Читать книгу China Hand - John Paton Davies Jr. - Страница 14

India, I had come to realize, was of concern to the United States not only as a base from which to prosecute the war against Japan but also as a potential entanglement in postwar colonial upheavals. I foresaw dreadful troubles in the final stages of and after the war when the European imperial nations attempted to hold on to or reoccupy their Asian colonies. The United States, following announcement of its intention to grant independence to the Philippines, was in Asian eyes relatively free of the colonial incubus. Indeed, many South Asians thought of Americans as champions of their desire for independence.

The cause of potential entanglement was our alliance with Britain, the Netherlands and the Free French in the war against Japan. These necessary and desirable ties could easily lead us into helping the imperial countries to maintain or reimpose authority over colonial peoples and thus involve us needlessly in alien conflicts contrary to our interests and convictions. With these anxieties in mind, I continued my exploration of India.

* * *

About a week after my session with Gandhi, a top Indian official in the Government, Ghulam Mohammed, told me that the Mahatma was preparing to incite some form of mass civil disobedience. I sought out Nehru in New Delhi, hoping to find out what was afoot.

In a two and a half hour visit on May 24, I asked Nehru about the reported plans for civil disobedience. He seemed to be disturbed that the alleged preparations were known. Unconvincingly he pled ignorance; he had been vacationing in the hills. I pointed out the obvious—the damage that disruption in India would do to our efforts to help China. Not only China would suffer, but straining the point in an appeal to his pro-Soviet sympathies, so would the Soviet Union. Nehru expressed, as I reported to Stilwell, “unemphatic agreement and continued to be his charming, dissemblingly sincere self.”

Would he support Gandhi in the projected campaign? Nehru was noncommittal. Following the advice of two Indian friends who said that “the only way to induce Jawaharlal to reveal what he is thinking is to make him flare up,” I asked him if he believed that he should follow the dictates of the Congress Party (that is, Gandhi) even though they were counter to his convictions. He was evasive.

Gandhi had recently said, I went on, that Nehru was virtually his heir, that the Mahatma was not disturbed by Jawaharlal’s occasional “apostasy” because he had faithfully carried out the Congress policy defined by Gandhi. Nehru pretended to be unaware that the Mahatma had claimed him as heir and asserted that he had more often won Gandhi over to his point of view than the other way around.

Getting no revelations, I asked why, if statements made to me were correct, was there no published accounting of Gandhi’s Harijan Fund, ostensibly for improving the lot of the untouchables. This flustered Nehru, I reported to Stilwell, “Why that’s a most unusual question,” he exclaimed, “a most unusual question. Why, certainly statements have been published of the use of the fund. Of course, I have nothing to do with the fund. I don’t know anything about the administration of the fund.”

I was prepared to believe that he had nothing to with the fund. In any event, Nehru launched into a tirade about how badly the outcastes of Dr. Ambedkar’s (leader of depressed classes) category abused outcastes of even lower grade. Inevitably, Nehru moved on to a dissertation on the inequities of the British, in historical depth. He then returned to a theme he had earlier expounded to me—how Indians listened regularly to Japanese broadcasts and “gloated” over the British reverses. He now added that the Japanese propaganda was clever. It told the Indians not to be impatient; they would soon be liberated by an Indian army of liberation—composed of prisoners taken in Burma and organized by the Japanese. He implied that the Indian listeners more than half believed what they heard on these broadcasts.

Several days after this conversation, Nehru went to Wardha to get the word from the Mahatma. After his return to his home in Allahabad I flew there on June 2 to find out what I could. Nehru said that he had not tried to present his own views to Gandhi in any detail; that he listened and told the Mahatma that he would go home and think over what he had learned. Nothing definite had been decided, nothing drastic was contemplated and, although the contradiction was not acknowledged, Gandhi demanded the withdrawal of the British even if chaos ensued.

But he and Gandhi were fully aware, I commented to Nehru, that a mass civil disobedience campaign hampering the war effort would alienate American and Chinese sympathies for the Indian nationalists. Furthermore, I failed to see how Gandhi could through such measures persuade the British to quit India. Although Nehru was noncommittal, my impression was that he was in agreement with what I said. But he was obviously not in a happy frame of mind. I felt that he was going through one of his recurring struggles between his intellectual convictions and his loyalty to the Mahatma.

This contradictory, indecisive personality, then, was Gandhi’s heir apparent. An upper class Indian by birth and an upper class Englishman by education, Nehru was bicultural, an elegant, intellectual, ornamental aristocrat. Gandhi had overcome the anglicizing influence of his English education and re-Indianized himself. But not Nehru. I wondered if some less diluted Indian would not succeed the Mahatma. And I did not see in Nehru indications of force and command. Curiously, he was perhaps a greater international figure than national figure. Mrs. Naidu had commented that it was unfortunate that in the United States Nehru was regarded as the leader of the Congress Party. He was not. He was the theorist. Patel was the practical man of action.

Ghulam Mohammed told me that he had gone to school with Nehru in England. At the height of the campaign, back in India, to wear homespun and eschew English textiles, G.M. returned one day to the quarters that he shared with Nehru and discovered that Jawaharlal had in the transports of nationalist protest consigned G.M.’s expensive English suits to a bonfire of imperialist fabrics. This annoyed G.M., whose nationalism was not of Nehru’s burning kind. Years later, in 1942, Ghulam Mohammed said to me that Nehru was being spoiled by American adulation. G.M. summed up Nehru as “intellectually dishonest and a weakling.”

To the Western mind, Rajagopalachari was more comprehensible than Gandhi, and even Nehru. The position that he took at the Allahabad Congress meeting was characteristic of his practical approach to politics, his willingness to work with what might be possible rather than rejecting any condition that was not, for him, perfect.

Rajagopalachari was cool and matter-of-fact on a subject that was becoming for me a major concern regarding the future—an antagonistic division of the postwar world in two, with the United States and its European allies reestablished in their Asian colonies in one camp and the non-white peoples of the world, opportunistically championed by the Soviet Union in the other. The white peoples, Rajagopalachari said when I saw him on October 20, 1942, cannot afford to continue to antagonize the colored peoples of the world. The colored peoples are going to win their freedom sooner or later. The whites had better grant that freedom sooner rather than later and so avoid the cumulating legacy of hatred.

* * *

The Congress Party was under the sway of Gandhi. But the Muslim League was controlled by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. In contrast to Gandhi’s ostentatious, loin-clothed simplicity, the lean fine-featured Jinnah was something of a fop in his precisely tailored and sharply pressed suits. After several conversations with him, I commented in January 1943:

Jinnah, as astute and opportunistic a politician as there is today in India, fulfills the role of fuehrer called for by the circumstances in which the Muslims find themselves (a minority feeling discriminated against by the Hindus.) He has skillfully exploited the apprehensions of his community and has built up the Muslim League as a disciplined organization obedient to his will.

The political credo of the Muslim League, and Mr. Jinnah’s battle cry, is Pakistan. Pakistan is a vaguely defined program for a more or less independent Muslim state in the areas where the Muslims are in the majority.

Ghulam Mohammed, whose tailored wardrobe Nehru had patriotically reduced to ashes, was one of those polished, astute Indians who moved urbanely through the two worlds of Asia and Europe. He left what was in effect a sub-cabinet post in the Government of India to become the Finance Minister of Hyderabad. His final position after the creation of Pakistan was Governor General of the new state within the British Commonwealth.

G.M. was a man with few illusions. Once while in Switzerland, he told me, he had been asked by a European friend (Salvador Dali as I remember it) to describe India. He did so: a great oversized head above and in drifting clouds, a small emaciated body, wizened and ribs showing, then enormous, bloated legs, afflicted with elephantiasis and standing in mire. “That,” he said, “is India.”

Neither Congress nor the League was a workable political solution for India, Ghulam Mohammed exclaimed to me. The only feasible Indian government, he said, would be one composed of a few politicians—Rajagopalachari and two or three others—some of the more able Indians then serving the British raj, and several of the very competent big business executives.

Like all of the educated Indians with whom I conversed, Ghulam Mohammed was convinced that as the Allies began to win the war the British would be less and less inclined to grant India its independence. Because India was too weak and divided to overthrow British rule, its only immediate hope was that the American newcomers might induce London to grant independence to India. But the Americans, my Indian acquaintances said, were under the British spell. The war against Germany and Japan, they all lamented, would end in another Versailles; as the United States betrayed China at the 1918 peace conference, so it would turn its back on India, in the settlements made by the victors of World War II.

Ghulam Mohammed, like Rajagopalachari and some other Indians whom I drew out on the subject, asserted that American solidarity with Britain at the expense of Indian independence would eventually lead to conflict on the basis of color. Expanding the subject, G.M. said that the Anglo-American bloc had the strength to impose a peace that would be against the desires and will of the peoples of Asia. But that kind of peace would produce fermenting hatred of the whites. It would be a peace only for our time and would end in a war of Asia against the whites.

The president of the racially extremist Hindu Mahasabha was V. D. Savarkar. He lived in a modest house in Bombay’s suburbs, where I called on him in May 1942. “A Sikh watchman with a dagger,” I wrote at the time, “let me in the gate. I was taken upstairs to one corner of the house where the Hero Advocate of the Hindu people had his small, rather grubby bedroom. Mr. S received while sitting on his bed, clad in a white pajama-like suit and one sock minus its foot. His free toes were agile. Mr. S. was apparently nearsighted—he wore glasses with very thick lenses. Hanging on the walls of the bedroom were four or five pictures of my host, some in color.”

The conversation that followed was one-sided. My few questions were answered by harangues: India belonged to the Hindus; the Muslims were foreigners; there must be a Hindu revival, and the establishment of a Hindu raj. Like racial fanaticism elsewhere, Savarkar’s message was simplistic, feverish, racially narcissist, and xenophobic. I felt that he did not have the magnetism or the creative intelligence to be a successful leader.

The Mahasabha’s vice president, Dr. S. Y. Mockerjee, was a quite different personality. Scholarly and respectable in appearance, he was a former Finance Minister of Bengal. I told him in January 1943 that Jinnah had expressed to me a wish that Rajagopalachari and Mockerjee would approach him with a request that the three of them ask the Viceroy for permission to confer with Gandhi (who had by then been jailed by the British) in search of a solution to the deadlock between the Indian nationalists and the British. Mockerjee displayed great interest in what Jinnah had said and exclaimed that he would get in touch with Rajagopalachari. But on the following day he told me it would be feasible only if Jinnah did not insist on acceptance of the principle of Pakistan. This was an issue on which Jinnah would not compromise. So nothing came of Jinnah’s overture.

* * *

The 50 million untouchables, outcastes, those belonging to the “depressed classes,” were not an organized political force. But they had a politically active champion who had risen from their shared degradation to membership on the Viceroy’s Council. He was Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, paunchy, bespectacled and prosaic.

Ambedkar wanted independence for India, but only if it meant a better life for the depressed classes. He did not believe in the Congress party’s protestations that its enlightened policies already guaranteed fair treatment of the untouchables. The party had failed, he maintained, to work earnestly for the betterment of the outcastes’ lot. Furthermore, conservative members of Congress had no wish to remove the disabilities (including indenture of unborn children to lifetime service in payment of a loan) that made the untouchables so useful to upper caste Hindus.

The suggestion that the depressed classes might find an acceptable place in a Congress-League coalition did not appeal to Ambedkar. It would mean, he said, rule by three groups: “the Brahmin, who is a rascal; the Bania (the trading caste to which Gandhi belonged), who is a cheat; and the Muslim, who is a fool.” No, he would wait until after the war and then if there was to be a transfer of power, the position of the untouchables should be negotiated with deliberate care among the British and the Indian factions.

This matter-of-fact, unprepossessing, canny politician inspired veneration among the untouchables. On the walls of their rooms his picture hung bedecked with garlands. American missionaries who had seen both Gandhi and Ambedkar amidst their respective followings said that the emotion welling out to Ambedkar was the greater. Untouchables would surge toward him to press their faces to his feet.

A young British officer, six months out of England and assigned to a regiment of untouchables, told me in December 1942, that these soldiers worshiped Ambedkar, actually prayed to him. After our conversation I noted, “During the recent riots they were stationed in Nagpur. The troops seemed to relish shooting Brahmins. In fact, the zeal of three or four of the untouchable soldiers was such that their rifles had to be taken away from them.”

Was there friction between the untouchable troops and other Indian units? Yes. Particularly, in his experience, with the Sikhs.

The untouchable soldiers were, to the lieutenant, an interesting contrast to the skeptical Tommies. They had complete faith in their British officers. He felt it rather pathetic that these Indian lads should march down the road singing with great assurance, “And when the German soldiers see the British flag they will all run away.” “The poor blokes haven’t the slightest idea what it’s all about.”

Like the untouchables, the princes were not an organized political force. But they had no need of a champion. They did very well on their own, thank you. Financially speaking, they were comfortably off; the Nisam of Hyderabad was reputed to be one of the richest men in the world. And as for being highborn, the Maharajah of Udaipur was a descendant of the moon and had never been to Delhi to pay homage to the British raj because no Maharajah of Udaipur could go to Delhi save as a conqueror.

Going to Delhi, or precisely going to the ball at the Viceroy’s House, did have drawbacks for princes. The young playboy Maharajah of Cooch Behar, who liked Americans, attended a viceregal party in white tie and tails and was enjoying himself dancing with pretty girls when the Viceroy spotted him. Cooch Behar was sent packing, told to change into his satins and jewels and return to sit in ornate display with the other princes below the viceregal throne, which he did.

Another high-spirited young maharajah was Jaipur. Jai was good-looking, engaging and a first-class polo player. In conformity with tradition he had contracted two dynastic marriages—a princess and her niece from the ruling house of Jodhpur. Then asserting his individuality, he sought to take as his third wife Cooch Behar’s beauteous, very bright, and emancipated sister, Ayesha. In the ensuing negotiations, Ayesha made her conditions plain—Jai must undertake to remain faithful to her for five (5) years. So alluring she was that Jai capitulated to her demand—an unprecedented humiliation for a maharajah. The princely set was properly scandalized. But Jai survived the traumatic five years and when my wife Patricia (whom I shall introduce later) and I knew them not long thereafter, Ayesha and he seemed to be unscarred by the experience.

As a footnote, Ayesha became active in national politics after India was granted independence. She was a prominent member of the legislature. In 1975 she got into trouble with the executive arm of the government that discovered that she had not turned in all of her treasure.

“Educate a woman and you place a knife in the hand of a monkey.” So went an unchivalrous Hindu aphorism. An educated Hindu woman observed to me that among enlightened Indians, the women tended to be (a) more radical and realistic, and (b) less hysterical than the men. Be that as it may, I was impressed by the poise and silken strength of some of the Indian women I met. In mind and mettle they were unsurpassed by any of the men.

In another society supposedly dominated by males—the traditional Chinese—the same was true. In force of character and intelligence Chinese women were easily equal to the men. Again and again in Chinese history women of humble origins worked and intrigued their way into positions of great power. They were simply smarter, tougher and more determined than the men from whom they seized and held power.

* * *

Beginning an exploratory tour of southern India in November 1942, I took the Madras Mail from Calcutta southward. At one of the stops I fell into conversation with the train-driver, a toothless Anglo-Indian gaffer. Typical then of these people of mixed British and Indian blood, he welcomed being treated as an equal, for the Anglo-Indians were not fully accepted by either of the societies from which they stemmed. My friend said that he had retired some years earlier, but with the war he had been called back. Would I care to ride with him to the next station? Indeed I would.

Just look at this engine, he exclaimed. Patchwork. No new engines for years. The inspector had said that it was a scandal to have such an engine on a mail train. As I wrote in my journal,

We started out with some huffing and chuffing dignity—the old man at the controls, the fireman-wallah very business-like. But as we gained speed and the locomotive shuddered and twisted, and as I found myself pitted with ashes, the greater was the crew’s nonchalance. At what seemed to me the pitch of the crisis, old ironsides leaned over and croaked, “We’re doing 60.” I groaned appreciatively. When it was all over and I was marveling that the front of the engine wasn’t plastered with sirloins and spare ribs, I asked, “Do you kill many cows?” “Oh yes, and many humans, too. They try to beat you across the track. Now when I was a young engineer in 1908 I killed one, and if it hadn’t been for some missionaries who happened to be along, I’d have been in a bad way.” I still haven’t found out whether it was a sacred cow that he killed or only a human.

In the evening the engineers were changed. The new one too was an Anglo-Indian, but younger. He was worried about an accession to power by Indian nationalists: “We’ve been having the cream of it in this country and they know it (skim milk masquerading as cream). The British pretend to be worried about the fate of the small democracies after the war—what about us (the Anglo-Indians) whose very existence they are responsible for? I hope they give us Burma if they grant Congress its demands!”

A wise Swiss doctor, Dr. H. H. Gass, whom I met 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.