India in Britain

Also by Susheila Nasta:

HOME TRUTHS: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora

WRITING ACROSS WORLDS: Contemporary Writers Talk

India in BritainSouth Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950

Edited by

Susheila Nasta

Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Susheila Nasta 2013Individual chapters © contributors 2013Foreword © Nayantara Sahgal 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataIndia in Britain : South Asian networks and connections, 1858–1950 /edited by Susheila Nasta.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Indic literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. South Asian literature(English)—History and criticism. 3. East Indians—Great Britain. 4. English literature—East Indian authors—History and criticism. 5. Books and reading—Great Britain. I. Nasta, Susheila.PR9485.3.I48 2013820.9'954—dc23 2012034945

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 122 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

ISBN 978-1-349-35201-2 ISBN 978-0-230-39272-4 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9780230392724

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-39271-7

To the memory of my father Kanayalal Nasta

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vii

Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgements xi

Notes on Contributors xiii

Foreword: The Importance of Strangers xviiNayantara Sahgal

Introduction 1Susheila Nasta

1 The Zigzag Lines of Tentative Connection: Indian–BritishContacts in the Late Nineteenth Century 12Elleke Boehmer

2 Writing Empire, Fighting War: India, Great Britain andthe First World War 28Santanu Das

3 Tracing the Legacy of an Experimental Generation: ThreeIconic Indian Travellers in 1890s London 46Alexander Bubb

4 Forging Global Networks in the Imperial Era: Atiya Fyzee in Edwardian London 64Siobhan Lambert-Hurley

5 ‘A Mosque in London worthy of the tradition of Islam andworthy of the capital of the British Empire’: The Struggleto Create Muslim Space, 1910–1944 80Humayan Ansari

6 Crafting Connections: The India Society and theFormation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth- Century Britain 96Sarah Victoria Turner

7 Dialoguing with Empire: The Literary and Political Rhetoric of Sarojini Naidu 115Chandani Lokuge

8 ‘Best Sellers’: India, Indians and the British Reading Public 134Madhumita Lahiri

9 ‘A Flute of Praise’: Indian Theatre in Britain in the EarlyTwentieth Century 149Colin Chambers

10 Calling from London, Talking to India: South Asian Networks at the BBC and the Case of G. V. Desani 164Emma Bainbridge and Florian Stadtler

11 ‘Civilizing Sabu of India’: Redefining the White Man’sBurden in Twentieth- Century Britain 179Jacqueline Gold

12 Connective Tissue: South Asians and the Makingof Postcolonial Histories in Britain 194Antoinette Burton

Select Bibliography 207

Index 217

viii Contents

ix

List of Figures

2.1 The Memorial Pavilion (Chattri) flanked by the Memorial Gates,Hyde Park, London. Courtesy Santanu Das 28

2.2 Papers and trench artefacts, Dr J. N. Sen, including a pair of broken, bloodstained glasses. Dupleix House, Chandernagore,West Bengal, India. Courtesy Santanu Das 30

2.3 Party of recruits 2nd Lancers at preliminary musketry drill(Q52675). By permission Imperial War Museum 31

2.4 ‘Terror by Night: Our Gurkhas at Work’, The War Illustrated, 7 November 1914 36

2.5 Unveiling ceremony of the Memorial tablet with names of 53 Sikh and Hindu soldiers at Sussex Downs, Brighton Chattri,2010. Courtesy Santanu Das 43

3.1 Gandhi in professional dress, 1904, wearing badge of theLondon Vegetarian Society. National Gandhi Museumand Library, Rajghat, New Delhi 49

3.2 Swami Vivekananda in London, 1895. Courtesy RamakrishnaVedanta Society of Massachusetts 56

4.1 Atiya Fyzee in a press photo from 1942. From her appearance, it may be assumed that it was an older photograph. CourtesySiobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma 65

4.2 A party held by Syed Ali Bilgrami and his wife in Cambridge (1907). Atiya is stood in the back row (second from left), whileIqbal is seated in the centre (third from left) and Abdul Qadiris seated on the right (second from right). Courtesy Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma 72

4.3 Students and staff at Maria Grey Training College, 1905–7. Atiyais sat on the ground in the front row (third from the right).Unfortunately, there is no way of identifying her British friendsamong the other students and staff members. Courtesy BrunelUniversity Archives 75

5.1 An artist’s impression of Woking Mosque. Mirror of BritishMerchandise 1890s. Courtesy of British Library Board 83

6.1 Charles Robert Ashbee, Press mark for the Essex House Press. InAnanda Coomaraswamy, Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: tEssex House Press, 1908). Courtesy British Library Board 101

6.2 Princess with lotus , Sigiriya, in Ananda Coomaraswamy,Indian Drawings, series one (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1910). Courtesy British Library Board 102

6.3 Plate XI in E. B. Havell, Ideals of Indian Art (London: J. Murray, t1908). Courtesy British Library Board 107

6.4 Frontispiece, drawing of Rabindranath Tagore by William Rothenstein, in Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: Macmillan, 1913). Courtesy The Bridgeman Art Library 110

6.5 William Rothenstein, Rabindranath Tagore, 1912. Pencil onpaper. Courtesy Tate/The Bridgeman Art Library 111

7.1 Frontispiece photograph of poet, The Bird of Time, 1912.Courtesy British Library Board 118

7.2 Sarojini Naidu and Mahatma Gandhi in Britain.Illustrated London News, 19 September 1931. CourtesyBritish Library Board 127

9.1 Margaret Mitchell as Amina and Kedar Nath Das Guptaas Dalia in The Maharani of Arakan, 1915(image by Walter Benington) 154

9.2 Cover of the programme for The Goddess, 1922, designed by Mukul Dey. Courtesy of Mukul Dey Archives, India and Victoria and Albert Museum, London 159

11.1 Sabu as Toomai. Elephant Boy. Dir. Robert Flaherty andZoltan Korda. London Film Productions, Dent 1937.Courtesy British Library Board 189

x List of Figures

xi

Acknowledgements

India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950 wasfirst conceived at the final conference of an interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Making Britain: South AsianVisions of Home and Abroad’ (AHRC Bid Reference AH/E0009859/1)which I directed on behalf of the Open University in collaboration withthe University of Oxford, King’s College, London, the British Library andSALIDAA (South Asian Literature and Arts Archive) from 2007–10. I wouldlike to thank many of the contributors to this volume for their participationat ‘Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain’ held at the British Library in September 2010 and all for their patience during the editorial process.Special thanks are also due to the Making Britain research team, especiallyRozina Visram whose scholarship as pioneering historian of Asians inBritain substantively helped to develop and progress the project, EllekeBoehmer, who as the main co-investigator contributed a wealth of experi-ence and generously shared ideas throughout, Ruvani Ranasinha, RehanaAhmed, Sumita Mukherjee and Florian Stadtler. The project would not havegenerated as much interdisciplinary interest across the Humanities without the valuable support of a distinguished group of advisers, consultants andinternational scholars; especially again Rozina Visram, major consultant,Penny Brook, Lead Curator of the India Office Records at the British Library;Richard Bingle, Lyn Innes, Partha Mitter, Deborah Swallow, Sarah Turnerand Rupert Arrowsmith. The book has also benefited immensely from thegenerous input of a wider body of international scholars and writers, manyof whom were key speakers at the conference: Humayan Ansari, AntoinetteBurton, Santanu Das, Michael Fisher, Chandani Lokuge, Shyama Perera,Nayantara Sahgal and Meera Syal.

Although primarily stemming from ‘Making Britain’, the ideas for this book were further developed and consolidated as a result of a 2011–12 follow- onpublic engagement project ‘Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections1858–1950’, which took an exhibition tour to seven cities in India. Although funded primarily by the AHRC (Bid Reference AH/J003247/1), it also gainedsubstantial support from the Open University, the British Library, the WorldCollections Fund, the British Council in India and the National Archives of India. Above all I have continued to gain inspiration from my numer-ous exchanges with Penny Brook, Rozina Visram, and Florian Stadtler as well as through the responses of public audiences in India and Britain. Thiswas made possible by jointly hosted events with new partners, the BritishCouncil, the National Archives of India, the V&A and the British Museum.

Much of the editorial process took place, perhaps appropriately, between India and Britain in 2011–12. The fruition of this book would not havebeen possible without the crucial support of a number of individuals and colleagues who commented on chapters, assisted with the copy- editingprocess, helped with securing permissions for illustrations and simplyenabled me to find the time to actually complete it. Here I must thank theOpen University for allowing me to take Study Leave, Glenda Pattendenfor initial copy-editing which has been invaluable, Paula Kennedy andBen Doyle at Palgrave, the anonymous Palgrave readers, Jo North, RachelGoodyear, as well as the long-suffering team in the Wasafiri office who have coped with the long absences this year of the Editor. Finally, I must as always thank my partner, Conrad Caspari and my children Alexander and Maya Caspari who have ferried cups of tea and made dinners.

xii Acknowledgements

xiii

Notes on Contributors

Humayun Ansari is Professor of Islam and Cultural Diversity and Director of the Centre for Minority Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author of The Emergence of Socialist Thought Among North IndianMuslims, 1917–1947; ‘Pan Islam and the Making of Early Muslim Socialists’;‘Islam in the West: 1800 to the Present’; ‘Attitudes to Jihad, Martyrdom and Terrorism among British Muslims’; ‘The Infidel Within’: Muslims in Britain Since 1800; and Managing Cultural Diversity at Work. He is currently prepar-ing a scholarly edition of the Minutes of the London Mosque Fund and theEast London Mosque Trust: 1910–51, and was awarded an OBE in 2002 forservices to higher education and race relations.

Emma Bainbridge works at the University of Kent. Her doctoral thesis was on the work of G. V. Desani and his contribution to postcolonial litera-ture. She was editor of the special issue ‘Connecting Cultures’, Third World Quarterly (2005), republished as a book by Routledge (2008).y

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at OxfordrUniversity. She is author of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005); Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002); Stories of Women (2005); andthe biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She has published four novels, Screensagain the Sky (1990); y An Immaculate Figure (1993); Bloodlines; and Nile Baby(2008); and the short story collection Sharmilla. Other publications include Empire Writing (1998); g Scouting for Boys (2004); Terror and the Postcolonial(2010; co-edited with Stephen Morton) and The Indian Postcolonial (2010; co-edited with Rosinka Chaudhuri). She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad’ (2007–10).

Alex Bubb studied English at Oxford University before taking a Master’sin South Asian History. As Senior Scholar at Hertford College, his DPhil project, ‘The Last Romantics’, is a comparative study of Rudyard Kipling andW. B. Yeats as parallel literary lives. He also has a longstanding interest in the activities of Indian émigrés in London and Oxford during the colonialperiod.

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois. Trained as a Victorianist, she has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth- century Britain and the relationship of empire to the nation and the world. The topics of women, gender and sexuality are central to her research, much of whichhas concerned Indian women in the imperial and postcolonial imagination.

She has edited collections about politics, mobility, postcolonialism andimperialism including, most recently, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (2011). The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 2010–11, she is currently engaged in a compre-hensive study of empire on the ground in the nineteenth century.

Colin Chambers is Professor of Drama at Kingston University. A former journalist, drama critic and literary manager of the Royal ShakespeareCompany (1981–97), he co- wrote Kenneth’s First Play and y Tynan withRichard Nelson (1997 and 2004 respectively); and was Associate Director onNelson’s Madame Melville (Vaudeville, 2000); and Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis(National Theatre, 2008, Paris, 2009). He adapted Molière’s The Learned Ladies (with Steven Pimlott, 1996); and selected and edited Three Farces by John Maddison Morton (Orange Tree, Richmond, 2011). His books include: The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre (editor and contribu-tor, 2002); Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution(2004); Here We Stand: Politics, Performers and Performance – Paul Robeson,Isadora Duncan and Charlie Chaplin (2006); and Black and Asian Theatre inBritain: A History (2011).y

Santanu Das was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and St John’sCollege, Cambridge (where he was also a research fellow). He currentlyteaches at King’s College London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006); and editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2011), and theg Cambridge Companion to First World War Poetry(forthcoming). He is currently completing a monograph provisionally titledIndia, Empire and First World War Culture.

Jacqueline Gold is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her dissertation, ‘Moving Images: India onBritish Screens, 1917–1947’, explores British audiences’ reception of filmsabout India prior to Indian independence. She has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and her research has been supported by theInstitute of Critical International Studies at Emory University, the AmericanHistorical Association, and the Council for European Studies.

Madhumita Lahiri is currently a Mellon postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Brown University. Her research is broadly locatedwithin postcolonial studies with particular interests in South Asian litera-ture and film. She received her PhD from Duke University after which shewas Fellow at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand. She has published in Social Dynamics, Feminist Africa andCallaloo.

Siobhan Lambert- Hurley is Senior Lecturer in Modern History atLoughborough University. Her research focuses on women, gender and

xiv Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors xv

Islam in South Asia. She currently leads an AHRC research network on‘Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies’ (http://www.waiis.org). Her publications include Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (2007); A Princess’s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum’s Account of Haj (2007); Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the ColonialExperience in South Asia (co-edited with Avril A. Powell) (2006); and Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (withSunil Sharma) (2010).

Chandani Lokuge is Associate Professor of English and Director of theCentre for Postcolonial Writing at Monash University. Among ChandaniLokuge’s 14 books are six critical editions in the Oxford Classics Reissuesseries including The Collected Prose and Poetry of Toru Dutt and t Memories of Cornelia Sorabji: India’s First Woman Barrister. Her research includes SouthAsian diasporic literature. She has guest-edited several literary journalsincluding Moving Worlds: Michael Ondaatje Critical Perspectives; CRNLEJournal: Home and Away –y Sri Lankan and Indian Diasporic Writing; and ggMeanjin: On Globalisation and Postcolonial Culture. She has published threenovels, Softly, as I Leave You (2011); Turtle Nest; and t If the Moon Smiled; and Moth and Other Stories.

Susheila Nasta is Professor of Modern Literature at the Open University and Editor of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, which she founded in 1984. Recent publications include: Home Truths: Fictionsof the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (2004). Current research includesa group biography of Asian Bloomsbury entitled Across the Tracks: India in Bloomsbury; and Asian Britain: A Photographic Historyy (forthcoming, 2013).Director from 2007–10 of the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Making Britain:South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’, she is now leadingthe follow-on ‘Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections 1858–1950’.See: www.open.ac.uk/arts/south- asians- making-britain for further informa-tion. She was awarded an MBE for her services to Black and Asian Literaturein 2011.

Nayantara Sahgal is an acclaimed novelist and political commenta-tor. Born in Allahabad in 1927, she was educated at Woodstock School in Mussoorie, India and Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA. She has held Fellowships in the US, at the Bunting Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, and the National Humanities Centre. Shereceived an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Leeds and is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her first published work was the 1954 memoir Prison and ChocolateCake. This was followed by nine novels. Rich Like Us (1985) received theSinclair Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award; and Plans for Departure (1986)

the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her latest novel is Lesser Breeds (2003). Her six non-fiction works include autobiography, essays on politics and literature, and a political study of Indira Gandhi. Her most recent work Jawaharlal Nehru: Civilizing a Savage World appeared in 2010.d

Florian Stadtler is Research Fellow at the Open University. Since 2008 rhe has been working on the major AHRC project ‘Making Britain: SouthAsian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’, and ‘Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections’. He has published articles and essays on SouthAsian Literature in English, British Asian history and literature, and Indianpopular cinema. He has guest edited the special issue ‘Britain and India: Cross-Cultural Encounters’ for Wasafiri ( June 2012). His monograph Fiction,Film and Indian Popular Cinema: Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imaginationis forthcoming with Routledge. He is reviews editor for Wasafiri.

Sarah Victoria Turner is a Lecturer in the History of Art Department at rthe University of York. She has written articles and catalogue essays on theimpact of Indian sculpture in Britain, transcultural modernism, and therepresentation of race in Victorian painting. She has published widely in periodicals on the display of Indian art in Britain and is currently writinga monograph on the relationship between art, empire and modernity in twentieth- century London.

xvi Notes on Contributors

xvii

Foreword: The Importance of Strangers

It seems to me that as individuals and as nationalities we are all the result of encounters with others, and of the outside influences, visible and invisible,that have been brought to bear on what we call home. There is no end toour involvement with strangers and the debt we owe them, or the extent towhich we in turn impact on them. The fallout of change works both ways.Neither side is ever the same again. The impact of Britain on India and of India on Britain was this kind of encounter. When there were empires andthe west considered itself The World, it was the empire’s stamp on its colo-nies that was taken for granted – the reverse traffic would not have been conceivable in an era when inequality was the order of the day, and influ-ence and impact were seen as flowing from the ruling race to the ruled. Butof course it has been a two-way traffic, and it was happening all the whileit was not acknowledged as such – as, for instance, in the case of the bondbetween Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi, Abdul Karim, which was amutual relationship at a human level, if not an equal one, long before anysuch thing was in sight on the subcontinent.

Personally I am fascinated by the question of encounters and what theymake of us. I once dedicated a novel, Rich Like Us, ‘To the Indo- Britishrelationship and what its sharers have learned from it’. Its chief character,Rose, is a beautiful London Cockney who meets Ram, a Punjabi businessman,in London in the early 1930s, falls headlong in love with him and marrieshim, though he is already married and has a son. Rose is intrepid enoughand in love enough to cross an ocean to an unknown country and live in India as a co-wife. In the story Rose and India affect each other. For Rose there is the cultural and emotional confusion and frustration of being a co-wife, there are her responses to political developments including thenational movement for independence which is in full swing, and hergeneral outreach to all things Indian in contrast to her anglicized Indianhusband who is a bit of a British stooge and does not have half her guts, hersterling human qualities, her curiosity or her sense of adventure. There isalso a possible subtext – which wrote itself into the book and I was unawareof while I was writing it – that Rose’s fresh unbiased approach to India and vice versa may have been possible because she was not English upper-crust. At a time when race and class distinctions ruled the scene, she was of humble origins, though white, and maybe this is why she found it natural toidentify with Indians as people, and not as a race apart, and to understand their political aspirations which imperial policy and the vested interests of

the white ruling class opposed. One way of looking at the novel is that thestrangers who cross our path, whether as individuals or as a slice of history,leave their indelible imprint on the persons or nation we become. We are all the consequence of connection and involvement. And this has been a kindof ongoing refrain in my fiction. I believe in the importance of strangers.

Apart from my fiction, there has been the lived experience of my ownfamily in this regard, starting with my maternal grandfather, Motilal Nehru. The Indo-British encounter was countrywide and took place at differentlevels to a greater or lesser extent, but my family’s experience of that historyis the one I know about, one that illustrates the changing course it took over three generations, from my grandfather’s down to my own. The brief background to it is that Motilal Nehru’s father was a police officer in Delhi, serving the last Moghul emperor at the time of the Mutiny in 1857. He fledthe city with his family along with thousands of others fleeing British ven-geance when the British re-took Delhi from the mutineers and sacked thecity. Motilal Nehru was born posthumously in 1861, brought up by one of his two older brothers, and read only Arabic and Persian until he was twelveyears old. He came late to English. With neither money nor connections, helaboured long and hard to set himself up in the legal profession, and workedat a furious pace to support his own family and his brother’s seven children, of whom he took charge when he himself was only twenty-six, when theirfather died.

By the first decade of the twentieth century Motilal had a nationwide reputation, had made a fortune at the Allahabad bar, and was owner of apalatial mansion, playing host to the most eminent Indians and Englishmenof his generation. In 1899 he had taken his first trip to Europe, and hadrefused to go through a purification ceremony on his return as caste and custom required. This had nothing to do with the transforming winds thatwere blowing from the west, just as his secularism was not west- inspiredbut ingrained in him as integral to his North Indian Hindu-Muslim culture.He had no patience with the Hindu revival movement and its ‘Back tothe Vedas’ call. He was interested in moving forward. And being a self- madesuccess, he made his own rules and refused to put up with the humbugof meaningless ritual. He was excommunicated by the orthodox but hisexample paved the way for young Kashmiri men of his community to defyorthodoxy, travel abroad and refuse to do penance on their return. Motilal’s relationship with the west, specifically with Britain, had a much bigger scope and significance.

Britain ruled India and in the high noon of empire this was an unchal-lenged fact. It had its advantages and disadvantages. There were newmasters, their language to be mastered, their laws to be obeyed. The racialdivide was absolute and social segregation was the norm. White society livedin its own enclaves. There were permissible limits within which Indianscould rise. They were not allowed to train as officers for the Indian army or

xviii Foreword: The Importance of Strangers

rise to executive positions in the administration. When in 1882, an Indianwas appointed district magistrate for the first time, there was a cry of alarm. The English-owned paper, The Pioneer, frequently warned it was prematurerto put natives in charge of districts. Whatever the clamps and cautions of policy, there was no stopping the blast of ideas and fashions from abroad,from political thought and advances in science, to sport, food, clothesand hairstyles. They found fertile soil in a generation of Indian men educatedin English history, language and literature. But modernity stayed male. Forthe most part westernization was kept within limits. It remained at a safedistance from the sanctum of private life and did not cross the thresholdto impinge on the cuisine or culture or pastimes of home and the womenof the family. Motilal became a spectacular exception in this regard. Hebrought the British impact home and established it in family life. He did thiswith the zest and energy he brought to everything he did, whether it washis drive to the top of his profession or his gourmet enjoyment of food anddrink and life in general. The household remained anchored in its Indian roots, but the home for all practical purposes became an English upper- classhome, the first house in Allahabad to have flush toilets, electric light andan indoor swimming pool, and the first to have, besides its stable of horsesand carriages, motor cars ordered from England. There were English tutorsfor Motilal’s son, an English governess for his daughters, and clothes forhimself tailored in Savile Row. Motilal was no socialist or republican. On theoccasion of the royal visit to India in 1911, he ‘received the command of His Gracious Majesty King Emperor George V to be in attendance at Delhi’and ordered a complete elaborate court outfit at Poole’s of London. He andhis family travelled to Delhi as guests of the Lieutenant Governor of theprovince in his special train and stayed in the Governor’s camp in Delhi.British officialdom had a high opinion of Motilal’s professional accomplish-ments, felt at home with his elegant westernized lifestyle, and enjoyed hislavish hospitality. But it was his personality and independent spirit thatcommanded their respect for him as an equal. A British visitor remarkedthat wherever Motilal sat, he became the head of the table. At a time whenpark benches and railway compartments had ‘Europeans Only’ signs, theBritish Chief Justice of the High Court offered to propose Motilal’s name for membership of the exclusively European Allahabad Club – an offer that Motilal declined.

There was no conflict in Motilal’s mind between his patriotic pride andthe English lifestyle and outlook he had made his own, nor any question of either/or, or of thus far and no further. He perceived Britain as India’s way forward, and British rule itself as the dynamic that would carry India togreater self-rule. It was an opinion he had in common with leading figuresof the Indian intelligentsia, only being the man he was, who did nothing by halves, he took this conviction to its logical conclusion when he plungedhis whole family into the crucible of change. Like a number of his famous

Foreword: The Importance of Strangers xix

contemporaries he believed that Britain’s unjust policies in India were not the result of British rule but of ‘un-British’ rule which was a betrayal of Britain’sown high ideals. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was the title of a book by Dadabhai Naoroji, published in 1901. This collection of Naoroji’s speeches was a detailed indictment of Britain for keeping India impoverished by bleed-ing her for Britain’s wars, otherwise draining her of her resources, and not allowing Indians more control of their own affairs. But he blamed all this on what he called ‘the present dishonourable un- British system of government’. He predicted a ‘glorious future for Britain and India. … if the British peoplewill awaken to their duty, will be true to their British instincts of fair play andjustice, and will insist upon the “faithful and conscientious fulfilment” of all their great and solemn promises and pledges’. He tried to educate VictorianEngland through the London Indian Society he had founded in 1865 aboutwhat needed to be done to address Indian grievances. On his election tothe House of Commons in 1892 as a Liberal Member, Naoroji said, ‘Wehope to enjoy the same freedom, the same strong institutions which you in this country enjoy. We claim them as our birthright as British subjects.’ In 1897 Sankaran Nair addressing the Indian National Congress had said it was ‘impossible to argue a man into slavery in the English language’. AndG. K. Gokhale had called for ‘a nobler imperialism’ to replace ‘narrowerimperialism’. In 1907 Motilal Nehru in a long presidential address to the Allahabad Conference praised England, acknowledged India’s debt to her and said, ‘I firmly believe that ( John Bull) means well – it is not in his nature to mean ill. This is a belief that is not confined to myself alone and will be readily endorsed by those who have seen and known John Bull at home. It takes him rather long to comprehend the situation, but when he does see things plainly, he does his plain duty, and there is no power on earth – no,not even his kith and kin in this country or elsewhere – that can successfullyresist his mighty will.’ It was a time of trust in Britain, tremendous hope and optimism that what was considered true Britishness would prevail, and Indian demands for political reform and for larger Indian participation in policy and governance would be granted. At the turn of the century whatIndians were seeking, in the words of Dadabhai Naoroji – the most respected voice of Indian nationalism – was ‘ self- government under British para-mountcy or true British citizenship’. It was the belief that Britain would hold good on this promise that led Gandhi – later Mahatma – to organize Indianvolunteer ambulances for Britain’s Zulu war and Boer War in South Africa, and Indian opinion to rally round Britain in the First World War. This was themood and atmosphere in which India’s first organized political party – theIndian National Congress – had been launched in 1885 by a retired Britishcivil servant, Allan Octavian Hume, to channel and promote India’s ris-ing expectations along the lines of a loyal Opposition to His Majesty’s Government. Had these moderate ambitions been realized at that moment in time, history would have proceeded very differently. The modernizing

xx Foreword: The Importance of Strangers

impact of western ideas was proving to be a two- edged sword. Having created a demand for change, it expected the demand to be heard and fulfilled.

Hume was an ardent champion – and there were others among English men and women – who were supportive of the Indian desire for rapid prog-ress towards self-government, not then conceived as outright independence.The presence of such opinion among the English themselves strengthenedIndia’s faith in Britain’s intentions. These Englishmen were visible proof, as itwere, that there was a meeting of minds on the crucial issue and that the day would soon come when ‘British subject’ and ‘equal status’ would mean thesame thing. Indians and their English supporters shared the conviction thatreform would empower Indians by gradual stages, as it had empoweredthe English people themselves in slow stages through Acts of Parliament.

While Motilal in India was describing himself as more moderate than theModerates in the Congress – a party he took little interest in since his careertook all his time – his son, at school in England, was reading G. M. Trevelyan’sbook on Garibaldi, dreaming of heroic deeds and ‘of how sword in hand I would fight for India and help in freeing her’. Jawaharlal Nehru was notat a school for raving revolutionaries. He was at Harrow. Along with Eton, it had educated nearly every future Viceroy of India from 1884 to 1947.Later, from Cambridge, Jawaharlal wrote to his father of his attraction toSinn Fein. ‘Their policy is not to beg for favours,’ he wrote, ‘but to wrestthem.’ His sympathies were with the Extremists at home. ‘As regards JohnBull’s good faith I have not so much confidence in him as you have,’ hewrote. Indian nationalism was being bred not on Indian soil but on imperialground. Britain, all unwitting, was serving as a dynamic zone of encounterfor breeding rebellion against herself. It was the British-educated Jawaharlalwho swept his moderate father and entire family into the Gandhi-led fightagainst British rule, and it was under Jawaharlal’s leadership that the IndianNational Congress in 1929 abandoned all compromise and announcedindependence as its goal. A psychological turning point had come with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh ten years earlier, putting an end to the faith in ‘true Britishness’. It was seen that law and order, English education,roads, railways and telegraph wires were signposts of a modernity that did not include racial equality. Winston Churchill immortalized the imperialmindset during the Second World War when he said that the AtlanticCharter’s reference to freedom for ‘all men’ meant all Europeans under Nazioccupation, and not others under foreign rule.

In 1921 when Motilal’s family, men and women, joined Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal’s home, known for its British lifestyle and its legendary luxury, and never known for half measures, made a blazing bonfire of its British goods and boycotted them thereafter. The family wore coarse hands-pun khadi from then on, and entered an austere regime of civil disobedienceand jail sentences. Motilal Nehru’s transformation from loyal subject of the King Emperor to outright rebel astounded his English friends. An English

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journal described their shock as resembling that of ‘a fond Edwardian fatherwhose delightful daughter became a suffragette and broke his windows’. When Gandhi started his Salt March in 1930, Motilal donated his palatialmansion to the Congress party and moved into a smaller house he hadbuilt on the estate. All-out war, albeit non-violent war, had been declaredagainst the British government and there was no looking back. The passionand dedication of my elders made me long to grow up quickly so that I, too,could go to jail. Meanwhile we children were not allowed to cry in front of the police when they came to arrest our parents. Family discipline called for, of all things, a British-style ‘stiff upper lip’.

I have never felt as alien in any foreign country as I did in my own home town as a child – where all the roads were named after Englishmen, thepark had a statue of Queen Victoria, and the best shops stocked English goods for an English clientele. What saved one from deep distress was thehumour of the situation. The thing about racial superiority is that it hasto be upheld round the clock. Not for a moment can vigilance be relaxed, and upholding British prestige among the natives had its hilarious aspects. Love, for instance, was a hopeless dilemma in novels and movies of the period if the English heroine discovered that the Englishman she had fallen in love with in some outpost of empire was suspected of having a drop of oriental blood. In a novel I read as a child a tragic ending was dramatically averted in the last chapter when it was discovered that the drop of blood was Spanish. In the movies, Charles Laughton as Henry VIII could not be shown gnawing at huge hunks of meat at dinner. An English monarch could not be seen eating with his fingers and displaying gross table manners. Thecensors deleted that scene for viewing in India. A film about the adulter-ous love affair of Lord Nelson with Emma Hamilton, originally titled ‘That Hamilton Woman’ was more decorously re- titled ‘Lady Hamilton’. Thenatives meanwhile got their own back, with jokes about the white sahibsand memsahibs. Some of these were hilarious examples of the inroads thatour two languages – Hindi and English – had made into each other. The master–servant relationship, lopsided though it was, did allow for interac-tion of a limited kind between ruler and ruled. Otherwise, the unbridgeable gulf between the English and the people they ruled was a glaring fact. E. M. Forster had taken a penetrating look at it in his 1924 novel Passage to India.I was reminded of the assumption of white ownership and arrogance I had been humiliatingly aware of as a child when years later I watched the TVversion of Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown (1984). I recalled that, as children,my friends and I had invented tortures for Mr Amery, then Secretary of State for India. Our favourite one was tying him up in a desert with water just out of reach.

The family I grew up in was committed to overthrow British rule but therewas no such commitment to overthrow Winnie the Pooh, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, or the classics of English literature, and nothing against

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eating shepherd’s pie or custard pudding for dinner. Agatha Christie andP. G. Wodehouse were also favourites of the late Jyoti Basu, who became a Communist in England in 1940 and after independence headed Communistgovernments in West Bengal for twenty-three years. His allegiance to KarlMarx notwithstanding, it was Hercule Poirot and Bertie Wooster who eased his burdens of office. Nor was there a contradiction in any of this.Inheritance is many-sided and takes many forms.

My grandfather had seen Britain as the way forward and there wasmuch about Britain that the Indian imagination, though it was in revoltagainst British rule, continued to hold in respect. Above all it admired theway the British governed themselves, and its admiration for the steel of British character, so evident under attack during the Second World War, was unbounded. I remember that my father who was to die in 1944 of hislast imprisonment under British rule, mourned when Britain came underbombardment during the Blitz and when Hitler’s army marched into Paris. During the struggle for freedom friends and allies had been gained in Britainand in many parts of the world for India’s independence. Nothing had made so global an impact or so stirred the world’s conscience in modern times as India’s war without violence. And there were Englishmen and women, many Quakers among them, with whom we could join forces and forge globallinks in common causes that transcended nationality at a time when theBritish government was silent on fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. There is a wonderful picture of Jawaharlal Nehru speaking, it appears, withgreat passion at a 1938 rally in Trafalgar Squire during the Spanish CivilWar. He also went to Barcelona with Krishna Menon, then head of the IndiaLeague in London, to assess the situation for himself.

A few years after independence when Churchill was Prime Minister,he asked my mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, what in her opinion hadbeen Britain’s biggest mistake in India, and she replied segregation – theunofficial apartheid that had made it impossible for the communities to meet and get to know each other on an equal basis. It had certainlymade it impossible for Churchill to regard Jawaharlal Nehru as anything but a traitor and an enemy. When he finally met Nehru at the first Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London, he was so deeply impressed by his personality and his influential role in the conference thathe called him the Light of Asia. He also told my mother that her brother had conquered mankind’s two greatest enemies – hate and fear. This was a remarkable tribute and a remarkable reversal of perception – the result of an Indian impact on Britain, by the Indian who had spent ten years as a prisoner of the British, on the Englishman who had vowed never to dissolve the British Empire. Virtual apartheid, which is the denial of racial equality,had prevented a unique encounter from taking place many years earlier, onethat might have made the transfer of power a much earlier routine event,and not the tortured saga it later became.

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Nehru never had the categorical one- dimensional approach to England that Churchill had had to India. Student years spent abroad do not neces-sarily make a foreign country feel like home, but given his westernizedupbringing, England was in a sense a continuation of India for him, and not the complete ‘elsewhere’ it might otherwise have been. Returning toEngland after a vacation in India he had written to his father in October1908, ‘The familiar sights and sounds had quite an exhilarating effect on me.’ He remained aware of, and indebted to, his English inheritance.In essence he regarded India’s history as richly layered, every layer of itintegral to the sort of people Indians had become. As Prime Minister, anticipating his first visit to America in 1949, he wrote to his sister (my mother), who was then the Indian ambassador to the United States: ‘Which facet of myself should I put before the American public – the Indian or the European, for after all I have that European or English sidealso.’ The emotional impact of inheritance is a diverse and ‘dynamic zone’ of its own that has no measure. I saw this impact in reverse asI watched Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi (1982) and Ken Griffith’sone-man film portrayal of Nehru. Besides their artistic engagement, bothAttenborough and Griffiths seemed to me to be intellectually and emotion-ally involved with their subjects, and with a whole slice of history. They were not Englishmen surveying the scene as outsiders. A point is reached in the experience of ‘encounter’ when each has become part of that shared experience.

I’ve made no study of how historical encounters in other cases resolvethemselves or how other countries reckon with the layered legaciesof outside influences. The story goes that a European journalist asked Deng Xiao Ping if the French Revolution had influenced the Chinese revolution, and Deng Xiao Ping replied: ‘Too soon to tell.’ From that awesome Chinese perspective, it may well be too soon to assess Britain’simpact on India or the reverse. But we do know that when the partingof the ways came in 1947, instead of tearing the past out by the roots and throwing it away, India gave this embattled relationship yet another turn by opting to build on what she chose to retain of the British connection: a commitment to parliamentary democracy and relatedinstitutions. India also made short work of the foreignness of the English language by declaring English to be one more Indian language. And inacknowledgement of the most recent layer of Indian history, she invited the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, to become the first Governor-General of free India.

To get back to family, the transfer of power forged bonds of friendship andaffection between my rebel family and the last Viceroy’s that continue tothis day. It would seem the wheel had turned full circle since Motilal Nehru’s robust involvement with Britain began.

Nayantara Sahgal

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Note

This is a transcription of a keynote address delivered at ‘Bharat Britain’, thefinal conference of the South Asians Making Britain project, held at the British Library in September 2010. Here, the distinguished writer, Nayantara Sahgal, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, talks about her family and her writing in relation to the long and interwoven history of India and Britain. The foreword draws largely on private papers, some of which are held at the NehruMemorial Archive in Delhi. For further reading and citations see: B. R. Nanda, The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal (New York: John Day, 1963); Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1901); Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London: John Lane, 1936); yand Nayantara Sahgal, Rich Like Us (London: Heinemann, 1985).

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