Amit Chaudhuri

It was inhuman to play cricket at this time of the year, in this heat, but that was precisely what they were doing these days. Moreover, the team was being sent out into that cauldron to pick up something called the Pepsi Cup. You had to feel for them, though they looked like young braves. While others might shop at the airport in Dubai, one would expect them not to glance at the watches and shapely state-of-the-art CD-players, to have nothing but a glass of orange juice at the hotel before going into the nets.

In 1857, eight years before Kipling was born, Indian soldiers in the north of the country rebelled against the representatives of the East India Company. The uprising was known as the Sepoy Mutiny and, later, somewhat romantically, as the First War of Independence. Although its impact on the Indian and Anglo-Indian middle classes was probably not as immediate and direct as it has been made out to be in subsequent colonial and nationalist narratives, it brought to an end a period of cultural exchange between different races. The late 18th and the first half of the 19th century had seen the commercial and colonial expansion of the East India Company in Bengal and other parts of India, thanks to a series of military victories and not a few dishonourable transactions, but it was also a time of commingling, especially in Calcutta, between the new, post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat – the solar hat and khaki uniform that Beerbohm has Kipling wear in one of his caricatures were not yet de rigueur. There are early portraits depicting Englishmen with their Indian wives, dressed in a mish-mash of Persian and Hindu styles. In the first half of the 19th century, the Fort William College, later the Hindu College, saw teacher and student, Englishman, Indian and Eurasian, engage in a colloquy at a crucial moment of modern history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally difficult for the narrator of the story ‘Beyond the Pale’ to make his seemingly unequivocal statement: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.’’‘

He had come back in April, the aftermath of the lawsuit and court proceedings in two countries still fresh, the voices echoing behind him. But he felt robust.

Although Bombay and Mumbai are the same city in reality, they are probably two different cities of the mind, or at any rate the names signify two phases in its history. Bombay was a colonial city; even when I was growing up in it through the early Sixties and the Seventies, its colonial planning and allocations were largely intact. Cumballa and Malabar Hill, Kemp’s Corner, Breach Candy all on one side, and, on the other, the curve of the Marine Drive as it led towards Church-gate, Nariman Point, Cuffed Parade and the Gateway of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only the ministers’ houses were concentrated, but where the professionally qualified – corporate executives, doctors, orthopaedic and plastic surgeons, solicitors, newspaper editors – mainly lived with their families, with a small service industry of dieticians and beauticians at hand; the kind of people who had inherited from their colonial rulers flats, clubs, roads, specific residential and work areas, along with table manners, a certain intimacy with the English language, and a comparable distance from the less privileged around them. New, tall buildings would come up unexpectedly; their names would become famous – architectural celebrities in a city that loved celebrity and once even had a magazine of that name. With its sea-breeze, its year-long sun, its ambitions of upward mobility, this part of Bombay in the Sixties and Seventies could feel like a Californian city in the Fifties, where the notion of ‘having fun’ still existed within the constricting but benevolent circumscription of middle-class values.’‘

In 1978, a short while before Robyn Davidson returned to England to write Tracks, her book about ‘traversing the deserts of Australia through tribal Aboriginal land’, she visited India. ‘I don’t know how or why I ended up in the medieval lanes of Pushkar, in Rajasthan, during one of the most important festivals in the Hindu calendar. But I’m almost sure I was the only European around.’ (Things would not always be like this: soon, Goldie Hawn and others from Hollywood would arrive in Pushkar, expressing surprise and delight that people in India were so happy.) On the plane back to England, Davidson met, apparently by accident, a man called Narendra, ‘some sort of nobleman and some sort of politician’, who recognised that she was ‘the woman who walked across Australia with some camels’; it was Narendra who urged her to write a book on nomads she had seen in Rajasthan, the Raika or Rabari, who herd ‘camel and sometimes sheep’. The idea gestated for several years until she met Narendra again, at a party in London, ‘six inches shorter than I remembered him’. When he ‘reminded me of my promise to write about the Rabari and invited me to India as if it were the most unexceptional thing in the world, what could I do but agree?’ So she ‘wrote a proposal; suborned editors with that twilight-and-dune picture that had been mouldering in my mental attic; signed contracts’.