A Millennium of Misrepresentation

BY M. R. SAMPAT KUMARAN, M.A.

I remember to have read some years ago a picturesque description of a sunset on the sea at Madras by a Western tourist. She paints a memorable picture of the sun slowly sinking into the sea, as the evening mellows into the twilight and the twilight darkens into the night. That description has ever since seemed to me an apt symbol of the representation of India in English literature. Madras may have the sea to its east: but what does it matter? In writing about India, verisimilitude is irrelevant. And after all, who knows but that in the topsy-turvy Indies, "where Mr. Gandhi lives and tigers"–who knows but that the sun may actually set in the east? That is the feeling which animates English literature in its treatment of India and Indian themes in all its recorded history of eleven or twelve centuries, from Alfred, who mentions India in his translation of Oresius and who is said to have sent embassies to India, to the latest novel or essay or poem on this ‘mystic’ land. And as most things European, this tradition started in Greece. Despite all their excellent quantities, the Greeks were an exclusive race: and the word ‘barbarian,’ which has played such a notable part in the European interpretation of the East, was of their coinage. Besides, the only news of India that they could get hold of came to them at second and third hand from traders and travelers: and travelers as a tribe are partial to exaggeration and adornment of their tales. Ktesias, physician at the court of Artaxerxes Memnon at Susa around 400 B. C. set the fashion in writing about the incredible East–a fashion which has survived to the present and shows as yet no signs of weakened vitality. Having actually seen a tiger, he described the beast as having triple rows of teeth and a sting in its tail. Most of the grotesque legends about India sprang in this way from the casual invention of a fanciful tourist. But they have coloured deeply the Western outlook on India, and English literature bears ample testimony to this fact.

On to the end of the Middle Ages, down to the Renaissance and the founding of the East India Company, English writers drew their conceptions of India from ancient Greek and Roman sources. And what touched their fancy anti stirred their imagination were not the sober records of a Megasthenes or a Strabo, but the fantastic inventions of a Ktesias or the credulous moments of garrulous, old Herodotus. And so they wrote of India with their fancy running free (if not amok) and peopled it with strange men and stranger beasts. Sencourt suggests that the first picture which English literature paints of Indians may perhaps be found in the following passage in King Alysaunder, a metrical romance of the fourteenth century:

To his navel penge his beard,

He was also as black as pycche;

And had a face well griseliche.

And that notorious impostor, Sir John Mandeville, added zest to the game. The Unknown East supplied a local. habitation and a name to all the dreams and morbid imaginings of the people of the Middle Ages. The medieval Mappemondes (maps of the world) with their fantastic geography and their scrupulously drawn goblins and demons and monsters became a "veritable repository of the illustrated fiction of the day." Fables migrating from India now and then reached Britain through devious routes, but in their new terrain they are swathed in strange clothes. Chaucer, whose only direct reference to India is the suggestive line, "The great Emetrius, King of Inde," has retold a tale from the Vedabba Jataka in The Pardoner’s Tale, but the original source of his story would undoubtedly have surprised him. The tale travelled to him through Persia and Baghdad and St. John of Damascus. So remote continued to be England’s connection with India till the establishment of the John Company Bahadur.

The great Elizabethans had the haziest notions of this country and carried on the merry tradition. Marlowe’s mighty dialect may seem to fall naturally from the lips of Hakluyt’s voyagers, but the superb rant of Tamerlane is entirely in keeping with the traditional ideas of Oriental pomp and glitter. Spenser places India in the Elfin domain, and is therefore kinder by far than those writers, who see in India not merely the glamour of fairy, romance, but also the sinister horrors of the unknown. Shakespeare shows but the most casual interest in India. His Titania has played tricks with an Indian queen. Apparently Indians as a race are as far removed from humanity as the fairies. And India was an Eldorado, overflowing with milk and honey and gold, "all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles sapphires," the ultima thule of wealth and value. Orland sings of his Rosalind:

"From the East to the Western Ind,

No jewel like Rosalind."

When Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn come out of the Abbey, the second gentleman exclaims:

"Our King has all the Indies in his arms,

And more and richer, when he strains that lady."

Norfolk declares (in Henry V) that the French "made Britain India: every man that stood showed like a mine."

About this time was founded the East India Company and therewith began an age of exploration and discovery, which brought India nearer to the people of England in diverse ways. Travelers of the day (and not of the third century before Christ) brought their reports; merchants bought and sold and slowly built up one of the greatest empires known to the history of the world; administrators from necessity and missionaries for the sake of their mission studied and translated the literature of the legendary land of wealth and wonders. Prejudice of course still persisted (and persists as a matter of fact even now); and facts were seen through coloured glasses. Nevertheless, from the seventeenth century onward, there is more concreteness in the conception of India, more assurance of definite knowledge. Milton paints a picture of "dusk faces with white silk turbants wreathed," and has a vivid description of the banyan tree. But in a beautiful passage, he unfortunately mixes up the whale and the crocodile and evolves a monster unknown to legend and biology. Dryden has the distinction of writing a full-dress drama on a contemporary Eastern monarch in Aurangazebe, but the play is full of faults and utterly false in atmosphere. It is noteworthy not as an instance of the poet’s gifts, but as evidence of the proximity to which India had been brought. Glanville, the famous author of the Vanity of Dogmatising, refers to "the most delicate musical accents of the Indians,’ a sure sign that India was getting to be something more than the eternal home of glamour and mystery and romance. Dryden and Pope allude to the supreme sacrifice of the Suttee, and Thomson mentions "Soft India’s cotton or her silk." And so, in driblets and droplets, facts about India invade obscure corners of English letters, till towards the end of the eighteenth century the loot from Bengal and the passionate eloquence of Burke thrust the Eastern Empire forcibly on the attention of the English people. Easy money, to be had in India for the picking, led to the display of odious vulgarity by the newly rich, and this in turn provoked fairly widespread criticism. Johnson is reported to have said of Clive: "A man who acquired his fortunes by such crimes that his consciousness of them compelled him to cut his own throat." The retired Anglo-Indian (in the old sense) is bitterly satirised in the once-famous Nabob of Isaac Foote. The protagonist in the play is described as "one who has been deaf to the crimes of a people," and "who owes his rise to the ruin of thousands": and the question is bluntly asked: "Why rob the Indian and not call it theft?" Even the shy, retiring Cowper has some harsh things to say of naked exploitation in India. And in the burning pages of Burke, the protest of the conscience of England against misgovernment and rapine in India finds its noblest expression. Living at a time when little was known about the culture and history of India, Burke with characteristic genius seized the central and crucial fact of the situation, that the inhabitants of India were men and women, entitled to sympathy and justice from the men and women of England. In his eyes, no strange species, human only by courtesy and therefore deserving of in-human treatment, peopled this ancient and venerable land. Anticipating many of the specious arguments of modern imperialism, Burke condemned outright the doctrine that morality is determined by longitude and latitude, and that what is wrong in Europe may yet be right in India. He impeached Warren Hastings in the name of outraged humanity, and there we hear a note, which has to reverberate far and wide before this millennium of misrepresentation can fairly reach its conclusion.

But Burke was a mere accident in this history, an Everest of insight rarely surpassed before or since by any English writer. And as we pass from Burke to the Renaissance of Wonder, we find that the great poets of the Romantic Revival were little concerned with India. When Wordsworth writes of

Something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round Ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking beings, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things,

he seems to be echoing the Upanishads. But the Indian influence, if any, is probably to be traced through Neo-Platonism and German Idealism, reaching him through the metaphysical Coleridge. Shelley’s famous lines,

The One remains, the many change and pass,

Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly,

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.

seem a splendid presentation of a familiar Indian concept, but it is difficult to trace the connection. Other writers of the day, Burke notwithstanding, display little interest in India, and the few that interest themselves in the matter are full of the traditional bias. The allusions of Keats to India in Endymion are quite fanciful and strictly in the orthodox tradition. Byron, it is true, gets out of the beaten track and makes himself conspicuous by violent denunciations of tyranny in India and ominous prophecies of revolts and uprisings; but his emotion appears to be rhetorical rather than sincere. Alone among the poets of the period, Southey pursued Indian studies of set purpose–and some might say, of malice afore-thought,–in pursuance of a resolution he had formed, while yet a school-boy, to write a heroic poem on every system of mythology known to the world. His Curse of Kehama is perhaps the only example of a serious attempt by an English poet to deal with Indian culture. But the poet’s utter lack of sympathy with his subject foredoomed the work to failure, and few have cared to read that weird medley of Indian (and pseudo-Indian) myths and legends or follow the unnatural and complicated story through its intricate mazes. Moore’s Lalla Rookh is a pretty trifle, re-telling in melodious prose and verse a popular North Indian tale. Scott tells a story of the days of Tippu Sultan in The Surgeon’s Daughter, The novel, though not among the best that he wrote, remained till the days of Kipling the most outstanding instance of a story dealing with India by a great English writer. In the study of Pappiah, the crafty dubash, Scott adopted the current tradition, spread by missionaries and retired administrators, that as a race Indians are given to deceit and duplicity That tradition is perhaps most brilliantly up-held in the forceful prose of Macaulay, whose contempt of India was equaled only by his ignorance of it. He criticises unsparingly the misdeeds of Clive and Warren Hastings, but at the same time points out that they did unto the Indians only as the Indians did unto them. As the sting is to the scorpion, as the horns are to the buffalo, so cheating is to the Bengalee. And if Clive cheated Omichund, it was only a case of tit for tat! He pleads that the immoral policies of empire-builders, must not blind us to the glory of their achievements.

And so we come to the Mutiny, which forms a turning-point in the history of Indo-British relations, The homicidal mania, which seized both the nations in 1857, made the re-establishment of even such friendliness as existed before the great revolt, exceedingly difficult. The shocked surprise with which Meadows Taylor’s Seeta, glorifying a marriage between an Englishman and a Hindu girl, was received by the British community in India, when it was published in 1873, is a sufficient indication of the change of spirit that had come over the rulers. After 1857, it was to be a war to the knife with Indian claims to civilization. Despite Kaye and Malleson, the British people heard only of Nana Saheb’s massacre of the women and children at Cawnpore, and nothing about General Neill’s hideous exploits. Tennyson commemorated the Siege of Lucknow, but no English pen extolled the heroism of Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi. And that is how Ruskin evolves the fantastic theory that the fondness of Indian art for curved lines indicates the utter depravity of the Indian race. The studies of Max Muller and other Sanskritists did little to dispel this all-pervading prejudice. If anything, they strengthened the prevailing belief that India had no civilisation and culture worth the name: for Max Muller’s pro-missionary bias is well-known and such works as the Indian Wisdom by Monier Williams encouraged the general feeling of racial superiority in the imperial race. As the crowning glory of this phase of Indo-British relations came Rudyard Kipling. In a few choice phrases he cleared the situation and resolved any obscure doubts that the Puritan strain in the British character might have raised about despotic rule and economic exploitation in India. England, averred the poet, has no more than taken up the white man’s burden to serve the captive’s need. Lesser breeds without the law should be dealt with in accordance with a new code of conduct, which exalted the civilising mission of the West over the wishes or even the happiness and prosperity of those to whom this drum-and-trumpet civilisation was to be brought. East is East and West is West, and England heaved a sigh of relief. No need at all to doubt the moral earnestness of the British in ruling India. With irrepressible gusto and not a little swagger, Kipling set about proclaiming this great truth in scintillating prose and verse. He knew the India of cities and cantonments, and the British civil and military officers and their subordinates. The principal characters in his fiction and verse come from this small community, living in splendid isolation amid a surging sea of subject Indians. And these latter enter his stories only as ‘extras’ and supernumeraries, types of physical cowardice and moral duplicity, designed to give a pat on the to the British sense of invincible moral superiority. There is nowhere any attempt to understand the Indian mind or point of view, except perhaps in the solitary instance of Puran Bhagat, and nowhere any attempt to draw an individual Indian. All his Indian characters run true to the traditional type and never deviate into reality. They are drawn in two dimensions–"in the flat," as Mr. Garrat points out in a recent essay–and their only purpose is to sustain the ancient tradition of cheating being to the Indian as the horns are to the buffalo. At a time when physical barriers between England and India had broken down, Kipling succeeded by sheer genius in erecting psychological barriers, which may out-last many generations.

We get a slightly different note in Lyall’s poems, but even to him India is the Land of Regrets. It is only in Edwin Arnold that for once the true spirit of India finds expression. The Light of Asia is an ambitious poem: there went to the making of it scholarship and insight and sympathy and a gift for melody. But the poet fails to rise up to the massive grandeur of the theme and the poem is in the last analysis, pretty rather than beautiful. Arnold’s translations from Sanskrit are of exceptional merit, and it will be difficult to supersede them. In all his work, he was animated by a spirit rare in any English writer, of being a

"Lover of India,

Too much her lover! for his heart lived there,

"How far soever wandered his feet.

I think he did but find wisdom’s wide stream

Nearest the fountain clearest.

The gentle speech, the grave reserve,

The piety and quiet of the land,

Its old-world manners and its reverent ways,

And kind simplicity of Indian hours."

The twentieth century has continued the Kipling rather than the Arnold tradition. Few among the inumerable novels on India that flow from the publishers’ presses to fill the shelves of circulating libraries are of any importance. Edward Thompson and Edmund Candler are outstanding among the present-day writers in this field. Candler is actuated by a contemptuous dislike of the educated Indian, but Thompson, while upholding the racial superiority of the British, is far more subtle. There is in his works an ostentatious fairness, which accepts India’s qualities, jostling with an overweening pride in race and religion. Forster’s Passage to India is the sole example of an attempt by a distinguished English man of letters to understand Indian life. But it is a woeful failure, if we judge it from the measure of success that it has attained in interpreting Indian mind and life. Forster sees the clash between cultures and races; but the Hindu mind is terra incognita to him. Professor Godbole is little better than a caricature.

This all-too-sketchy survey of the representation of India in English literature has now reached its conclusion. Roughly, there have been three periods in this story. First, there was the age of tales of the long bow, when anything and everything could be said and believed of India. It was succeeded by the age of exploration and discovery, when India was knit to England by ties of trade and empire, and British administrators had to learn something about Indian history and culture to carry on their work. Then came the age of self-righteous imperialism, when the lesser breeds without the law were relegated to their proper place in the scheme of things and an unending stream of libel and invective flowed from English pens. The end of the epoch is not yet in sight. India has ceased geographically to be terra incognita, only to assume that character morally and psychologically. In ancient days, ants as large as griffins guarded gold in India, and tigers with stings in their tails roamed about in its jungles. Now, men who are as strange in their mental and spiritual constitution as the gold-guarding ants or the stinging tigers live and labour under her tropical skies. It is remarkable that three centuries of intercourse with India has failed to let the blinkers from British eyes. Not a single translation of any Indian classic, worthy to rank as literature in its own right, has yet appeared. And no Indian idea or theme has inspired any great work in English verse or prose. Even Emerson’s Brahma is an American and not an English product. Few Indian writers have used English for literary or artistic purposes. And those who have done so, from Derozio and the Dutt sisters upwards, have, written graceful and competent, but not great poetry. And their work has had little or no Influence on English literary tradition; In the translations of Tagore, the world of English letters may see the work of a great poet and mystic; but the obscurity of the work and its strange atmosphere is hardly likely to ensure for it wide popularity. Thus, India has found an asylum only in the bye-paths and alleys of English literature: and there too she lives amidst unhealthy surroundings, enveloped by miasmic vapours of prejudice and morbid imaginings, and there are no prospects of her early release. Till some great artist lays bare the soul of India in memorable English prose or poetry, this Punch and Judy show, that we have been surveying, must continue in literature as in politics.