One of the great advantages of the National Education Policy 2020 is the freedom and flexibility it offers to university departments to update and upgrade the syllabi of any subject, encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to complex issues. Exercising this discretion, the Vice Chancellor of Doon University, Prof Surekha Dangwal, asked me to curate a credit course for the Master’s programme of English literature, which will also give students an overarching view of the transformation of India from 1900 to 1947.
Starting this year, students will read Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore, A Passage to India by EM Forster, Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand, and Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. This is what we may call ‘literature and beyond’ because it is a time-space in which fiction and non-fiction coalesce to give the learner a better grasp of what happened in India in the first five decades of the last century, something which the several tomes of Towards Freedom by Bipin Chandra or The Transfer of Power in India by VP Menon do not reflect.
The idea had emanated three years ago in the course of an interview with the officer trainees editing the House Journal of ‘Three. One. One’ at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand. This name was chosen after long discussions to honour and acknowledge Article 311 of the Indian Constitution, which gives civil servants the ability, as well as the responsibility to act without fear or favour. They wanted to know of books that would give them a fair idea of India from the beginning of the last century to the dawn of Independence.
The interview was being conducted in my Study, just below the Director’s office, which was once used as a lodge for visitors who could not afford the well-appointed rooms of Happy Valley with its exclusive sitting lounges and a well-stocked bar. Legend, backed by memorabilia, has it that in 1883, when Kipling was still a struggling writer, he was a guest of one Mr. Wultzer, the Manager of Charleville Hotel, which currently houses the Academy. A verse ascribed to that period and displayed on the website of The Kipling Society reads:
A burning sun in cloudless skies,
And April dies,
A dusty mall – three sunsets splendid –
And May is ended,
Grey mud beneath – grey cloud o’erhead,
And June is dead!
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The selected works
So, I started with Rudyard Kipling, the die-hard imperialist, who actually believed that the sun would never set on the British Empire. His best-known work, Kim, published in 1901, chronicles the adventures of an Irish orphan in India who becomes the chela of a Tibetan monk while learning espionage from the British secret service. The book is replete with a nostalgic, colourful depiction of Indian tradition, especially the exotica of street life. Kipling had been a journalist working for the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, and his father had been the director of the Lahore Museum. Kipling received the Nobel for literature in 1907, which gave his reputation and writings a boost. Six years later, it was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore for ‘his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.’ A year ago, Gitanjali was first published as Song Offerings, with the following introduction by WB Yeats: ‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics… display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life… a tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing.’ Tagore’s Nobel meant a lot for India, especially the educated class, and it continues to be a ‘favourite’ among choices as books to be given as a prize to students for their academic distinction. And so, this was next on their reading list.
A Passage to India by EM Forster captured public imagination when it was adapted as a well-received movie by English director David Lean. The book is set in the 1920s when MK Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement has stirred the nation, and the white man’s burden is being questioned in the court, as well as on the street. It depicts the interface between the British and the Indians in India and the tensions that arise when a visiting Englishwoman, Adela Quested, at the behest of the local Europeans, accuses the well-respected Dr Aziz of having assaulted her during a picnic. The principal of the local college, Cecil Fielding, gives testimony in his defense, and during the trial, Adela has second thoughts about her accusation in the witness box and finally withdraws the charges. However, more than the acquittal, it is the flaming passions, and the contest of ideas between the Ruler and the subjects that is more important.
Although the Booker Prize-winning novel Heat and Dust was written by Jhabvala in 1975 and adapted as a film around the same time as A Passage to India, it was also set in the 1920s – in fact, a year before Passage. This is the story of Olivia, the young bride of Douglas Rivers, the district officer of provincial Satipur. Restless, fitfully arty and romantic, she cannot understand the ‘formal and rigid’ world of the Club and the station, and cannot decide which is worse: the long empty hours she has to endure by herself, or the company of the dowdy elderly women who must defer to her given her status as the wife of an ICS Burra sahib. She is charmed by the decadent, but charming Nawab of the neighbouring principality who sends her a Rolls Royce and builds her a house in the mountains. How can an English beauty succumb to the charms of a Desi Raja?
While Heat and Dust and A Passage to India describe the world of the British officials and the nascent Indian elite, there was another world in every habitation – be it the palace of a Maharaja or the hierarchical lines in a cantonment town. It was only through Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, which I read when I was in high school, that I became aware of the fact that this was the story set in the military station of Jullundur, as Jalandhar was then known. This is one day in the life of a young ‘sweeper boy’ Bakha who must clean latrines for survival, and in return pick up the crumbs from the homes of families and the army Langar. The temple priest tries to molest his sister, but when she protests, he accuses her of ‘polluting him.’ In the course of the day, Gandhi halts at the local railway station, and makes an impassioned plea against untouchability. Anand had written this novel when he was studying in England, at the behest of Gandhi who wanted him to write ‘with feeling about what it meant to be an untouchable.’ Anand, like Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Hiren Mukherjee, and K.A. Abbas, was a founding member of the Progressive Writers Association of which Munshi Premchand too became an integral part. Anand went on to write Coolie – the story of a 14-year-old boy who becomes a porter to skip starvation, and Two Leaves and a Bud on the rank exploitation of tea garden workers by the plantation managers who treat them as sub-human.
Last but not least is Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, which is set against the backdrop of the horrendous violence, killings, sexual assault, and wanton destruction of entire localities and habitations in the months following the announcement of Partition, and the earmarking of Muslim-majority districts for Pakistan and Hindu-Sikh districts for India. Overnight, neighbours turned foes, and the demolished soldiers who had fought shoulder to shoulder in the Second World War were now at each other’s throats. This orgy of violence and bloodletting is the unfortunate background in which the two nations marked their independence.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)