Roll over Macaulay

Pat Nagel- portfolio


Essay-ooh aaah India


“The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.”

Sultan Mehmet of Turkey on his conquest of Byzantium from the Romans after 1,123 years and 18 days of their rule - quoted in Vikram Chandra’s “The Sacred Games”.


Roll over Macaulay

The posh Indians with an Oxbridge education from a generation or two ago spoke funny. Their accents were nominally upper middle class but somehow over-enunciated. It was the strain of remembered preservation. The accent was a valued acquisition. It announced their Brown Sahibi sensibilities and suggested they should be taken for English. Too bad it was a trapped piggy-in-the-middle sound, hollow too. It wasn’t, after all, underpinned by the insouciance and sliced vowels bred by the privileges of empire.

Unfazed, irrespective of paradoxes and contraindications, this top rung of Macaulay’s children believed completely in the West just as he intended them to. They were, even into the nineteen sixties and seventies, the native advance guard, the unabashed welcoming committee you couldn’t ridicule into silence. On desi shores, these accents, their accompanying mannerisms, the badge-like cold weather clothes, the liking for Worcester Sauce and sausages, the studied ignorance of “native” culture, did awe the underclass. The banias on the other hand, who were often richer than these pretenders, laughed up their sleeves. But seizing opportunities being the bania way, they scraped and bowed with professional gusto and simply over charged such affectation.

The home-grown English speakers, those educated in our government and private institutions with their sprinkling of poignant white missionaries and Lord Jimming educators, were largely condemned to a second and, it must be said, third, rung of Macaulay’s educational edifice. These English speakers were letter perfect meal ticketers, persons who read English as a “foreign” language and thought in other, altogether more comforting mother tongues. These worthies have, ever since Macaulay introduced Indian-English education in the 1830s, composed the richest seam of out-and-out babudom. Babudom that has been lampooned with their “preponing” preponderance towards “doing the needful” and by their super-heroic “swinging into action”.

Caricatured but unconcerned is the babu, now into the 21st century, having grown up generation upon generation with no “power”, waiting only for discretionary “orders” from the “officer” who therefore needs to do all the worrying “if any”. Babu doesn’t care either about being bested by the “mixed up” produce from our home grown public schools. What are they after all, all sing-song Hobson-Jobson hybridisation syntax shot through a tarka of coal-fired steam. More fun than funny, unlike the Vilayat returned ones, but why grudge them that?

Banquo’s ghost at this and all tables described so far is indubitably British, mostly Anglo-Saxon-Norman English actually. The rest, namely the Scots and the Welsh in the Indian experience, were “Tommies,” low caste and not fit to emulate. They’ve been familiar enough in the bazaars and kothas speaking their pidgin and dipping their wicks in the same inkpots and introducing an overlay of blue eyes and grey eyes to take on where the Greeks left off.

But, it was an unchanging England, a fancied, Bertie Woosterised period between the wars with surviving notes of High Raj Victoriana and pre Great War bucolic that was the ideal. On the khaki side of the fence there was a Sandhurst-IMA variant complete with bottle-brush moustache, harrumph and cravat. Time, they used to say, moves slowly in the colonies.

Then, slowly at first and faster all the time, the world moved on. “Sentiment,” as they say in the stock market, changed abruptly. Socialism became discredited. Class, that caste-wealth-birth triumvirate has received so many dents, scratches and holings lately that it might be best to abandon ship to scrap and go in for a new, up-to-date “reserved” model. Colour, in this most racist of countries, has gone in for a makeover – “wheatish” and “shyamla” is largely seen as contrast to fair and not automatically ugly. Ethnicity has become chic. Consumerism is in. Colonialism is camp. It’s the tradesmen who use the front entrance everywhere worth the bother and keep people in business.

Meanwhile, the accented Oxbridgers have gone obsolete though they seem to make nice sounding foreign ministers of India and Pakistan reminiscent of appeasement and gloss over moss signifying nothing. Our present Pranab babu with his broad Bengali vowels may do very well however because he’s got the “power” and “orders” formula down pat.

Maybe Oxbridge has gone old hat and expensive. The current dayers go to Harvard and Yale, their claws sharp and their accents drawn tight on a leash. Signature tunes, they know, have gone subtle. On the way back, any day of the week, standing under Nelson and the pigeons on his hat at Trafalgar Square, they can watch posses of pogromming Patels, Noons, Mittals, Pauls, Hindujas and Tatas sweeping by- none of them worried a whit about their broad Jinja or Jullunder or Navsari or Chennai or Bengaluru at that - and with a good deal of that insouciance aforementioned.

So, we’ve arrived at the age of the digital remix brought on by resurgence, our place in the sun, a smaller world, technology, interdependence, money. Imitation has become a multispoker, all overlays and blends and a dose of bhangra-reggae. There is no need for compromise. The information highway is faster than any dictionary. Amartya Sen and his welfarism and VS Naipaul and Vikram Seth with their “finest” writing of the English language is cause for pride, of course. But if it’s hair you want to let down and a voice you want to call your own, let’s talk chutney and raise a cheer for the pioneering work of Salman Rushdie. He started that torrent of Hinglish exuberance- unless you want to give some of the credit to Shobhaa De in her Stardusting days. That exuberance which is so Indian has broken out of its confines and not just on the written page. But let’s look for barometers anyway. Cast your eye over the three big Bombay books this year all with their we don’t need glossaries and italics for the goralog. And let’s not forget the delicious desi gaalis, full-throated, immense, confident. It’s alright for Suketu Mehta in Maximum City and Vikram Chandra in Sacred Games, huge mothers both books. But the third mother, Shantaram is by Australian Gregory Roberts, but that takes nothing away from Bombay or the quality and heft of the gaalis. Confidence has come. Everything else will follow Insha’allah.

(1,109 words)

Title: Roll over Macaulay
Thursday, 21st December 2006
By Ghatotkach

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2006 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.