How the Brits influenced Indians...to read Wodehouse, and drink tea!

I am conscious that there is something ironic about English-speaking Indians like myself attacking the British in English for having imparted their English education to Indians. Ironic, yes, but only up to a point. I had my English schooling in India, and I learned it without the shadow of the Englishman judging my prose. I delighted in the language on its own terms, as a pan-Indian language today, and not as a symbol of colonial oppression.

In any case, most English-educated Indians, including myself, will not repudiate Shakespeare and P.G. Wodehouse: we must concede we couldn’t have enjoyed their masterworks without the English language. But had we not been colonised by the English, and continued using Persian or Urdu to interpret each other across our linguistic divides, the English could always have sent us awhole bunch of toothsome VSOs instead of sturdy colonial-era master sergeants, and we’d have probably learned the language better than we in fact did

I am told by a British-Indian friend that in a passionate public debate in London in 2015 on the merits or otherwise of my Oxford views, more than one speaker sought to discredit me in my absence (I was in India) on the grounds that I was a known aficionado of Wodehouse and the English language, who had even revived St. Stephen’s College’s Wodehouse Society, the first of its kind in the world, and still served as patron of the London-headquartered (global) Wodehouse Society. The implication was that one cannot denounce British colonialism and celebrate the doyen of English humorists at the same time.

My critics could not have been more wrong. Yes, some have seen in Wodehouse’s popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj, the British empire in India. Writing in 1988, the journalist Richard West thought India’s Wodehouse devotees were those who hankered after the England of 50 years before (i.e. the 1930s): ‘That was the age when the English loved and treasured their own language, when schoolchildren learned Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Rudyard Kipling It was Malcolm Muggeridge who remarked that the Indians are now the last Englishmen. That may be why they love such a quintessentially English writer.’

Those lines are, of course, somewhat more fatuous than anything Wodehouse himself could ever write. Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself, and the Raj is largely absent from his books. (There is only one notable exception I can recall, in a 1935 short story, The Juice of an Orange: ‘Why is there unrest in India Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience.’) But Indians saw that the comment was meant to elicit laughter, not agreement.

(Mahatma Gandhi himself was up to some humorous mischief when, in 1947, far from sitting down to steak, he dined with the King’s cousin and the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and offered him a bowl of home-made goat’s curd — perhaps from the same goat he took to England when he went to see the King in a loincloth! I reinvented the moment in my satirical The Great Indian Novel, only substituting a mango for the curd.)

If anything, Wodehouse was one British writer whom Indian nationalists could admire without fear of political incorrectness. Saroj Mukherji, née Katju, the daughter of a prominent Indian nationalist politician, remembers introducing Lord Mountbatten to the works of Wodehouse in 1948; it was typical that the symbol of the British empire had not read the ‘quintessentially English’ Wodehouse but that the Indian freedom fighter had.

Indeed, it is precisely the lack of politics in Wodehouse’s writing, or indeed of any other social or philosophic content, that made what Waugh called his “idyllic world” so free of the trappings of Englishness, quintessential or otherwise. Whereas other English novelists burdened their readers with the specificities of their characters’ lives and circumstances, Wodehouse’s existed in a never-never land that was almost as unreal to his English readers as to his Indian ones. Indian readers were able to enjoy Wodehouse free of the anxiety of allegiance; for all its droll particularities, the world he created, from London’s Drones Club to the village of Matcham Scratchings, was a world of the imagination, to which Indians required no visa.

But they did need a passport, and that was the English language. English was undoubtedly Britain’s most valuable and abiding legacy to India, and educated Indians, a famously polyglot people, rapidly learned and delighted in it — both for itself, and as a means to various ends. These ends were both political (for Indians turned the language of the imperialists into the language of nationalism) and pleasurable (for the language granted access to a wider world of ideas and entertainments).

It was only natural that Indians would enjoy a writer who used language as Wodehouse did — playing with its rich storehouse of classical precedents, mockingly subverting the very canons colonialism had taught Indians they were supposed to venerate (in a country ruled for the better part of two centuries by the dispensable siblings of the British nobility, one could savour lines like these: ‘Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.’)

I am grateful, in other words, for the joys the English language has imparted to me, but not for the exploitation, distortion and deracination that accompanied its acquisition by my countrymen. Something similar can probably be said about those two great British colonial legacies (now that we have discredited democracy, the ‘rule of law’ and the railways as credible British claims): tea and cricket. Both, I freely confess, are addictions of mine, a personal tribute to the legacy of colonialism.

In an address to a joint session of the US Congress in 1985, the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi recalled, with a twinkle in his eye, the great affinities between the American Revolution and the Indian colonial experience. Cornwallis, after surrendering at Yorktown, triumphed in Bengal. And then, Rajiv Gandhi added mischievously, “Indian tea stimulated your revolutionary zeal.”

He got a good laugh for the allusion to the Boston Tea Party. But he was wrong. In 1773, there was no Indian tea, at least none that was properly cultivated and traded. Tea was a Chinese monopoly, and the taxed tea the colonists tossed into Boston Bay came from Amoy, not Assam. Perhaps if it had been Indian tea, the American revolutionaries might have thought of a less wasteful method of protest.

It was the British who established Indian tea as a cultivated commodity. The story is interesting, and once again commercial motives came into play. The British ruled India but not China: rather than spending good money on the Chinese, they reasoned, why not grow tea in India

Their desire to end their dependence on Chinese tea led the British to invent agricultural espionage, as a secret agent, improbably enough named Robert Fortune, slipped into China in the early 1840s, during the chaos and confusion of the Opium War years, to procure tea plants for transplantation in the Indian Himalayas.

But most of the thousands of specimens he sent to British India died, and the East India Company directors were left scratching their collective heads.

The solution came by accident — when a wandering Briton discovered an Indian strain of tea growing wild in Assam, tested it in boiling water, tasted the results and realised he had struck gold: he had made tea.

(Reproduced with permission from the Aleph Book Company)