Forever English

Renuka Narayanan

Remains of the Raj
By Anthony Wild
HarperCollins
Price: Rs 1100

The Indian renaissance and spooky hill stations: traces of the Raj are everywhere. But does anyone really miss those days?

A retired admiral and a retired general are several chhota pegs down. They are joined by an old Oxonian and an old boxwallah. All four harangue the geeky scion of another fauji family about his lamentable lack of interest in a military career. ‘‘The British left us four things,’’ drones the old sea dog in hawhaw accents. ‘‘The English language, the armed forces, the post and the railways.’’ Geek’s eyes glaze, he excuses himself and dives into a bacardi. ‘‘I’m going to America,’’ he says. ‘‘Why don’t they get real!’’

I’m peering into the famous Bug Pit at Bukhara in Central Asia where British spy John Connolly was kept by the Emir and finally decapitated for not converting to Islam. He was a player in the Great Game and the (now sanitised) Bug Pit is a hot tourist attraction. ‘‘Serves him right,’’ says a young Israeli. ‘‘What was he doing here, anyway, meddling in another country?’’

Tell that to celebrants of Empire. Author Antony Wild has re-examined the British legacy in India in a beautifully produced book with interesting photographs, plenty of charming anecdotes and lots of opinion. It explores the participatory intervention of the British in our geographical, cultural, military, economic and social history. Seven chapters take you from the origins of the East India Company to Peter Brooks’ Mahabharata.

But Wild stays on an observatorial howdah, though he did the adventure thing of spending three months on the Indus. For most of the book, especially his section on language, reads as though cobbled entirely from clippings. If he had spoken to Indians, he would have discovered living curiosities, like the enduring ‘‘Tamil’’ term for a freebie, OC (on company account), which comes from the glory days of John Company. Or how, after Persian, English has been the greatest source of new lexical items to Indian languages.

As for the rest, it’s mostly a series of yawns. The British dug up Moenjodaro from the sands, they reconstructed our past and connected one part of Hind to another. They mapped the subcontinent, brought in modern education as the West understood it, instituted the Indian Penal Code, outlawed thuggee and sati.

Now if only Wild had the guts to include the things we remember the British for. But there’s not a squeak about the Dhaka weavers’ thumbs, the millions the British took out as the ‘India Debt’, about the scurvy, small pox, plague and venereal disease they brought to our shores on their ships, about the Devadasi Abolition Act that felled entire sub-cultures at one stroke. Nor does he seem fully aware of our stupidity in not changing their rules. Leftover rules that keep the police our oppressors rather than servitors, laws that forbade dancing in temples (until 1991 with the first Chidambaram Nrityanjali festival).

So the Indian reader gets the impression that this is essentially a feel-good book for the Brits (certainly, the Scots and Irish, who mostly populated the Raj), though it is definitely a richly illustrated addition to the existing mountain of Raj nostalgia. (Pix of the Khyber Pass and the Indus are of abiding interest in India.) Nor does it seem to tell the reader anything earthshaking that is not already known, fully or partly.

But though he lapses into Tatlerese sometimes, Wild’s writing style is pleasant and crisp to read. His most compelling section, on the World Wars, highlights how many Indians freely enlisted to serve under the British. It does not acknowledge that Indian troops were sent in first waves as cannon fodder to the trenches at Flanders. It does air our pet peeve, however, that the Indian contribution in the Second World War (two and a half million soldiers) is yet to be honoured and publicly counted.

It is in the very last paragraph of his Epilogue that Wild links India and England. The affection that the elderly and the educated have for India, he says, is tied to their own loss of identity. It was on the fabulous stage of India that the English myths they admired in themselves shone: fair play, courage, charity. ‘‘After the curtain fell and the applause faded, they became a much diminished, ordinary people.’’