Articles

India, January 1999.
Here is my one traveller’s tip for those of you considering going to India: don’t tell anyone. Pretend you’re spending a fortnight with your decaying mother in Torbay, really. Announcing you’re going to India is like saying you’ve got a bad back: everyone has an address, has a cure. The very mention of India turns half your friends into travel Moonies. “You are going to Dhinki Dhoobre, aren’t you?” they say, with barely contained missionary zeal. “Well, you simply must rearrange everything.” I jest not. I had 20-page faxes of handwritten itineraries, imploring phone calls in the middle of the night, notes from strangers, the itinerant yogis of subcontinental tourism. And they all end with the same damning phrase: “If you’re not going to see the palace at Mollycoddle, then you’re not going to see the real India, and you might as well not bother.”

As if all India seen through western eyes isn’t sensationally unreal. I tried to imagine Indians saying to each other, “Well, of course, if you’re not going to Sheffield and the Arndale Centre then you’re not going to see the real England.” The rest of your friends, those who aren’t born-again sahibs, will say, “Oh, India, how wonderful, I’d love to go, but I don’t think I could face it, the beggars you know, how do you handle the poverty?”

India has an unassailable position at the head of the world’s poverty league. It is a perceived truth, an unarguable rubric, that this is the poorest country in the world. In the rich West, the implication is that to confront it, you need to have had a caring gland removed. It will be too much for sensitive, charitable folk, so best not to go, best not look. How do you cope with poverty is the most asked question about India – the best answer comes from Mark Tully, the veteran foreign correspondent, who lives in Delhi: “I don’t have to cope with the poverty; the poor have to cope with the poverty.” To which I would add that actually the poverty is what you and I go to see. Poverty is what formed India, made India what it is. If Indira Gandhi’s dream of a modern, thrusting, industrial tiger economy had been realised, and it had become a bigger Malaysia or Singapore, you wouldn’t be that interested. It’s the grinding lot of the vast majority that makes the opulence, the splendour, the architecture, the decoration, and the trappings of the princes and history so awesome.

Always in India you’re confronted with these juxtapositions of wealth and poverty; power and hopelessness; of sublime beauty and shocking ugliness. Everywhere you look there is binary metaphor, an encyclopaedia of contradiction, dichotomy and counterpoint. Indians, all Indians, are the cleanest people in the world; you see them washing in the morning and evening, like obsessive surgeons scrubbing up, and then they work all day in streets that are no more than baked open drains, with rooting pigs and mange-crippled dogs. It’s a contradiction. It’s a contradiction, it’s India.

Go to Agra – Agra is the one place the born-again sahibs back home will never recommend. “Oh well, of course, there’s the Taj Mahal,” they’ll say, “I suppose you want to see it. It’s wonderful, of course (they sigh), but spoiled.” Don’t believe it. Agra is an industrial military town, noisy and dirty, a real place where soldiers inhabit the old colonial officers’ quarters and the town is modern, in the sense that in India even things that were built yesterday have a look of ancient exhaustion. But it is also a place that has more bona fide world heritage sites than anywhere else on the globe: it was the capital of Mughal India. And sitting in the middle of it is the Taj Mahal, Shahjahan’s tomb for his beloved wife, but like everything in India, it’s not that simple. She was his second wife and she died in childbirth, and then one of her sons killed all his brothers, and locked old Shahjahan up in a castle till he died. From his terrace he got perhaps the best, most heart-rending view of his wonderful white tomb.

Everyone should see the Taj once. It is an absolute, there are few absolutes in this world, it is absolutely beautiful, absolutely stunning. Set in the corner of a garden laid out in Arab fashion, but – with Victorian confidence and hubris – replanted by the Victorians like an English country garden, the Taj sits against the sky on the middle banks of a river. Its absolute symmetry, the maths of perfection, is almost painful to contemplate. It is the most complete thing ever built by man and nothing can diminish it: not the queues; not the crowds; not the kitsch of endless reproduction and familiarity; not the sneers of Noel Coward or the epicurean India snobs; not the clicking lines of newlyweds waiting to be photographed on Princess Diana’s bench. Nothing can touch it and nothing adds to it; not moon-light, or dawn, or dusk, that’s just weather and light. If you go to India for just one thing, if you go to just one place abroad in your life, it should be the Taj.

The other place born-again sahibs will never recommend is New Delhi. Nobody does, even if they live there. Like Pretoria, Canberra and Washington, it’s a capital without a soul, only a name, because civil servants and embassies were dumped there, but, if for nothing else, Delhi is memorable for the finest example of English architecture. You’ll see Lutyens’ viceregal palace and its approach from India Gate, a red stone Arc de Triomphe which beggars the Champs Elysees, or the Mall, or any other street built by swagger and power. A mile away is Chowpatti Street in Old Delhi, where traders from all over India buy and sell wholesale. It’s a frantic stasis. The last word in free-market economics and capitalist chaos, it makes Cecil B De Mille look like Ingmar Bergman; to see the impossibility of organising India, coping with India, imposing a logic on India, Chowpatti Street is the answer.

Simla is a hill station – it was the summer residence of the viceroys – and it scampers up the nursery slopes of the Himalayas, surrounded by pine forests and vertiginous views. The town is like a cross between Godalming and Alice Springs, Tudorbethan home countries with corrugated tin roofs. A big billboard welcomes you to India’s Switzerland; well, Switzerland should be so lucky. Simla is now where the new Indian middle class comes to relax; we didn’t see another white face. Families who’ve done well out of foreign trade and old-fashioned metal bashing industry, avaricious for the West. The men don Pringle sweaters and Sta-Prest slacks, but again the contradiction; the women wear kurta pyjamas and saris. They make odd couples: the men look like dowdy, Sunday afternoon Milwaukee plumbers and the women splendidly, riotously Asian, and they promenade, as the Englishmen sahibs used to, to Scandal Point, where though, bigoted, disappointed paragons of empire had collected in covens to pass vicious gossip. The Indians are too polite, they smile and laugh and pass exaggerated compliments.

I came here in search of Kipling’s India. It’s here that Kipling’s father built an amateur theatre, and here, in the splendid Cecil Hotel, that Kipling wrote. It’s been lovingly restored to an imperial grandeur and comfort. I found a second-hand bookshop and curio dealer in a dark nook that could have been straight out of Kim, but the more you look, the further the stories and the ghosts slip away. Kipling’s India, I realised, only ever existed in the slow, damp afternoons of home counties vicarages. To search India for it is as pointless as looking for Graham Greene’s France. Kipling, after all, wasn’t looking for Kipling’s India, but I bear the literary baggage of empire and my family’s clubbable mythology of tea planting and pith helmets. India infected our souls far more than the Raj ever infected theirs. A polite and kindly people, Indians will say what they know you want to hear, that they are terribly grateful for the railways, and the post office, and the civil service – but how often do you think about your post office, or your railways, or your civil service?

The Raj hasn’t been wiped away on purpose with anger or resentment, it’s just sunk beneath the seething surface, beneath the daily grind for dhal and a few rupees. India’s poverty absorbs everything and uniquely reinvents it. Reincarnates it and decorates it. The vaunted babus and the civil service that we left behind have become an intricate, impossible filigree of forms, carbon paper, rubber stamps and towers of files. It’s as impossible to conceive constructing India’s civil service as it is building their temples.

Leaving Bombay airport, I collected nine separate rubber stamps, the last one applied with a grinning shrug to my hotel baggage label because there was nowhere left for it to go.

Walking around the pine-scented streets of Simla, I thought with what quite good manners the Indians had buried our lauded shared two centuries. How little was left – and then, from a parade ground somewhere below, a military band struck up a hymn, the sun was setting, catching the spire of the Surrey church, and the gables of the officers’ club, Gurkhas stood on starched guard, “rock of ages for me” words, and the years rolled back, and I was awash in a remembrance of things past, a reverie for a time and a life that I’d never actually lived, that existed only in print and celluloid, of burra pegs and punka wallahs, sepoys and redans. The ghostly echo of our finest hour – but only I felt it and that’s another thing about India: everything you can or want to dream is here, everything anyone tells you is true. It’s a place that accepts all visions, all interpretations, all are true, but none is the whole truth, like Hinduism, that most beguiling and infuriating of religions. It’s endlessly accommodating but rigidly fatalistic. It starts with a simple trinity and then there are 30 million, or 300 million, or 3,000 million lesser gods; I was told all three figures with absolute authority. India has a civil servant’s religion of numbing complexity and awful simplicity; no other country in the world believes this, or could afford it. You can’t convert to be a Hindu, you can’t join the reincarnation train halfway through its endlessly slow, circular journey. Plenty of westerners come, though, to pick through its jumble for something off the peg that fits; they do yoga as exercise, which is a bit like walking the stations of the cross as aerobics.

This is not an empirical, rational place. Here a spade is not a spade, it’s a two-man spade, it’s a two-man tool. One man holds the handle, the other pulls a rope tied to the blade, in 40º heat, I watched a pair of men, one with a small chisel, the other with a lump hammer, chip away at a rock the size of the Taj Mahal’s dome. They were planning on flattening it. It was a Sisyphean task of epic proportions that defied a normal life expectancy. But they worked with a slow rhythm of men who know that all life is just an illusion, there is only karma, only rhythmic chipping away at this existence in preparation for the next, when perhaps they’ll come back as a JCB.

Everybody agrees you must see Rajasthan, although again, born-again sahibs will recommend spectacularly inaccessible places. Travelling on Indian roads has a funfair-like, heart-in-the-mouth excitement. The gaily decorated lorries swerve across the rutted roads and all have the imperative “horn please” painted on the back. Eight or nine hours on the Asian equivalent of the wall of death, where you know that every other driver has the ethereal air bag of reincarnation for added confidence, is a little more nerve-jangling than most of us want on holiday.

Rajasthan is places and forts. In a remarkably short space of time they fuse together into a rummage of blinding opulence. You don’t lose the ability to be awed, just the ability to rise to the awesomeness. I’m sorry, my jaw has dropped as far as it will go and my eyes have reached the ends of their stalks. The guides’ mantra of impossible facts come round for the second, third, fourth time: “all from a single piece of marble, all laid by hand, all real gold, real silver, the biggest, longest, highest, most expensive”. It rolls over you like the blindingly reflected light, and the cumulative effect is of slowly being drowned in decadence. But there is none of the bated, reverential, national trussed-up preciousness of English country houses.

One place stood out for its contrapuntal oddness. A man in a hotel said we should see the largest gun on wheels in the world. Now, you know, I’d thought I’d give it a miss. The biggest gun on wheels in the world is not what I’d come to India for, but, somehow, we found ourselves there in front of it, a vast, ornate sewerage pipe on bossed wheels with a soldier asleep in its shadow. As uninspiring and unmemorable as anything you care to forget. But it was set in a place called Jagger Fort, a dilapidated 17th century barracks on the crest of a mountain, home to nesting pigeons, green parrots and langur monkeys. Scattered in its ruined, crumbling courtyards were mouldering Victorian barouches and state sedans, a fading theatre, an overgrown garden, a wall of curling, bleached photographs from durbars and forgotten polo games, all dozing in the heat. From the battlements you could see across Jaipur and out over the dun-coloured desert, kites and eagles hanging in the thermals and wild figs and banyans slowly, slowly pulling apart the teetering walls. It was a moment heavy with reverie.

The first time I came to India, 25 years ago, the rule was eat first. Public food was either poisonous or disgusting, often both. The biggest change in India is that you can eat Indian. The food in hotels is universally adequate, often good and frequently exceptional. Food on the street, though it looks enticing and smells better, is still just too risky to consider, not because the cooks are dirty, but because the vegetables by necessity are grown in human manure. Our soft western guts are just too vulnerable. Gastric liquidity is the second most commonly asked question about India, and indeed you should only travel with people who you feel comfortable talking stools to. Personally I will happily indulge in toilet talk for six or seven hours at a stretch. Indian food tends to be gassy – slow-cooked vegetables and pulses so you see lines of Dutch tourists who at every step sound like an RAF motorbike display. They wear expressions of pained concentration: farting in India is playing Raj roulette with the linen. I came away with the rarest of all tropical afflictions: constipation.

I finally found my Kipling connection in Bombay. I adore Bombay, a cross between New York and Gomorrah, the most exciting and walkable city in the world. I love the Mutton Street junk market and the red-light district with its filthy streets and brightly saried eunuchs and the chaos of Victoria station and the dhobi ghats, the biggest launderette in the world. The monsoon still lingered and in the afternoon there was a downpour. I’d been taken to see the house Kipling was born in, now an art school. Outside, in the teeming gutter, a small, naked child crouched and washed itself, its black hair cut roughly to the shoulder, the little body wriggled like an eel, and I was transported back to my grandmother’s house with its Benares brass, worn leopard skins and Turkey rugs and my favourite bedtime story with its wonderful frog, fishing in the Wainganga river, with taxis and scooters rushing past.

One last word on the poverty. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Bombay. They’re not as good at it, they don’t have as much reason, but there are more. And you will be bothered by more peripatetic salesmen in Morocco or Naples than in India. And if you’re really worried by poverty here, then allow yourself to be ripped off. Don’t argue with taxi drivers or curio sellers – you don’t start from an even bargaining position. The most cynically embarrassing thing to hear from born-again memsahibs is that the poverty is terrible but “do you like my shawl? I managed to beat him to half the price”.

India is a poor place but only in economic terms. On any other scale you care to think of, it’s rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Any fool country can have democracy and freedom of speech and a rudimentary social security system when they’ve got the cash, but to achieve these things when you don’t is humbling. India is that most miraculous of all modern states, a secular, democratic theocracy. And if we measure wealth in terms of any of the things that really matter – family, spirituality, manners, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, dexterity, culture, history and food – then India would be hosting the next G7 conference and sending charity workers to California. Of all the places you’ll never get to because of squeamishness, trepidation, laziness and dodgy bowel, India is by far and away your greatest loss.

In the frantic scurry and crush of Bombay’s railway, where there is a fatality every day, a man bumped into me. I mention this because it’s rare. Indians are dexterous in crowds. As our shoulders jarred, he touched his heart with his fingers. It’s a silent apology and prayer. There is a spark of God in all of us. He was saying sorry to his bit of the deity for bumping into mine. We may have given them the iron of the railways, but they filled it with 3,000 million gods.

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