A farewell to India

Sometimes you read a book that has the power to change your views on a subject in a major way, and William Dalrymple's book 'The Last Mughal' had that effect on me. It shattered my understanding of India and in doing so, hit me hard in a very personal way. India had been my world for a year. To survive it, being able to cope with it, I built a mental shield against its debaucheries.

I suppose the slight sarcasm with which I sometimes described the particularities of Indian society were funny to read. For me however, commentating on the absurdity of it all was more than mere sarcasm: it was a way of surviving. I remember that during my first months in India, Gyda and me made fun of Indians by mimicking the British attitude. The Raj (colonial rulers of India) I had always found amusing, because of their slightly eccentric, pragmatic and snobbishly sarcastic way of treating the oddities in Indian life. Copying their attitude ('oh dear, another fakir, hope this one doesn't burn my chapals') makes you better able to stand the combination of dirt, hassle, prejudice, ignorance and alien aspects of Indian culture. Ridiculing the Indians gives a shield against them. So yes, I admit to nurturing an ethnocultural feeling of superiority. Ironically many Indians do the same thing against us westerners: the Post-modern Age has made them a very nationalistic people. The difference between them and me is that where my feeling of cultural superiority is the result of knowing the outside world, theirs is caused by total ignorance of the outside world. They don't know a world without overcrowding, public urination, littering, cow shit, con artists, or deep-rooted corruption. So they are unable to see the disadvantages of Indian culture. Which means their attitude is no excuse for mine.

Dalrymple's book shattered my ideas about the Raj. Of course, the British were oppressors, they had no right to rule India, just as the Dutch had no right to Indonesia, the Belgians to Congo or - to cite the obvious present day example - the Chinese to Tibet. Of course there was the massacre in Amritsar, and I had read of the way the British repressed the 'Mutiny' in 1858. Yet I supposed these things had been exceptions, committed by the odd idiot or crook official. The British had moreover brought some good things to India too, like a sound administration, fine infrastructure, the basics of good education, etc. They were oppressors yes, but they had at least. as exponents of European reason, humanism and enlightenment, held moral superiority over the Indians. They taught the Indians a moral and intellectual lesson or two and brought the country Modernity. The book taught me how wrong I had been. Not only did the British commit mass murder, Dalrymple shows very convincingly how the murders were caused by widespread ignorance of Indian culture, religious bigotry, open racism and bestial feelings of revenge. And there is more: there was a directed, intentional campaign for the eradication of India's cultural heritage: monuments were consciously demolished. The crimes were not committed by a few stupid officers, no. All levels of Britsh-Indian colonial society, from the highest officials to the lowest colonial worker, participated with glee. There goes your moral superiority.

(What is also shocking though, is the parallel it draws with the current European neo-fascism of Le Pen, Blocher and Wilders. The arguments and complaints against the Muslims in British India, 1858, were exactly the same as those put forward by European right-wing islamophobes today.)

Dalrymple's story centres on the city of Delhi, not my favourite place, to say the least. When people told me they had to go to Delhi I usually replied with 'I'm sorry for you'. Of course I never like or liked big cities, so I guess I had my reasons. Yet Dalrymple shows something I had already known but never fully thought over well. More than the other Indian megacities, it is Delhi that has an old, dusty, but very cultured and sophisticated soul. It was the centre of a cultured and tolerant Islamic society - the last remnant of Mughal Urdu culture (although religious bigotry of the orthodox Islamic variety was not absent). Any stroll through Old Delhi's bazaar can still bring you a little sense of that soul, even though the original old Delhi is gone. The British intentionally plundered and bulldozed it, murdered the population, destroyed a centuries old civilization. This was not in the 16th century, when the Spanish were committing similar crimes in the Americas. It was in 1858, only one generation before the first world war.

The mental shield I had built against India is now shattered. If I ever go back to India, I will have to do without and invent a new way to deal with it. Somehow, I think I will be up to the challenge. After all, I have come to love this part of the world, even though I do at times hate it too.