NO FULL STOPS IN INDIA

Mark Tully was born in Calcutta and educated in England. He worked for the BBC in South Asia for twenty-five years and now works as a journalist in New Delhi. Among the many major stories he has covered are the Bangladeshi war, Mrs Gandhi's State of Emergency, the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and Operation Blue Star – when the Indian army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. This operation and the Punjab problem was the subjects of his first book, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle, which he wrote with his colleague Satish Jacob. In 1987 he made the much-applauded radio series From Raj to Rajiv, which traced the story of India's forty years of independence and formed the basis of his second book. Of his books Penguin publish No Full Stops in India, The Heart of India and India in Slow Motion, which was co-written with his colleague and partner Gillian Wright.

In 1992 Mark Tully was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India, a rare honour for a foreigner. This puts him in the unusual position of being decorated by the Queen of Britain and the President of India.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Operation Black Thunder. Sikh militants taking aim from the Golden Temple at the police

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The greatest temptation journalists face is to regard the stories they write as their own. They are not: they are the stories of those who are involved in the events reported. It's not the journalist who is the hero, it's those who suffer the famines or floods, those who fight cruelty or oppression, those who govern and those who oppose them. Never do I feel this more strongly than when I walk away from natural disasters with the material recorded for what I know will be ‘a good story’, leaving the victims to their suffering.

Let me say from the start, then, that this book is not mine – it belongs to all the people whose stories I have told, and of course to India. It also belongs to those who helped in the telling. It belongs to Gillian Wright, on whom I relied from the time when we planned the book together to the final corrections. She travelled with me, shared the insights she has gained from her deep reading and long experience of India, did much of the research and took responsibility for much of the drudgery which inevitably goes with the final stages of producing a book. The book also belongs to many patient people at Penguin who put up with my procrastination and, when the stories rambled, brought me back to the straight and narrow. It belongs to my agent, Gill Coleridge, who arranged for Penguin to publish me and persuaded them that I would eventually deliver as the delays grew longer and longer. It belongs to the BBC, and particularly to Alan Hart, for arranging six months’ leave for me. It belongs to my colleagues in the Delhi office of the BBC, Satish Jacob and Avrille Turner, who have given me invaluable advice and help. And belongs to my wife, Margaret, and my family, who encouraged me to keep going.

The portrait of Ram Chander for Chapter 1 and photographs for Chapter 3 are reproduced by permission of Rajesh Bedi, those for Chapter 5 by permission of Pramod Pushkarna and India Today, that for Chapter 6 by permission of Saibal Das and India Today, and that in Chapter 7 by permission of Raghu Rai. My thanks to them all.

Mark Tully, June 1991

INTRODUCTION

‘How do you cope with the poverty?’ That must be the question I have been asked most frequently by visitors to India. I often reply, ‘I don't have to. The poor do.’ It's certainly true. I live a very comfortable life in Delhi, while the taxi-drivers who have lived opposite me for fourteen years have to sleep in their cars in the cold winter and on a charpai or light bedstead in the open during the hot weather. I have a three-bedroomed flat. The taxi rank is their home. My foreign guests expect the taxi-drivers to take them back to their hotels whatever hour of the night it may be. Before leaving, they will check the fare with me to make sure the taxi-drivers don't get a few more rupees than they are due. That's the way my guests usually ‘cope with the poverty’.

The crocodile tears that have been shed over India's poor would flood the Ganges, so there's no need for me to add my drop to them. No matter how much it may upset my guests, it's better to be honest and admit that I've learnt to live with India's poverty. The only excuse I can give is that I'm not alone in this: most prosperous Indians – and indeed the prosperous in all parts of the world – have learnt to live with the fact that millions of Indians live below what economists have defined as the poverty line. Millions more don't have adequate housing and sanitation. The fact that we, the fortunate of the world, still live with India's poverty is a scandal. India – which barely rates as a trading nation, which has no oil to export, which has no monopoly of any other essential commodity, which has not adopted a hostile ideology, which can threaten only its smaller neighbours – does not count in the capitals of the West. It ought to count if we really cared about coping with poverty.

The successful capitalist countries of the world are rejoicing in the downfall of communism, and in the West we are talking of the final triumph of our civilization as though it was now proved that there was no other way ahead but ours. But our civilization has still to show that it can provide for the poor of the world. A great deal of evidence indicates the opposite – that the West has harmed the poor and continues to harm them. After all, it was our civilization which left India a poor and backward country. A. Vaidyanathan writes in the Cambridge Economic History of India of the ‘impoverished economy’ which was the raj's legacy to India. He says, ‘Altogether the pre-independence period was a period of near stagnation for the Indian economy…. There was hardly any change in the structure of production or in productivity levels. The growth of modern manufacturing was probably neutralized by the displacement of traditional crafts, and in any case was too small to make a difference to the overall picture.’ It is also our civilization that India has tried to follow since independence, with results which certainly could not be described as a triumph.

There are many reasons why India in particular should make us in the West aware of how much remains to be done in the developing countries and of how many difficulties have still to be overcome before anyone speaks of triumph. One is obviously the size of the problem India faces. There are countries which are poorer than India, there are countries which have made far less economic progress, there are countries which don't have even the rudiments of a modern state, but there is none which has so many poor people. India's nearest rival in this respect is China, but the World Bank's World Development Report (1990) shows that there are more than twice as many poor people in India than in China, and more than four times as many extremely poor people.

China is a communist country but India is a parliamentary democracy – surely that's another reason why we should take the plight of India very seriously. China's achievements could mean that it is communism which will triumph in the war against poverty and democracy which will be defeated. I think that that is unlikely, but those who are now talking of the victory of freedom should perhaps ponder the strange fact that one of the freest countries in the world, which has made an all-out effort since independence to eradicate its legacy of poverty, has been much less successful in this than its communist neighbour. Of course India's achievements in some fields are more impressive than China's, but the fact remains that communism has provided better education, better health services and more food and clothes for its poor than democracy has.

In the Indian Express of 17 June 1990, the eminent Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote, ‘It is important to understand the élite nature of India to make sense of India's policies.’ He has, for example, compared India's success in providing higher education with what he has called ‘the shocking neglect of elementary education’. Why has giving every man a vote not meant the transfer of power from the élite to the majority who in India are undoubtedly the poor? I believe one of the main reasons is that India's élite have never recovered from their colonial hangover, and so they have not developed the ideology, the attitudes and the institutions which would change the poor from subjects to partners in the government of India. Democracy has failed because the people the poor have elected have ruled – not represented – them. The ballot-box is only the first stage in democracy.

If all that were wrong with India were a particularly bad hangover from the raj, there might well be room for optimism. After all, even the worst hangover evaporates eventually, and in the twenty-five years I have known the country I have seen many of the more obvious relics of colonial rule disappear. India is no longer a land dominated by brown sahibs imitating the ways of the white sahibs who used to rule them. But India is still a land dominated by foreign thinking, and I would suggest that that thinking is just as alien as the brown sahibs’. Colonialism teaches the native élite it creates to admire – all too often to ape – the ways of their foreign rulers. That habit of mind has survived in independent India.

India's most successful students no longer knock at the doors of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge: they now prefer Harvard or Yale. But what do they learn there which is relevant to their country? The scientists are versed in technologies aimed at reducing the role of human beings in production, although labour is India's greatest asset. The doctors want to practise medicine which provides the latest and most expensive techniques of healing individuals, whereas India's need is for public health, preventive medicine and simple cures which can be administered by paramedical staff trained inexpensively. The business-school graduates know how to administer complicated corporations with billion-dollar assets – the sort of corporations which will put out of business the small, labour-intensive and unsophisticated industries that India is officially committed to encouraging. All this is not surprising, because America is concerned about educating students to propagate the American way of life and keep its economy expanding.

What makes matters worse is the cultural imperialism of the West, an imperialism now strengthened by our success in the battle with communism. We don't need armies to hold down our modern colonies, we don't need viceroys to administer them on our behalf: our economic might holds them in captivity, and our apparent success ensures that they accept, if not enjoy, their slavery. Today most Indians see no alternative to our culture at the end of this century, just as their grandparents and great-grandparents saw no alternative to direct colonial rule at the start of the century.

The best way to destroy a people's culture and identity is to undermine its religion and its language. We, the British, did that as India's rulers and we continue to do that as part of the dominant culture of the world now. It is true that the British rulers of India were very cautious about Hinduism, especially after the Mutiny. Unlike some colonial powers, we did not attempt to convert India to Christianity. But we did create the impression that our religion was superior to Hinduism. As a child in Calcutta, I remember being told that Muslims were superior to Hindus because at least they did not worship idols.

At independence, India adopted the contemporary Western view that common sense dictates that religion be confined entirely to the personal domain and kept out of all public life – to put it at its kindest. What in fact the majority of people in the West have done is to consign religion to the rubbish bin. ‘Modern’ Indians inevitably follow our example, and anyone who does not believe in keeping religion out of all forms of public life is regarded as ‘communal’ – that is to say, totally biased in favour of his own religious community. The élite's so-called secularism inevitably degenerates into disrespect for religion. But the vast majority of Indians, who do not enjoy the benefits of modernity, still believe that religion is one of the most – if not the most – important factors in their lives. I have to admit to believing that the West is paying a very heavy price for its lack of religion, but it has made the economic progress to achieve other goals in life – ephemeral though they may be. What I think is manifestly wrong is to disturb the religious beliefs of those who have no hope of any other comfort, which is exactly what we have taught and are still teaching the Indian élite to do. Not surprisingly, this is producing a backlash in India – Hindu fundamentalism. The greatest Indian leader of the century, Mahatma Gandhi, was a deeply religious man, but he campaigned tirelessly against the excesses of his own religion, Hinduism – particularly the humiliation of Harijans or untouchables. At the same time, he knew the danger of ridiculing rather than reforming religion. He believed that, in India at least, politics needed religion. In his autobiography he said, ‘I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’

A central tenet of what passes for the post-religious ideal is the equality of all men. But, although all men may be equal in God's eyes, they can never be equal in the eyes of other men, and because of that basic flaw in the doctrine of egalitarianism we in the West now talk of ‘equality of opportunity’. The pursuit of equal opportunities for all has many achievements to its credit, but this ideal too is going to be realized only if there is another life after this one. Our differences of opportunity start the moment we are conceived. The gap widens as we live in different families, go to different schools, are inspired or bored by different teachers, discover or fail to discover our individual talents and are given or not given the resources to develop those talents. So it goes on throughout our lives. There will always be winners and losers. The alienation of many young people in the West and the loneliness of the old show the suffering that egalitarianism inflicts on those who do not win, the superficiality of an egalitarianism which in effect means equal opportunities for all to win and then ignores the inevitable losers. Imagine how many losers there must be in a country like India where many children have their physical and mental growth stunted by malnutrition, where many parents are forced to regard their families as economic assets to be exploited in the child-labour market as soon as possible and where education is often seen as a waste of time because it does not lead to jobs or a better life. Imagine also what would happen if egalitarianism and its companion individualism destroyed the communities which support those who start life with no opportunities.

For all that, the élite of India have become so spellbound by egalitarianism that they are unable to see any good in the one institution which does provide a sense of identity and dignity to those who are robbed from birth of the opportunity to compete on an equal footing – caste. Caste is obnoxious to the egalitarian West, so it is obnoxious to the Indian élite too. The Statesman, one of the daily papers of the English-speaking élite, recently published an article by Bernard Levin in which he told Indians what to think of the caste system. He said,

The roots of such evil [the caste system] go very deep; so deep that until very recent times those condemned through the accident of birth to occupy throughout their lives the lowest place (and in India the lowest place is low indeed) accepted their fate without any sign that they resented it or that they could and should have a different and better one. Many abominable cruelties have been practised on the low castes and tribes; at one time hardly a week went by without a Harijan being murdered because he had taken water from a well the use of which he was denied and thus polluted it.

This article was applauded by the English-speaking élite in India. One way to discredit any system is to highlight its excesses, and Levin is right to say that the caste system has many of these. But what the constant denigration of the caste system has done is to add to the sense of inferiority that many Indians feel about their own culture.

It would lead to greater respect for India's culture, and indeed a better understanding of it, if it were recognized that the caste system has never been totally static, that it is adapting itself to today's changing circumstances and that it has positive as well as negative aspects. The caste system provides security and a community for millions of Indians. It gives them an identity that neither Western science nor Western thought has yet provided, because caste is not just a matter of being a Brahmin or a Harijan: it is also a kinship system. The system provides a wider support group than the family: a group which has a social life in which all its members can participate. In the September 1989 issue of Seminar magazine, Madhu Kishwar, one of India's leading feminists, wrote, ‘Even though the survival of strong kinship and community loyalties has some negative fallouts the existence of strong community ties provides for relatively greater stability and dignity to the individuals than they would have as atomised individuals. This in part explains why the Indian poor retain a strong sense of self-respect.’ It's that self-respect which the thoughtless insistence on egalitarianism destroys. Madhu Kishwar also pointed out that the support system provided by kinship ties still provides greater social security than the combined effects of all the schemes that successive socialist governments have introduced to help the Indian poor. Every Indian government so far has thought it necessary to adopt socialism as its political creed, but none has tried to adapt that Western doctrine to the special needs of India.

The attack on Indian languages started in 1835 with what the Oxford History of India rightly describes as a ‘fateful decision’ by the governor-general, Lord Bentinck. He ruled that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science.’ He therefore directed that all funds available for education should be ‘henceforth employed in imparting to the native population knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language’.

The spread of English as an international language has given a new impetus to this onslaught on the languages of India. The upper echelons of Indian society regard English as one of the greatest gifts of the British. They have made it the language of the exclusive club they belong to, and parents who see half a chance of getting their children admitted to the club will make any sacrifice to provide an English-medium education for them. The élite are not concerned that English has impoverished Indian languages and stood in the way of the growth of an indigenous national language. They insist that English must be preserved as the common language of multilingual India, even though less than 3 per cent of the population have even a basic understanding of it. Yet the irony is that we, the British, laugh at India's zeal for our language, and Indian accents and Indian English have long been a fruitful source of jokes. In my many years with the BBC in India, I have often had contributors rejected because of their ‘thick accent’. ‘It's too Peter Sellers’, I am frequently told. I hear thick European accents on the World Service – accents which are certainly very difficult to understand on the crackly signal that reaches Delhi. I doubt that many BBC producers would tell a Frenchman that his accent was unacceptable: they are only too happy to find Frenchmen willing to speak our language. The French take an enormous pride in their own language: the still colonized élite of India do not.

India has followed Western economic thinking too. When socialism was in fashion, Nehru rejected Mahatma Gandhi's plea for development from the villages upward and concentrated on trying to create an industrialized nation through centralized planning. Now that the West has rejected socialism, the Indian élite talk of liberalizing the economy, making consumerism the engine of growth and allowing the wealth created to ‘trickle down’ to the poor. The irony is that, during the years when Rajiv Gandhi was liberalizing the economy, the growth in employment declined – and that's the growth rate that matters most in India.

An Indian friend of mine attended a conference at Oxford in the middle of the rejoicing over the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. When asked what he thought about the triumph of democracy, he replied, ‘I don't think it's democracy which has triumphed – it's consumerism. And that's a disaster for us.’ You have only to watch the advertisements on Indian television to see how successful consumerism is in India too, even though most Indians have no hope of buying the goods advertised. We, the advocates of consumerism, might not be too happy if the day ever came when they could buy the goods. The average Indian's annual consumption of commercial energy is the equivalent of 210 kilograms of oil. A Briton consumes the equivalent of 3,756 kilograms of oil. India's population is around 900 million. If each Indian were to start consuming the amount of commercial energy a Briton does, that would mean the world finding the equivalent of an extra 3,190 million tonnes of oil each year. Imagine what consuming that would do to the greenhouse effect, not to mention its effects on oil and other energy reserves.

Of course it's not just consumerism that has distorted the Indian economy: many of its ills can be blamed on socialist controls which have protected inefficient and often corrupt industrialists. But I don't think it's good enough to say that all would be well if India amended its policies, liberalized its economy and concentrated on competing in the world market rather than protecting its own market. That would mean massive investments going into products which few could afford. In spite of all the controls, investment is already slanted in favour of the élite. To take one example, private transport is beyond the wildest dreams of most Indians, but the streets of Delhi are nevertheless clogged up with Japanese-designed cars and scooters which can compete in the international market. For the less affluent there are only decrepit, outdated and fuel-inefficient buses quite incapable of providing an efficient service even if the roads were cleared for them. There has been no development of suburban railways worth the name, and not even any attempt to relieve the burden of the poor man's taxi-driver – the cycle-rickshaw puller. He does not enjoy the fruits of modern aerodynamics, metallurgy or engineering. His vehicle hasn't changed in the twenty-five years I have known Delhi – it's still inordinately heavy, and doesn't even have such modern aids as gears.

In its 1990 report on poverty, the World Bank suggested that those developing countries will be most successful which ‘promote the productive use of their most productive asset – labour’ and provide ‘basic social services to the poor’. Officially, India has spent the last forty or more years trying to do that. On paper, or in theory, it has not failed: laws have been passed and funds have been voted to provide social services. The failure has been in the implementation of the laws and the disbursement of the funds. To implement and supervise the laws and policies, the élite who dominate the administration would have to go into the countryside and become involved in the lives of the villagers, but they resist even being moved from the state capitals, where they enjoy the comforts of modern conveniences, to the district headquarters. There's an entertaining Hindi novel, Rag Darbari, about the futility of the government's efforts in the countryside. Its author, Shrilal Shukla, writes:

In the old days when the white men ruled India, the Rest Houses where they stayed while touring villages were built on river banks or in valleys, forests and mango groves – that is, wherever the poetry of Wordsworth, Rabindranath Tagore or Sumitranandan Pant came to mind. Such things as dust and bustle, cholera, smallpox and plague, starvation and poverty, ugliness, bad manners and unpleasantness found it very difficult to reach them…. Now there have been hundreds of experiments in which brown sahibs have gone from the town to the country, stayed in a village for a few days, drunk the local water and returned alive and kicking without any contagion or disease. By means of jeeps which stir up typhoons of dust day and night, one thing has been settled – India, which until now had been located in the towns, is spreading into the villages.

The cynical Shrilal Shukla was himself a member of the élite cadre of government servants – the Indian Administrative Service. He knows how experimental the stays in the villages have been, and how administrators leap into their jeeps at the earliest possible moment to rush back to their comfortable quarters in some government compound and clear the dust from their lungs with purified water, aerated soft drinks or stronger medicines.

If an industrialist does take advantage of the various tax and other concessions available to those who venture into the countryside, he will import all his key employees from the cities and provide them with houses, schools and health centres so that they do not have to interact with the locals or take any interest in improving their facilities. Very often all the locals get is jobs as cleaners and a little trade. Until administrators, doctors and teachers spread out from the cities and settle in the countryside, no end of investment in school buildings or health centres will provide the effective social services which the World Bank rightly says are so essential for balanced development.

The failure to deliver has brought democracy into disrepute. During the 1989 general election, I asked a labourer who he was going to vote for. He replied, ‘What does it matter? Whoever I vote for will put my vote in his own stomach.’ Disillusionment with politicians has spawned its own vocabulary. One phrase which has gone straight into Hindi without translation is ‘vote-bank’. It means the politician's practice of trying to build up the support of a caste or religious community by making promises specific to its members – promises that are not fulfilled. Another telling usage is the word ‘kursi’ or ‘seat’. In political terms, this is the seat on which an office holder sits, and has come to signify the unscrupulousness with which a politician fights for that seat and the tenacity with which he sticks to it if successful. Then there is ‘Aya ram gaya ram’, or ‘He's just come and he's gone.’ That describes the many politicians who change their parties with each fluctuation in their political fortunes. A ‘note chapne ka machine’, or a currency-note printer, refers to a scheme involving large sums of money from which the politician will take his cut. Most political pundits credit the Indian voter with great wisdom because he has consistently thrown out politicians who fail to perform, but the system does not seem to allow anyone to make radical changes, so the time will surely come when the Indian voter will lose faith in the system too.

India has shown that democracy alone is not enough – nor, incidentally, is economic growth. What are required are politics and a political system which are relevant to India's past traditions and present circumstances. In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, the political scientist Michael Oakeshott wrote, ‘Those societies which retain, in changing circumstances, a lively sense of their own identity and continuity (which are without hatred of their own experience which makes them desire to efface it) are to be counted fortunate, not because they possess what others lack, but because they have already mobilized what none is without and all, in fact rely on.’ The élite who dominate modern India believe that all that's good comes from outside and are certainly not without ‘hatred of their own experience’ but do ‘desire to efface it’. We in the West do not hate India's experience: we despise it and believe that what we have to offer is far superior. As satellite television spreads, it will be even harder for the many courageous but uninfluential Indians who realize the rightness of Oakeshott's words to fight the pressure from outside. They will become more and more marginalized. It's my belief that if we are really serious about coping with India's poverty we too have to show far greater respect for India's past and perhaps even learn from it ourselves, for we have still not shown that we have the answers to poverty. We must be aware that our way of life is encouraging thinking and policies which increase poverty and instability in the less prosperous parts of the world. Development is more than mere economics.

I am well aware that I will be accused of advocating a return to some golden age of India which never existed. Many will say I am trying to drag India backwards – to deny it the fruits of modern science and technology and to rob it of the freedom of democracy. Such critics are, I believe, in effect accepting the claim that there is now only one way: that Western liberal democracy has really triumphed. Of course India must live in today's world, and its citizens must feel that they are progressing and prospering. India must keep abreast of all the latest knowledge, but it must adapt that knowledge to its own problems, it must build on its own traditions and beliefs. In The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi is quoted as saying, ‘My Swaraj [self-rule, or independence] is to keep intact the genius of our civilization. I want to write many new things but they must all be written on the Indian slate. I would gladly borrow from the West when I can return the amount with decent interest.’

It should be possible for India to preserve its own genius and to build a nation according to its lights, for, as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who became India's second president, said in his edition of the Upanisads, ‘The characteristic genius of the Indian mind is not to shake the beliefs of the common man but to lead them by stages to the understanding of the deeper philosophical meaning behind their beliefs.’ But the Western world and the Indian élite who emulate it ignore the genius of the Indian mind. They want to write a full stop in a land where there are no full stops.

The stories I tell in this book will, I hope, serve to illustrate the way in which Western thinking has distorted and still distorts Indian life – I might almost say they are parables. They provide no answers to India's poverty, but I believe they do suggest where we should begin to look for those answers – in India itself.

RAM CHANDER'S STORY

Bed tea or chota hazari (small breakfast), as we used to know it when I was a child in Calcutta during the last days of the raj, is one of the luxuries of my life in India. It's one I would be able to appreciate more if I had the self-discipline not to drink until eleven o'clock or so at night, eat a vast dinner and then go straight to bed, even though I know my digestion will only just be starting to cope with such excesses when the time comes for me to get up. Waking up would be easier if I had a more old-fashioned servant: some of those who lived here during the raj have admitted that they knew it was time to get up when they felt their cheek and realized they had been shaved. My Ram Chander's banging on the door is not much more kindly than the hammering of the corporal's baton at the end of my bed when I was in the army.

Ram Chander, or ‘Chandre’ as I have come to know him, is not one of those smooth, smart, silent, servants of the raj. He would stand, if he ever stood straight, about five foot four. He doesn't stoop, but he always seems to lean – perhaps because anything akin to a straight line is abhorrent to him. No amount of encouragement will make him eat three meals a day, so he is thin almost to the point of emaciation. He caught smallpox as a child, and so his face is pockmarked and one eye is covered by a glaucous film. Whatever clothes he wears become instantly crumpled, and his hair, although thinning, has a will of its own. Chandre speaks no English, for which I am to blame since I have never made any effort to teach him – in this city of snobs, I don't want to lose one of the few opportunities I get to practise my Hindi.

It would be surprising if Chandre were a Jeeves, because he comes from a caste which is not normally promoted beyond the lowest ranks of the servants' quarters – he is from the bhangi or sweeper caste, at the bottom of even the Harijan caste hierarchy. But Chandre is no upstart; the success he has made of his life has not gone to his head. I can imagine that in these egalitarian days many will regard it as the height of condescension for me to describe his becoming my servant as a success, but that is the way Chandre looks on it because he is a lot better off than most people from his village.

Condescension is a trap which anyone who writes about his servant can easily fall into. The word ‘servant’ itself shocks liberal consciences, but that is what Chandre is. So why do I want to write about him? One reason, of course, is because I think that I have a good story to tell. I also hope that his story will show those who have a horror of the caste system that a Harijan is a human being. Ever since Mahatma Gandhi awoke India and the world to the suffering of Harijans, they have been much pitied. But all too often those whom we pity become pitiable. Our concern, our anger about their plight, denies them humanity. Above all, I hope that I am paying a tribute to the affection that Chandre and I have for each other.

Chandre does not know the year of his birth. That's not uncommon in an Indian village, where life is still not measured exactly in ages – the ages for joining and leaving school, the legal age for marriage, or even the legal age to vote. These all exist in law, of course, but rural India has never been a great respecter of that. All that Chandre does know is that he was still a child when the jhagra or troubles took place.

The troubles – the partition riots of 1947 – found Chandre and his mother in Lahore. His mother was working as a sweeper in a lunatic asylum. Chandre told me, ‘My father was not alive by then. He was a big strong man, like you, but he died about a year after I was born. He died in one minute, at night.’ Chandre did not know what had happened in that minute.

I asked Chandre what he remembered of the bloodshed in Lahore. He replied with his usual brevity, ‘Much rioting.’

Lahore, the magnificent capital of Punjab, became part of Pakistan after partition, and Hindus like Chandre's mother fled to Delhi. No one knows exactly how many fled or how many Muslims tried to make their way to Pakistan in what must surely have been one of the greatest upheavals of history. About half a million people were killed, many of them butchered in trains. Chandre and his mother were lucky. He remembers that the train journey from Lahore to Delhi, a distance of about 300 miles, took several days. He also remembers a mob stopping the train.

‘On the way, near the start of the journey, someone attacked the train. I don't know who. The carriage was crowded, great big men were weeping, we were all scared. We shut all the windows and doors, and I hid under a seat. Then the military came and we reached Delhi safely.’

After that adventurous beginning to his life, Chandre could well have just settled down to being one of millions of Harijans working on the land in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. His village is Molanpur, post office Gavvan – a villager always describes his home by his local post office – district Badayun. It is about four hours' drive from Delhi. Chandre's family was better off than most Harijans because they did own some land. According to Chandre, his grandfather had at least ninety bighas (fifteen acres) but he lost a lot of that to the Ganges, which meanders where it likes through the soft soil. His uncle was still farming about fifty bighas when Chandre was a boy, grazing the buffaloes and goats. His mother used to make ghi, or clarified butter, from the buffaloes' milk and sell it in the bazaar at Gavvan, only a mile away by foot. As soon as he was strong enough, Chandre was taught to plough with bullocks. Then he worked the year round in the fields – sometimes his family's and sometimes other people's which his family had taken as share-croppers, sharing the produce with the owners on a fifty–fifty basis.

Chandre was perfectly happy. ‘Farm work goes on twelve months of the year. We lived well and I was never hungry.’

‘What about school?’ ‘I asked Chandre when I was trying to piece together the story of his childhood.

There was actually a school, I discovered later, but it didn't teach much which seemed relevant to working on the land, and Chandre had no other ambitions at that time.

I imagined there had been some massive dispute over land which had driven Chandre out of his village. But not at all – it was a sudden storm, although it must have been brewing for some time.

‘I left home because I argued with my mother. She told me to go, otherwise why should I go?’

Extracting information from Chandre was trying my patience, so I said rather irritably, ‘Chandre, I don't understand. What was the row about? Surely your mother didn't just get angry for no reason at all.’

That at last got Chandre going. ‘Well no. One evening I returned home to find the buffaloes and bullocks lowing because they hadn't been fed. I said that my cousin should give the buffaloes green fodder. I said that I spent the whole day working in the fields and what I brought home everyone ate, so why couldn't my cousin at least look after the animals and give the fodder. My mother said, “If you leave the house there'll be no fighting.” That night I was sleeping in the fields while the maize was growing, to keep away the wild animals. In the field I thought, “My mother has never spoken to me like this in the whole of my life and so I should go.” I left the next morning from the fields and no one knew that I had gone. No one knew where I had gone. I had eighty rupees with me and the clothes I was wearing.’

It is quite possible that Chandre would have cooled down and returned to his village to make peace with his mother had he not met a member of his biradari or subcaste on the road – described by Chandre as one of his relatives. Chandre has an army of so-called relatives, who are always demanding his attendance at weddings, funerals or other family occasions. He asked Chandre where he was going, and Chandre replied without thinking, ‘To find work.’

His relative said, ‘But you have work in your village and you have land, so why do you want to go outside.’

Then Chandre told him the story about his mother. His relative replied, ‘Your mother should not have spoken like that. You have done right. You can come with me – I have work in Delhi.’

So Chandre arrived in the capital of India with just the clothes he was standing up in and his eighty rupees. His relative was living in what is known as a jhuggi-jhonpri, that is a cluster of one-roomed shacks normally consisting of mud walls and rusty corrugated-iron roofs. Even someone as short as Chandre could not stand up inside the jhuggi. The jhuggi-jhonpri had sprung up on the edge of a construction site because, as usual, the contractors had made no attempt to house the migrant labourers building in this case a hospital. Chandre's relative was working as a labourer, carrying sand and bricks on his head.

The next day, Chandre's relative sent him off to buy atta or flour for making chapattis, but Chandre was never to return. It wasn't that he didn't want to return – he had nowhere else to go and was very grateful to his relative – but he just got lost. When I asked Chandre how he could have got lost when there must have been plenty of atta shops nearby and plenty of people to ask the way back to the construction site, Chandre replied, ‘I crossed the road to the shop, bought the atta and then forgot the way.’

‘But it must have been a big construction site. Some people must have known the way back to it,’ I said.

‘Yes, it was a big site, but I didn't know what to ask for. I had only arrived the night before, so I didn't know. I wandered around all day and in the evening I found myself in Akbar Road.’ Akbar Road is one of the tree-lined avenues of the original New Delhi. Its colonial bungalows set in large gardens are occupied by ministers, senior civil servants and service officers. Chandre must have walked a long way from north Delhi to get to this, the most sought-after part of the capital. The burra sahibs of independent India live like their colonial predecessors in an artificially sanitized zone, removed from all the discomforts suffered by the people they are governing or administering. Chandre was overcome by the alien orderliness of it all.

‘There were no people on the streets, no shops. So I finally realized that I was completely lost and there was no one to ask. It was getting dark, I had nowhere to go, so I just sat down by a rubbish heap and started to cry. I couldn't think of anything else to do.’

‘No. You remember our dhobi [washerman], Sohan Lal? A friend of his came by and asked me why I was crying. He said, “Don't worry. Come with me,” and that night he gave me food and a place to sleep. He asked me my caste and I said I was a bhangi. But he didn't mind. He was a dhobi.’

‘No, there was nothing like that. I didn't feel like that. I spoke to Sohan Lal and his family and they didn't let me feel anything.’

I was a little surprised by this, so I said, ‘Sohan Lal's family had absolutely no reason for taking you in. You were not related. They didn't know your family. They didn't come from the same area.’

‘No, they just felt sorry for me when I told them that I had arrived in Delhi the night before, had been told to go and buy atta and had got lost. They said, “You stay here until you find your relative, otherwise you will die.”’

Chandre could well have died or got lost in the underworld of Delhi if Sohan Lal's family had not taken pity on him. To this day, Chandre remains a very nervous traveller. Recently he was sent by train to Allahabad to meet me. Before I left, I assured him that the Prayagraj Express terminated at Allahabad, but a tired Chandre told me he had sat up all night in case he missed the station.

Sohan Lal's family lived in the servants' quarters at the back of a large compound in Akbar Road. A senior naval officer called Nayar was living in the bungalow – he must have been an admiral to qualify for such spacious accommodation. Chandre was taken to see Nayar Sahib the next morning. Nayar telephoned a friend who was looking for a sweeper and suggested that he took on Chandre. But Chandre once again failed to reach his destination.

‘Nayar Sahib's sweeper told me to go behind the Ashoka Hotel where I would find a house and to ask there about the job. There was no house – just a big hotel – so I wandered round all day and then luckily found my way back to Nayar Sahib's house in the evening.’

‘He called the dhobi and asked him whether I got the job. The dhobi told him that there was no house where the sweeper had sent me. So the sahib called in the sweeper and asked him why he had told me to go to the wrong place. The sweeper said he had gone for the job himself – I suppose it was better paid. Anyhow, Nayar Sahib got very angry with the sweeper and said, “This man will work here now.”’

Chandre worked for Nayar Sahib for five years – or at least that is as he remembers it: I am a little doubtful whether a senior naval officer would have remained in one posting for so long. Anyhow, it was during Nayar Sahib's time that Chandre met and married his wife. Under normal circumstances Chandre's marriage would have been arranged for him by his family and the biradari or subcaste, but he had not had any contact with his village since he had arrived in Delhi. So it was that Nayar Sahib acted as the head of Chandre's biradari – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his marriage-broker. It all happened very suddenly, as Chandre explained in his laconic way.

‘A man was running off with a girl in Nayar Sahib's time. He came to the compound where I lived. We were all on duty, so the women asked him who he was, where he had come from, what caste he was. He got frightened and ran away. Perhaps the police were after him. He left the girl behind and didn't come back. Then, after some days, all the compound people – the dudh-wallah [milkman], the mali [gardener], the dhobi and all the rest of them – went to the sahib. He called the girl. She told him she had no relatives in Delhi and was not married. The compound-wallahs suggested the marriage. The sahib asked if she wanted to stay with me. So it was fixed.’

‘I can't remember. The sahib took us to a navy place in his car where we had an official marriage and put our thumbprints on the papers.’

Chandre did not bother to find out about the man who had brought his wife to the compound.