India, My India; 2; As in My Time

After 17 years of exile in England, I came back to India, my native land, like a prodigal son. But I came back to Lucknow, like a pilgrim. My mother was born in Lucknow and I went to school there. I had left India in 1947, the year of independence in partition, because although I had fought for her independence, I could not live in a divided homeland. Now I had come back to revisit the land of my birth, and in my search for the past, I came to Lucknow, in so many ways the starting point of my youth. Lucknow, the center of culture and good taste, the home of Urdu, the language of Hindus and Muslims alike,

the capital city of the Nawabs of Abad, the scene of the famous seed of the British residency, in the so-called mutiny of 1857. Somewhere I made the history and culture, the life and the ruins lay the landmarks of my youth. Somewhere I made this crowded past, dwelt the ghost of my boyhood days, something of a boy scout and something of a scholar, something of a musician and something of a dreamer, conscious of India's past and concerned for her future. Somewhere the face of a boy emerging then as now from another world, and I made the proud palaces and humble ruins of Lucknow, I made the statues and tombstones, I wondered where a wence that child had gone. I sometimes feel that I grew up in the Lucknow market, and found the feet of my youth amid the jostle and frong of this eternal fairground.

I came to Lucknow from my own town of Charkaray, in the autumn of 1931, to study at Sanabad High School on the banks of the River Gomti, but life in Lucknow itself proved too compelling. I must have spent all my Sundays here, in the Luckfast market, Lucknow's Petticoot Lane and Pledge of Garden, wandering aimlessly through this open-air theatre show, this paradise of arcades and entertainments. By the pavement restaurants, I would relish my rise below by the handful. In 30 years, the prices had changed, but the flavour had not.

Away from the disciplines of school and the dreams of heroic careers, I discovered something of the other world in which I had to find myself. Here, I made the fly-blown pictures, and the artist's impressions. I made the sellers in the towns, the tricksters and the entertainers. I made the litter and junk of the ages. This was truly a schoolboy's paradise. And not the least fascinating to a curious schoolboy were the units, the professional-made entertainers.

Yes, these are men, performing their accomplished song and dance act in the marketplace. There are a lot of heritage fights. Partridge fights are more of a tradition than a spectacle in Lucknow. The result is the palaces themselves. With their established rules and their own jargon, they're almost a part of the Lucknow culture. There's no crude fight to the death here, just a contest of skills and a gambler's dream. The past times of a schoolboy, the landmarks of my youth, I could hardly have expected a decade or two of independence to have changed all this.

But beyond the richness of the market and the daily life, beyond the history of the poets and the palaces, lay decay. This was Lucknow, my Lucknow, and I was astonished at its rapid decline. Since independence and the breakup of Lucknow's old social structure, a new industrial class had struggled to emerge. Many of them refugees, unable to identify themselves with an older society, itself decadent and dying. These were the hard times of transition to socialism and democracy.

Deck of housing, overpopulation, impossible sanitation, had assumed appalling proportions. And I was shocked to realize that these piles of refuse and open sewers might have been playgrounds for my children. I could not escape a feeling of guilt as I realized that I too had forgotten that this existed. Alahabad, the home of Nehru, my idol, the seat of my university. After Lucknow, the next station on my pilgrimage into the past.

In August of 1939, I went up to Alahabad University, full of the idealism of India, full of the current zeal for independence. Under Gandhi, the independence movement was entering its final phase. In Europe, it was the eve of the Second World War. 25 years, a quarter of a century ago, and these students had not yet been born. I wondered what causes and concerns moved the hearts of its undergraduates now. In my day, Alahabad had been caught up in the rising tide of India's independence. The university throbbed with life, and depending upon your religions, with sedition.

And now, science and technology, of course, and a hundred new subjects. A concern for culture still, but the cause is more academic now and less political. Accepted the issue of a national language for India had aroused such passions and indiscipline that they had even had to close the students union. The scene of a thousand debates of countless voices long since still. I thought my heart beat again with the inspiration of that time. The memories of martyrs and champions, the deeds and words of Gandhi and Nehru, of men like Subhas Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and Chandrasekhar Azad. Where were their voices now? Where were they alike?

Perhaps over a cup of tea, old Ram Singh, the university caterer, would explain. He must have served a million students in his time. But should I have expected an explanation from him? Should I have expected among the students, the same causes and concerns that inspired me? No, transition time and the struggle for peace, they have their own problems now. Today, as in my time, the facts of India still defeat the philosophy. You can be academic in India for only so long.

The people, the pressures and the sheer diversity will win in the end. Buses and bus stations for a novelty in my time. But today, life in and around them is as much a part of India as railway stations, her markets and her village wells. They are not just concerned with transportation, somehow they always involve movements of whole families. They become transit depots for households. The fact of travel only a minor interruption to the wider routines of living. But even here, I found something positive and reassuring. I felt that whatever the problems of the day, whatever the changes and the challenges,

from imperialism to independence, from feudalism to socialism, from shanks pony to overlaying coaches. India will accept and adapt herself and very soon make it all her own. In the summer of 1942, I came down from university to join the Indian Army. Here, at the Indian military academy of Dharadun, and at Bangalore, the sandhests of India, I did my training as an officer cadet. When Britain brought India into the Second World War, many young Indians chose peace and passive resistance.

I joined the Indian Army because I could not see the beginning of independence before the end of fascism and the dreams of dictators. I passed out of military college in January 1943, an officer in the 11th Sikh regiment. But this was not the army I had known, no longer officer by the British Raj, and organized by the sergeant majors of Salisbury Plain. This was an Indian Corps now. But in its passing out parades, it's etiquette, it's parties on the lawn, it's a tendon core of military wives and sweethearts. The influence was still that of the terribly British. And yet, as I talked with the staff and cadets after the parade in the grounds of the academy, I was aware only of a superficial change.

Perhaps I was just happy to remember to allow nostalgia to take over. But these seemed the faces I might have known. Without the features and the accents of the Midlands, the Shires and the Highlands, they might have been the cadets of my time, the companions of my arm. The army had a deep influence upon my life. It was my first career. It gave me discipline and initiative, action and adventure. I served in it and fought with it, in India, Burma, Malaya and Japan, with the 11th Sikh regiment. It gave me a profound respect for soldiers, and a deep contempt for war.

And in the end, an abiding faith in the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. In the grand tradition, sports like polo and tent pegging remain in flourish, giving it all rather more the air of a sophisticated social event than a serious business. Tent pegging, a feat of forcemanship surviving from the old Mughal camp days. The object is to wrench a tent peg from its ground on the point of a lance. A sport conjuring up more recent memories of famous cavalry regiments, the Bengal Lancers, the Hudson Source. I had grown away from this, but the military academy and the army were still a part of me.

And I had come back, not so much to recall what I once was, but to reflect on what I might have been. The essence of this way of life I saw in my brother's mess in Chhasi, where the gods seemed still to reign supreme. My brother, a Colonel on the Kashmir Front, had taken special leave to meet me. I was filled with nostalgia for my army days. And it was also the nearest I could get in India to a point of beer. The talk was in English and in the stani.

And I remembered as a young second lieutenant being admonished by my English commanding officer for talking in Urdu in the mess to a fellow Indian. At that time, I was a foreigner in my own country and intruder in his Indian army. Yet unmistakably, the presence was still that of the Raj, the customs, the traditions, the trappings and the etiquette. At my brother's army bungalow in Chhasi, the mood seemed to continue, servants, ease and security. His three young daughters were packed off to their school, a private condom school run by German nuns. Inside the house, my brother's bad men laid the table, served the food and did the odd jobs.

He was one of the recognized perks of the trade. Not through the sweeper, a part timer at 15 years old, polished the floors, swept the grounds and cleaned the toilets for 10 rupees, about 18 shillings a month. In the kitchen, grinding spices on the stone, Nazir the cook was a full-time institution. 50 rupees, about four pounds a month, plus free board and lodging. Beside him, his special perks, poppy seeds, soaked overnight and allowed to simmer. In my time, Nazir would assuredly have killed himself with his addiction to opium.

But now he was state registered and existed on his allowance. It kept him going, he admitted, but he would have preferred the killer. Out in the yard and in the cool of the kitchen door, the two kitchen maids made up the contingent, still understaffed by normal standards in this society in India. And my brother's wife has self-handled the delicate saris, two delicate for the weekly thurby, the washaman. At St. Francis' Convent School, the high school for girls in Jhansi, my brother's three daughters are taught by German nuns. German nuns, German Catholic nuns, teaching English to Muslim and Hindu children.

Perhaps only in India could such a paradox be quite normal. After independence, India kept her private schools and did not allow the spread of state education to interfere with these ancient establishments. The girls here are prepared for the old Cambridge School Certificate, now called the Indian School Certificate. But the papers still come from Cambridge and are corrected there, not so different from my own family in England, and yet something of an anachronism in my India, disdemanding unfulfilled nation. But somewhere outside, anywhere outside, lay the real India, moving, yearning, crying out in its highways and bites rivers, symbolized by the eternal cry of the thurby, the washaman, the toilet of India, carving out his faint, grove of personal history on some stone, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Somewhere outside, anywhere outside, a humble Hindu funeral, just another death, just another ritual. The mourners assembled, the sun's head shaved, and the face of death unveiled for a last farewell, another life has come full circle. Just another death, just another ritual, a last cleansing dip in the sacred waters.

Somewhere outside, anywhere outside, beyond the philosophy of the past, and the progress of the present, the unyielding, relentless facts of India, endless toil, the face of death, and endless toil, as in my time. Peace be upon us all. This is NET. The National Educational Television Network.