Notes from an Indian Journey
LASKY, MELVIN J.
By Melvin J. Lasky NOTES FROM AN INDIAN JOURNEY After ten years of independence from British rule, India, with its multi-lingual, religiously divided population of 381 million people, still...
...Our greatest need is for a democratic opposition...
...Do I write against the speculators in my paper...
...With a single order an Emperor sweeps away regional languages and unifies the writing of the country—and orders all road axles for carts to be of the same size...
...Of course, our proprietor is a 'speculator.' But our paper shows a handsome profit and so he has nothing against it that his class is regularly abused...
...In some of the bookstores, I see old copies of Marie Stopes prominenty displayed...
...The traditionalist would leave the problem to the usual checks, for why new-fangled and impious notions of interference with nature, when pestilence, war and famine will settle it for you as they have done in the past...
...What would have the United States have become if every regional group used their democratic rights to set up local schools in Italian and German and Polish...
...Yes, I do...
...The Chief Justice understood how serious the business dislocations were for butchers, and for hide merchants too, where there was a total ban on the slaughter of cattle, useful or otherwise...
...We have become calmer, quieter...
...MADRAS IN NOVEMBER 1949, the Constituent Assembly, although sharply divided (the debates were in English) approved by a majority of one vote the decision to make Hindi the official language of India...
...We are now beginning to make power and modern products of our own, And if we are industrially balanced our population problem could also be absorbed...
...Hindus and Moslems are living and letting live...
...But he was given a table in the corner at which a 'sweeper' soon joined him...
...What was the Gujerati I learned as a boy...
...If India falls," Gandhi once said, "Asia dies...
...They would have passed away generations ago if people could read and write something else...
...And then think of the Chinese tradition, from Shih Huangti, the founder of the Chinese Empire, through the last of the Manchus down to Chairman Mao...
...That today the various religious groups are seizing upon the confused linguistic issues only shows for me their weakness...
...CALCUTTA WHY, WHEN the stink of death is so much with us here in the present, do I press and prompt for the lurid stories of the Hindu-Moslem carnage a decade ago...
...There is today, for the first time in our Indian history, a unified national state...
...Still, these peoples do not feel well or at ease in their own skin...
...What a bowdlerization there will be in ten and twenty years...
...The Americans 'Americanized,' and we must Indianize...
...Why should we throw it away...
...I would say, first, the program of industrialization, and especially the new hydro-electric dams...
...It concerns the holy cow...
...For three days," Sudhin Datta says, "the corpses lay in the streets of the country's largest city, exposed to the sun and rain until they had become black and bloated and too putrid even for rats and vultures to feed on...
...Among the other indelicate conclusions: (1) Unless fertility is so reduced as to limit the average number of children to three, the present rate of population growth cannot be stemmed: (2) only one in six of the mothers of child-bearing age are responding positively to "family planning...
...Most of the languages which are with us today have been preserved only by illiteracy...
...Otherwise we will all become strangers in our own country...
...and the bodies thrown into the river collected where it bent under the window of a young girl who went raving mad watching the accumulation...
...I have been trying to understand it for years, and it still remains a puzzle...
...The Court was not oblivious to the fact that the maintenance of useless cattle involved a wasteful drain on the nation's cattle feed...
...Years afterward, I heard Nehru refer to the 1947 massacres in terms much stronger than correspondents generally used at the time...
...But what happens to sacrosanct customs when the philosophy of utilitarianism breaks through...
...He thought that the several general elections the new Indian democracy had experienced were surprising achievements...
...Robert Trumbull, who represented the New York Times in those years, now confesses: "Looking back, I think the fault of the correspondents, myself included, was in failing to impart in their daily dispatches a sense of the full enormity of what was going on around us...
...In the years of struggle against the British, he has come to have a hatred for the fair complexion of Europeans...
...It is not...
...Meanwhile, according to something called "a pilot research monograph in family planning," I learn that in the Lucknow area "total fertility comes to 6.015 children per mother, with a gross reproduction rate of 2.379...
...A Socialist Leader: "Our major achievements in ten years of independence...
...There must be a half-million of them...
...The statistician comforts himself with the fact that India's rate of increase is lower than that of Japan or the United States or Canada, and far lower than that of South American countries...
...He asked about the apparently conciliatory Soviet moves on the questions of European disengagement and atomic bombs...
...Dulles the model of diplomacy by 'small signs...
...India values her democratic rights...
...He remained amazed at how the "Personal Law" which he had helped to draft had actually revolutionized the status of women...
...The strange paradox of this question of using English instead would seem to be that those who speak English have opposed it, and those who have always resented it have suddenly become the champions of "the language of Shakespeare and modem scientific truth...
...Do not be misled by the Cassandras...
...BOMBAY ARE THERE too many Indians...
...We are faced by a very serious menace to Indian unity in this linguistic chauvinism...
...The memory is still very vivid of the Hindu religious fanatic who murdered Gandhi...
...I ask A. D. Gorwala—who has written so bitterly on "the disease of surplus population" and other problems that hardly a publication in the country dares print him any more—for some guidance in the moral and medical complexities...
...Abu Sayeed Ayyub: "India has never had one national language...
...I was, after all, the last Governor-General of India, and I could not help feeling—then— that the continuance of a foreign language would be derogatory to our national prestige...
...Some have even started a slogan, 'Hind, Hindu, Hindi, these three are one'" Amlan Datta: "This whole misfortune in India has been based only on a misreading of the 19th century in Europe...
...Was it not a moral responsibility on the part of all democrats to state their faith in liberty unequivocally, even loudly, especially when the basic principles of a free society were under challenge...
...This, unfortunately, is being usurped by the Communist party today...
...I demurred...
...I was eager to talk about Indian affairs, and he was relaxed enough to take a thoughtful backward glance at the path the nation had taken in ten years...
...The patriot, distressed at the lack of Indian achievement in so many spheres, finds consolation in the thought of the enormous population...
...But there was still a small bone left for the butchers...
...The Socialist is convinced that population control is only a capitalist fetish, and, inasmuch as full employment will guarantee work and livelihood for all, the more the merrier...
...I find there atrocities and massacres, monolithic patterns, burnings of books...
...And I fail to understand why our sense of national unity will be damaged by the use of English as the state language...
...Melvin J. Lasky (see cut at right), who records here some of the impressions and encounters he had on his second extensive trip through India, has been editor of Der Monat in Berlin and of the Anchor Review in New York...
...The Indian Republic, which historically is a kind of melting-pot of Moslems and Persians from the West, Malays from the East, "Indo-Aryans" from the North, and dark Dravidians in the South, stood in Bandung with brown, black and yellow brethren for progressive racial equality...
...Nowadays they are not supposed to be expelled...
...BOMBAY-DELHI A mahrathi editor: "My newspaper, with 50,000 circulation, is the largest language paper in the state of Bombay...
...We in India," he says, with slightly frenetic patriotism, "have always been a tolerant, liberty-loving and non-violent people...
...I tell you it is a scandal the way our country is sometimes run...
...THERE is this morning in the Times of India a long and important dispatch on the latest Supreme Court decision...
...Better not talk about that...
...Brahmin pandits will have to create a dictionary full of new words and phrases...
...With few exceptions—Tata is the one everybody will cite to you—the men who control private industry are not in tune with the modern economic world...
...individually, democratic...
...He was saddened by the return of the caste problem, "which has been going out socially, but is now coming back politically" (for all parties maneuver cynically for the caste-man's vote...
...That we should point the way for a whole continent full of struggling peoples...
...I will simply not accept the linguistic imperialism of the Hindi-wallahs...
...And here is one devoted to concrete...
...And what the Englishman has left behind is no longer his property...
...I am shown matrimonial advertisements which call for "fair brides," and even one asking for a bride of "Jewish complexion...
...It is the key to India's economic welfare and to our political stability...
...And because of it the ruling party has become shot through with materialism and corruption...
...Are there social services organized...
...But there is a growing allegiance to democratic ways...
...Gorwala's eloquence is convincing...
...I am bewildered...
...Look at Indonesia...
...It had made divorce possible, given them property, titles, rights of inheritance, etc...
...Second: the social services which have put doctors and school-teachers into thousands of sick and ignorant areas...
...They are three-fold: (1) Integration...
...They are all due, I think, to our methods of organization...
...Meanwhile, the Hindi-wallahs go on artificially creating new words which nobody understands...
...But have you seen one for tea...
...We need English for science, for intellectual life, for international affairs...
...Abuse and recrimination is the meaning of the cold war...
...In essence, it is God-fearing, liberal and non-violent...
...Hindi is simply not rich enough and good enough for all our purposes...
...Every now and then, in some outburst of infantile romanticism, we might quote some of our tender love poetry to each other...
...But would you say that it is given in a cynical or despairing way...
...A Bengali tells me that until recently it was not uncommon to rub apparently fair-looking girls with a wet towel to find out whether their complexion was natural...
...Think of our whole Indian tradition from Asoka the Great to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi...
...The religious Hindu believes that continence and abstinence are the only tolerable approaches...
...But it is not because I have a 'vested interest' that I want the state divided into a separate Maharashtra and a separate Gujerat...
...politically, decentralized...
...I was a sentimentalist, too,' Rajagopolachari confessed one evening in Madras to me...
...by 1976 at least 100 million more...
...Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali...
...Nothing but a miserable dialect...
...Oh, with that," Nehru said, "I have no quarrel...
...So it is that my friend da Costa stands almost alone, and in his isolation has turned to the spinning a fine political myths to make up in personal hope what is lacking on the national sense...
...We disliked them...
...Well, haven't they always been militant, intolerant, authoritarian, regimented by centralizing Caesars, excelling in the arts of mass extermination...
...But now that Englishmen are gone, anger has gone...
...They held that the various statutes on the books for "the prevention of cow-slaughter" and the "preservation and improvement of animals" were illegal and were flagrant violations of their fundamental rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the Republic...
...It is the land of Rabindranath Tagore, and there is a literary pride of fierce intensity...
...When I press Miss M. as to her real motives for wanting so much to go to Europe, she admits hesitantly that she hopes her skin "would become lighter...
...There are few supporters of the principle of dictatorship...
...Of course you haven't...
...The unconscious motive is, I suspect, the old desire to peek behind the myths of national character (Indian tranquility, Hindu non-violence...
...The "fair bride" is the only true prize to be won...
...3) Democracy...
...Now it is true that in addition to Bazaar-Hindi, with its make-shift vocabulary of a few hundred words, there is the prosy Khariboli Hindi, a fine and difficult tongue...
...And their imprecations against Indian capitalists cannot but make headway, if you knew what Indian capitalists are...
...When I gave Pandit Nehru a copy of my book on the Hungarian revolution, he seemed to strike a sadly apologetic note about India's slow and inaccurate comprehension of events...
...A Professor: "Our major weaknesses...
...Thus the petitioners were turned away...
...A founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he has contributed to various publications, including the New York Times, and sections from his travel notes on India have appeared in the London magazine Encounter...
...He felt happy about the new type of "community villages" being fostered throughout the countryside...
...Khrushchev himself spoke of this with me, even asked me to help...
...A Foreign Journalist: "You are confused by the complications of the caste system...
...I could only tell him what I had heard from two former U. S. Ambassadors in Moscow, namely, that they (George Kennan and Charles Bohlen) waited expressly for years for one small, serious, substantial sign that the Bolsheviks, wanted to settle some open problem with the Americans—in vain...
...Of course political maturity in a land of illiteracy will be slow...
...We have not even sent back the statues still standing in our parks...
...On the contrary...
...If Nehru fails to reform the Congress, India may go the way of Chiang's China...
...Thus the provisions of certain acts in force in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh which insisted on a "total ban" were declared invalid...
...I wouldn't...
...But should we really build a new shoe or clothes factory to help our ill-shod, ill-clad millions...
...The cobbler got up and walked out...
...We have always spoken to each other in English...
...How true to tradition the Communist revolution in China has run...
...It should be suspended...
...Your 20th-century friends come and tell us we should build factories...
...But what are those verses really—nothing more than a few flowery phrases—and these are passed off nowadays as the richness of regional cultural traditions...
...Oh, you will find strong popular feeling against our present government...
...But then," he countered, "is Mr...
...To be sure, the cow remains untouched...
...By and large, they would seem to be the undesirables of the marriage market...
...But India appears to be afraid of this warning today: it fills her with too much self-consciousness, it gives her too burdensome a sense of historic mission...
...I was elated to find him still so dedicated, still so assured...
...The atmosphere of political sycophancy that reigns in our country today...
...If no other country in history has ever adopted a 'foreign' language for official use, then let India be the first...
...But it is an adoration compounded of love and hate, of self-respect and self-abnegation, of envy and pity...
...The Court was quite aware that to maintain them was to deprive the useful cattle of much-needed nourishment...
...It has become so cynical that in its electoral opportunism—in particular in the nomination of candidates and their appeals to voters—it has not hesitated to bolster up the old caste system...
...Some time later a cobbler came in, or at least they called him 'cobbler,' for that is one of the symbols of uncleanliness (hence the removal of leather shoeware in all holy places...
...Strangely enough, the most striking specimens of Indian womanhood I meet and talk with are mostly from the South, dark-skinned creatures of uncommon beauty, grace and intelligence...
...In areas where they are discriminated against, young Moslems are not sinking back into apathy or rushing into violence, but doing perhaps what the Jews did in Germany, trying to get to the top...
...There is the awful problem of rapid urbanization...
...I was surprised, and I remain grateful for this political unity...
...Or for jute...
...They are not men of your 'Protestant ethic,' of the 'capitalist spirit' which made Europe and America what they are today...
...And are they not our finest products...
...And the Chinese...
...By Melvin J. Lasky NOTES FROM AN INDIAN JOURNEY After ten years of independence from British rule, India, with its multi-lingual, religiously divided population of 381 million people, still offers the picture of a society in flux, beset by many and various problems...
...We have no 'organization men' (except possibly in the Communist party, and that is why they are growing in power everywhere...
...It has neither ancient richness nor modern usefulness...
...the presence of so many useless animals tended only to deteriorate the breed...
...Here he began to speak with a frown, nervously, and even the fading rose on his jacket suddenly looked utterly wilted...
...The Chief Justice (according to the Time's legal correspondent), "after an elaborate consideration of the place given to the cow right from the Vedic ages to the present times and its utility to the nation, said that the usefulness of the cow and her progeny was clearly established...
...My wife is from the South, but I know no Malayalam...
...Those in possession of their senses kept their doors bolted...
...Should we now therefore be ready to recognize and proclaim to the world that India has not one but a dozen national languages, just as it has not one but half-a-dozen national religions...
...Had Communism come to power on the Gangetic Plain and a free and open society established itself along the Yellow River, we might be hearing lurid tales of Indian cynical violence from Kautilya to Aurangzeb, and the civilizing mildness of Confucian wisdom...
...It is a thing of endless neurotic ambivalence...
...But it scarcely existed a century ago...
...And in the south one impassioned young man insisted that "a people should have the language in which it dreams"—but then made the Freudian slip of admitting that his own Telegu, alas, was not good enough for dreaming...
...and if thus they missed the fine glow imparted to the monsoon sky by houses blazing away at night, no where was there any escape from the stench of rotting carcasses...
...Let us not search for simple or heroic solutions...
...Among a lew experts there is talk of the legalization of abortion...
...Issues become smaller and spirits become weaker...
...An exaggeration...
...5. K. Chatterji: "Is it true that the Hindi-speaking minority in India amounts to 42 per cent of our population...
...The challenge of China...
...We are not modern people, and probably will never be...
...It took a month to reverse Krishna Menon's, and his own, wild misreading of Budapest...
...Recently I was in a small town in the North, and went in for a meal to a Brahmin restaurant...
...and some harrassed fathers have even tried to give guarantees that their daughters would become "50 per cent fairer" within three months of marriage...
...The deal with the Maharajahs to establish national unity still seemed to him a defensible expedient, although, as he added, "sometimes I think we were much too generous...
...The Indian is outraged by color discrimination in Mississippi...
...His explanation was that "in the absence of external danger a people always multiplies the divisions within itself...
...In many of the villages there are odd tales of the coming of contraception...
...That is absolutely necessary...
...At the end of the second Five Year Plan alone (1961), there will be 25 million more to provide for...
...Orthodox Hindu society itself was organized around a principle of Varna or color, and its scriptures condemned Varnasankara, the mixing of colors...
...Scraps of Herder have led to absurd notions of the relations between nationality and language...
...But when he begins to go into the surgical details of his plan for the sterilization of men with three children or more, I find myself making a move to change the subject...
...I know there are times when even the men in Moscow look out toward the West for a signal which could break the deadlock...
...What will happen down on the farm once the butchers and tanners begin counting the number of seeds in the feed-bag...
...At home our people should continue to speak their mother-tongues, in my own case Tamil...
...Out of the pieces of the British Empire and the bits of the princely order, we have integrated the territory and the administration...
...The birth-rate can and must be brought down...
...I was pained to tell him that I thought he must be about the only man in the land who still felt that way...
...And what, in the present, filled him "with despair...
...He felt pleased about the break-through in India of new science and technology...
...But, says Miss B., with a tone of bitterness, "we just have to be more witty, more charming...
...They are a hopeless lot...
...Have you seen the people sleeping on the streets of Bombay...
...What would happen to all our cobblers and hand-spinners...
...Centuries jostle each other...
...2) Secularism—and the country, torn for so long by religious fanaticism and communal struggles, actually accepts it...
...We believe and take pride in the fact that India's chief contribution to the progress of civilization is a spirit of synthesis which reconcile differences without obliterating them, which welcomes diversity of culture and tradition, of race and religion...
...If India is to become modern, people will be moving around...
...My mother tongue happens to be Mahrathi and it is, I believe, along with Bengali and with Tamil, a far richer and more developed language than Hindi which has been imposed on us 'officially.' Gandhi's mother tongue was Gujerati...
...The compensations to the princes were often almost as fabulous as the bejewelled empires surrendered...
...When, at last, Datta could get through he went to visit his mother, and the first thing he heard was how a neighbor of hers, an alumnus of a British university, had incited a mob to finish off a dozen Moslem hawkers whose decomposing remains he had passed to reach his mother's house...
...What we need is a vigorous, large-scale, country-wide propaganda and action program...
...He deplored "the new provincialism" in the land, especially the controversy over the linguistic issue...
...Yet, in Calcutta, they would not love English so much had they not loved Bengali more...
...The Supreme Court had only she-buffaloes, breeding bulls, and working bullocks in mind...
...English was the speech of the conquerors whom we allowed to take possession of our country...
...I reminded him that so much of what he has been, saying could only serve to reinforce the recalcitrance of the other side...
...3) no suitable method is yet available that "may generally be accepted and be easily adopted by the women...
...I remember then his buoyant confidence in the future of the country, darkened only by his preoccupation with the "challenge of China...
...His clinical no-nonsense severity is formidable and admirable...
...Still, if not all champions of English are supporters of the traditional languages, not all spokesmen for the regional cultures command fluency in the beloved mother tongues...
...It reminds me just a bit too acridly of the hard-hearted readings of the German past in order to strike a blow against Hitler, and even the stone-faced interpretations of Russian history to lengthen the shadow of Stalin through all Slav time...
...Have we thrown away his railways and telegraph wires...
...But consciously, too, one feels the necessity of recapturing what is almost a lost chapter of contemporary history—for how busy we were in the West with our miseries in the terrible winter of '47 to follow with any understanding the brief blood-curdling cables in paper-rationed journals...
...Today I never use it...
...A Lawyer: "The best we have done...
...And don't they earn the largest amount of foreign currency for us...
...Beware of all of our eloquence on the linguistic issue," Purshottam warned, "beware of all our bunk...
...I ask, half-afraid of what is coming...
...But you must remember that in India profoundly different historic epochs run on simultaneously...
...Our Indians are old moneyed men, quick-bargaining traders and quick-killing speculators...
...A Stamp Collector: "It seems to me to be absolutely scandalous...
...We just do not know how to bring people together for purposes and activities...
...MALABAR HILL COLOR, I was confounded to learn, is a chronic concern of Indian social and sexual life...
...The worst...
...But the hardness and blindness is, I am afraid, mutual...
...Their notion that a state needs one language is based on an antiquated European philosophy of nationalism which cannot and should not apply to India...
...In Mogul times Persian was exclusively the language of the court...
...So," says Gorwala, "our life will generally continue to be, if not short, still nasty and brutish unless we recognize that biology is our priority...
...In ancient times Sanskrit was the language of a strictly limited elite (and only of men...
...The decision on Hindi was an erroneous step, taken when thought was not ripe...
...A number of butchers, hide merchants and cattle-dealers in the state of Bihar banded together to press their case through the law courts...
...There are not...
...This "adoration of color in the Hindu," according to Nirid Chaudhuri, has "a profound historical basis," for "the Hindu civilization was created by a people who were acutely conscious of their fair complexion in contrast to the dark skin of the autochthons, and their greatest preoccupation was how to maintain the pristine purity of the bloodstream which carried this color...
...This figure has been inflated by improperly combining the figures for Rajasthani, Kosali, Bhojpuri, Urdu Punjabi and Maithili, some of which are totally distinct...
...Where would we all be if we did not hold to the things we believe in...
...And so, on returning home that day, I destroyed the draft of a booklet I had contracted to write, proving that my countrymen, as a whole, were allergic to physical violence...
...His thesis was (and remains) that an Asia at the crossroads could take either of two paths—the Indian or the Chinese, a "middle way" of freedom and social reconstruction, an extreme way of total regimentation...
...Seen from there, Hindi seems almost a lost cause...
...The killings of the Pakistan partition period were "awful" and still horrified and shamed him...
...You see what I mean...
...Who would deny that at least one aspect of the cold war had a "spiritual" side...
...As if Belgium didn't have two languages, and Switzerland three, as if the future united Europe would not have a dozen...
...Not all the new defenders of English against "Hindi imperialism" are friends of the other 13 national languages...
...Even in Bengal one writer told me that he still has "difficulties," for he had lived too long in the Indian west...
...NEW DELHI IT IS some five years since I visited Eric da Costa in his office at The Eastern Economist...
...Here is a new stamp issue devoted to the steel industry...
...No, I believe our future lies in English and the mother tongues...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 33
