine moves in the Great Game: the Anglo-Russian competition for suzerainty in the North-West Frontier Province...

...the British, they thought, were there not for personal profit but for the betterment of the native population...

...George Otto's son R. C. Trevelyan the poet, who traveled with E. M. Forster on the author's first trip to India in 1912...

...Here Walter served, under the curious "Agency" arrangement that the British had in areas that were technically still independent dominions, as Military Advisor to both the native government and the British Political Agent, an official supposed to keep an eye on the tribal goings-on in the sometimes restless frontier area...

...Trevelyan passes no judgment on the Raj...

...Charles, the son of an Evangelical Somerset clergyman, and Macaulay, the son of the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay and also brought up an ardent Evangelical, keenly felt a Christian duty toward India...

...It was not, then, simply a case of milking the sacred cow until the udder ran dry...

...Some ten Trevelyan kinsmen died in the bloody massacres at Cawnpore during the Great Mutiny of 1857, when enlisted Sepoys fired first on their British officers and then turned the sword on the wives and children of those officers...

...Nonetheless, his childhood in India had been vivid enough that he began to plan a journey back to his youthful haunts, namely the Andaman Islands, Kashmir, and what is now northern Pakistan, where his father, an officer in the 93rd Burma Infantry (later the 5th Battalion of the 8th Punjab Regiment), was transferred soon after Raleigh's birth...

...And finally there is India itself, as seen by Raleigh Trevelyan and by the Trevelyans before him: Charles and his wife, Hannah, Macaulay, Charles's son George Otto ("not a very great sportsman...

...It is sublimely sad...

...Raleigh recollects days spent on ponyback, while his father, havingfew border intrigues to attend to, "played polo and tennis, fished,..went on shoots and stalked snow leopard, measured glaciers, paid courtesy visits to mirs [local chieftains] and rajahs and was entertained by them...

...and a host of other near and distant relatives and associates...

...And yet things had not always been so idyllic at Gilgit...

...It shimmers, it has an aura, its proportions are perfect...

...ling, and at any rate he had only one ayah, the long-suffering Nanny Spicer, to watch out for him...

...Charles Trevelyan and Macaulay exemplified a "higher cause" British attitude toward the ruling of India...

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...Each took an aggressively reformist stance, pressing for the teaching of English in native schools, freedom of the press, equality before the law regardless of color, and the abolishment of certain barbaric native practices such as suttee (the ritual immolation of the Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre), and other innovations...

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...Their impressions are recorded alongside one another, allowing the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 41...

...They were, in Raleigh Trevelyan's words, "prepared to assimilate themselves as much as possible to their Indian surroundings and learn about the customs and heritage of the Indian 'golden age.' " Trevelyan, Macaulay, and the others at loggerheads with the Orientalists got THE GOLDEN ORIOLE: A 200-YEAR HISTORY OF AN ENGLISH FAMILY IN INDIA Raleigh Trevelyan/Touchstone Books (Simon and Schuster)/$12.95 paper Jennifer Howard 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 the title "Anglicists...

...Great reading but also more than that...

...he merely lets it speak through the observations of those who knew it...

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...LibertyPtess/LibertyClassrs GEORGE WASHINGTON: A COLLECTION Compiled and Edited by William B. Allen April 1989 marks the bicentennial of George Washington's presidency, yet this is the only one-volume compilation of his writings in print...

...Never face a tiger on the ground," was the advice of an old hunter to a new arrival in India...

...And yet Trevelyan makes a good case for the more far-sighted side of the Anglicist philosophy...

...Born from the mingling of commercial and military opportunity, the British presence in the subcontinent never forgot its pragmatic origins...

...When Trevelyan came back to Gilgit, he found a golden oriole singing in the chinar tree in the garden of his old bungalow, just as one had been singing when he had last left decades before...

...So all in all Raleigh Trevelyan made five journeys back to India between 1977 and 1984, braving diplomatic and vehicular hazards in order to return to Kashmir, and then swinging southward in search of the other Trevelyans...

...It provides a privileged experience, that of reliving with the greatest of Americans his public career, through a judicious and well-annotated selection of his own writings...