The Colony and the Nation

Here’s a good pairing: The Ruling Caste (link), by David Gilmour, and English, August (link) by Upamanyu Chatterjee.

Gilmour’s subtitle is : Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, Chatterjee’s is An Indian Story, but it could be called “governing lives in the Indian republic”—governing through the Indian Administrative Service, the successor to Gilmour’s Raj. So, parallel stories, joined and separated by time, as in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

The parallel isn’t quite exact. Gilmour is retailing—and trying to generalize from—a welter of anecdotes that he culled from diaries, family records, and suchlike sources. There’s a great deal of “the personal” in this tapestry. But Chatterjee offers a more conventionally structured novel. You get the general context of misgovernment and squalor, but you also get the piercing particular isolation of one very lonely young man.

Neither Gilmour nor Chatterjee purports to offer a full-scale appraisal, but Gilmour makes his general perspective clear. In a New York Times, William Grimes offers a just summary (link):

Mr. Gilmour concedes that the British ruled by force, not consent. At the same time, the civilians, as members of the Indian Civil Service were known, took a high-minded view of their mission. The duty of the British was, they believed, to rule firmly but fairly, to improve living conditions wherever they were posted and to maintain high standards of integrity. It is a measure of their success that both India and Pakistan adopted the British model for their own civil services after independence.

Chatterjee is less explicit, but it is hard to find much solace in his world of dust, mud and careerism, where nothing much seems to work right (except, perhaps, the hero’s scabrous sense of humor). We are left, then, with a cruel paradox: British rule may have been arrogant and presumptious—but in many respects it may have been better than what followed.

There is the occasional convergence between the two books Example: one thing about the Brits is that they weren’t there to stay: unlike the Brits who went to Canada, to Australia, even to East Africa, the Brits in India all intended to (and most in fact did) return to their little cottage in Surrey. Perhaps surprisingly, a century or more later, one of Chatterjee’s characters finds that in this respect not much has changed. We’re considering “the Club”—the local social club, maintained as an island of solace in a hurricane. The District Collector has lately made an important decision, unaccountable to at least one of the locals:

“Idiot” said Sathe … “He’s messed up the Club. Once it was a good place to have a drink, play billiards and waste time. But he’s cancelled the license—did he tell you that? He wants all the families to come to the Club and chat with him or something. I can’t understand it, this move of his to keep what he calls the non-officials out of the club. It’s like the Raj, natives not allowed. … And in this case the natives of Madna not allowed. You officers are birds of passage, anyway … We are the ones who stay here with the Club. If we want to drink here we should be allowed to.”

— Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August 131
(NYRB Paperback, 2006)

“You officrs are birds of passage … we are the ones who stay…” It’s a complaint uttered at other times and other places by anybody who has to suffer under the ambiguous glories of “administration.”