China Hand. John Paton Davies, Jr.
a few days later, spoke sympathetically of the plight of the Anglo-Indians but they treated the Indians worse than the British did. It was a case of over-compensation and a desire to associate themselves with the master-race.
An English friend had told me that Madras had a seventeenth-century flavor. Indeed, its atmosphere was placid old colonial—low venerable buildings, no concrete and glass cubes, wide quiet streets, shade trees. People wore bright colors and I found them not quite so smoldering, morose or craven as in Calcutta.
I called on C. R. Krishnaswami, Rajagopalachari’s son. Dressed in aerated homespun he offered me in greeting a limp, soft hand. Then with his head cocked at one side, he led me into his father’s modest little house. The early part of our conversation was interrupted by a little girl of about ten and a boy of about six. I remarked on what attractive children they were. He smiled and said softly, “They dislike foreigners.” I thought he should be a little uncomfortable at having said that, so I laughed and said something about not being surprised. “I can say that to you,” he remarked, “because you are an American. An Englishman would have been offended and embarrassed. That is a strange trait in the British.” I didn’t agree with him there, but contented myself with generalizing about most children of any race disliking the foreigner, the strange and grotesque-featured alien. As cases in point, Chinese children, American children. He wouldn’t let matters rest though and went on to describe how the British failed to inspire trust and friendship and how even those Indians who professed friendship with Englishmen admitted in private to an active dislike.
The children, incidentally, were not his but his sister’s—Gandhi’s grandchildren.
Dr. H. H. Gass, who worked among lepers, a stout old Indian merchant and I shared a compartment on the train to Bangalore. In his gauzy white garments, the merchant puffed and ah-ed his way onto the big leather seats, then crossed his bare feet over his thighs in the lotus position. He looked like a New Masses caricature of the Indian capitalist bloodsucker. His bearer joined us, squatting on the floor mixing from a hamper various spices, nuts and goos, which he rolled neatly into a damp shiny leaf. This betel nut vegetable cocktail the old man chewed with relish, salivating liberally the while. The result was red-stained mouth and teeth.
The merchant owned jute and sugar mills and 5,000 sewing machines making uniforms. He was on his way to Bangalore to buy a cigarette factory. What to do with one’s profits—that was a problem. Put them into goods and the government might confiscate them; put them into land and the Japanese may invade and seize it; put them into gold and silver and you get no returns. Nonetheless, many Indians were hoarding gold and silver, burying them. And then there were so many demands on one’s money. He had to give a dowry of five thousand rupees to marry off his daughter.
Although Swiss, Dr. Gass had been born in India, received most of his education in the United States and married an American. He remained calmly quiet during the merchant’s stereotypical expositions of the Hindu-Muslim-British relationships and the usual assignment to the United States for liberating India from the British yoke. To me the most striking statement made by the doctor related to the United States and not to India. We had been talking about the numbing poverty prevalent in India. Yes, Dr. Gass observed, but he had seen as acute poverty in Texas and Oklahoma.
Poverty seemed somewhat less oppressive in the highland state of Mysore than in British India and Travannore. Gaunt, pot-bellied children and the diseased and deformed of all ages were less in evidence. This was due in large part, I was told, to the relatively efficient administration retained by the Maharajah of Mysore.
I rattled across Mysore in a charcoal-burning Dodge bus, open at the sides. The country was verdant, rolling and altogether pleasing. The hazards to traffic were cows and apoplectic-faced monkeys. Costumes were gay— magenta, orange, cerise, royal blue. Some of the women wore flowers in their hair; some wore their costumes as sarongs. Further south, in the Cochin countryside, the conservative matrons went about their affairs bare to the waist, while the young women, flouting convention, daringly clothed themselves from ankles to neck.
On the charcoal express a young Indian businessman sat next to me and promptly engaged me in a discussion of The Problem—how to get rid of the British and, he being a Hindu, establish a unitary state. Again it was that Britain was to blame for India’s servitude and the United States was somehow or other obligated to put matters aright. Again I held forth no hope that Washington would intervene in this affair.
Were the Indians, in my opinion, capable of democratic self-rule? the young man demanded. Certainly the Indians were capable of self-rule. But he had qualified self-rule with “democratic,” a word subject to varied interpretations. My fellow passenger interrupted to rail against the British for not industrializing India enough. He wanted automobile factories. I replied that a well-to-do mass market was a pre-condition for this kind of industry. Commenting on this conversation in my journal, I wrote of a “feverishness and reproachfulness in the Indian mind.”
The bus ride ended 7,000 feet up on Ootacamund’s tableland, beautiful with wild-flowered downs, eucalyptus groves, streams and a lake. From Ooty I went down to the Malabar Coast by train and along it to Trivandrum by bus, rickshaw, canoe and a night launch in the moonlight motoring through still waterways canopied by palms and abloom with hyacinths and lilies. Most of my time during this journey of 36 hours was occupied by listening to and then, from weariness, merely hearing repeated effusions regarding The Problem—India and the British.
CHAPTER VIII
AN AMERICAN IN INDIA
At Trivandrum I found myself unexpectedly in a reviewing stand seated on the right of the Maharani of Travancore. I had arrived at Trivandrum, the capital of Travancore, that morning and sent a note to the Diwan, or Prime Minister, asking for an interview with him. He had courteously received me, and also arranged for his barrister son, Pattabhi Raman, to show me a solemn religious procession later in the day.
Pattabhi Raman met me at the foot of the canopied reviewing stand, outside of Trivandrum and beside a broad road, freshly covered with white sand, leading to the shores of the Arabian Sea, less than a mile away. Thousands of townspeople and country folk tranquilly lined the road, across from which groves of coconut palms rustled in a light breeze.
Without fuss or fanfare the Maharani and the Princess arrived in a long Cadillac. Pattabhi Raman presented me to the Maharani, an attractive woman in perhaps her mid-forties, and to her daughter, who in her early twenties, was, as princesses are supposed to be, beautiful. The Maharani was the sister of the preceding Maharajah and mother of the reigning one. Her son was now Maharajah not because her brother had died without heirs but because in Travancore succession proceeded from the Maharajah to his sister’s son and not to his own. Therefore the spoiled three-year-old son of the beautiful Princess was heir apparent. P.R. said that the young Maharajah was more interested in his nephew than in his own son.
This mode of determining succession seemed to me to have one evident advantage over the familiar passage from father to son. One could be sure of an unbroken bloodline so long as the women of the ruling house produced both sons and daughters. From the woman’s point of view, it ensured feminine dominance without the burdens of authority. What chance did a maharajah have, boxed in by mother and sister? He owed his princely legitimacy to his mother, not his father, and eventually would be deprived by his sister of dynastic immortality through his son.
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