Heart of India , livre ebook

MARK TULLY
The Heart of India
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
The Barren Woman of Balramgaon
Blood for Blood
The Ikka-wallah s Lament
Girlfriends
The Goondas of Gopinagar
Two Brothers
Village Strike
Twice Born
Beyond Purdah
Glossary
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE HEART OF INDIA
Mark Tully joined the BBC in 1964 and was the Chief of Bureau in Delhi from 1972 to 1993. He continued as South Asia Correspondent until he resigned from the BBC in 1994. He still lives and works in Delhi. Among the many major stories he has covered are the Bangladesh war, Mrs Gandhi s State of Emergency, the execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Bhopal gas disaster and the demolition in 1992 of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya. The Punjab problem and Operation Blue Star-when the Indian army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine-were the subjects of his first book, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi s Last Battle , which he wrote with his colleague in the BBC, Satish Jacob. In 1987 he made the much applauded radio series From Raj to Rajiv , which traced the story of India s first forty years of Independence. His second book accompanied the series. His best-selling book No Full Stops in India was published in 1991. The next year he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India, a rare honour for a foreigner. This puts him in the unusual position of having been decorated by both the Queen of Britain and the President of India.
I would never have written these stories without Gillian Wright, who worked with me from the plans for the first visit to Uttar Pradesh until the last i was dotted
Introduction
When I ended my long career as the BBC s correspondent in Delhi, many people I met in India were surprised that I was not returning to live in Britain. They imagined I would follow the pattern of the British civil servants and police officers who spent their most active years ruling India and then returned to Dorset, Devon or Cornwall to enjoy their well-earned retirement. But the idea of leaving India never crossed my mind. I would have looked back on my life as wasted if, after spending nearly thirty years working in India, I had no desire to remain once my BBC career was over. The roots I had put down were not so shallow that I could pull them up as soon as the job which brought me here had ended.
At least four generations of my mother s family before me spent their working lives in India. Most of them went home to retire, and I can well understand why. In the first place, they were positively discouraged from staying on . Britain ruled India, but it did not colonize it. The British Raj did not encourage settlers. Settlers might set a bad example and go native , destroying the carefully nurtured image of the difference, and hence the superiority, of the British race. The Raj, it was thought, depended on that image of superiority to enable it to rule so many with so few. Philip Mason was a member of the Indian Civil Service, the steel frame which held the Raj together. In his memorable book The Men Who Ruled India he described the Indian Civil Service as a corps of men specially selected, brought up by a rigour of bodily hardship to which no other modern people have subjected their ruling class, trained by cold baths, cricket, and the history of Greece and Rome, a separate race from those they ruled, aloof, superior to bribery, discouraged from marriage until they were middle-aged, and then subject to long separations .
But I wasn t sent to rule India-the Raj was over long before I could offer myself for the Indian Civil Service. Even if the opportunity had been there, I am sure I would never have been accepted. I wasn t very good at the Spartan life of my public school, I was a careless writer of Latin and Greek prose and I was bored by cricket. I was sent to write and broadcast about India, and an independent India too. That meant I couldn t keep aloof. I had to become involved; I had to become part of India-at least that was the way I saw it. Some have argued that I became too involved, that my reporting was prejudiced by my affection for India. For my part I have never been able to understand why British journalists who are open Francophiles, overt admirers of America or enthusiasts for some other Western country which they report are not likely to be accused of being partisan, but correspondents who identify themselves with countries whose cultures are not European or American are regarded with the gravest suspicion.
I soon realized that it was not going to be difficult to get involved in India. From the first day I arrived I was surrounded by friends-the friends my predecessor introduced to me, the staff of All India Radio, many of them much senior to me, the members of the Press Club, my new neighbours. Many are still good friends to this day. It s through them that I became involved in their country. Now, when I am asked why I m staying on, I reply, Because of my friends.
That, of course, is only part of the truth. I m drawn to India by its beauty, particularly its natural beauty. Recently I was beside a camp fire in the Great Himalayan National Park, watching the snow-covered mountains glitter in the sunset. A week later I was in Kerala, in the extreme south, sitting in my bathing trunks, looking out over the Arabian Sea as the sun slid like a great red dome below the horizon. There are the smells of India too, which evoke such nostalgia. There is the dry scent of early summer in Delhi as the blue jacarandas, the scarlet gulmohars and other trees come into flower, the sweet smell of the queen-of-the-night and the freshness of the first scent of pine trees in the foothills of the Himalayas after a long, hot and dusty drive across the plains. There are the folk songs and the classical music with the raagas that start with such austerity and end in ecstasy. There are the great epics and the love poetry. There s the art of the Pradhan tribe in Central India which occupies the whole of one wall of my flat. There s the colour of the festivals, the solemn dignity of the courtyards of the great mosques filled with line after line of worshippers bowing their heads in prayer and the colourful informality of the pujari performing the evening rites in a Hindu temple. There s the sound of priests singing the Sikh scriptures carrying across the water of the sacred tank in which the Golden Temple stands. There are the great monuments of India. I have never known anyone to be disappointed by the Taj Mahal or the forts of Rajasthan. There are fresh-cooked parathas for breakfast in the open-air dhabas , or restaurants, along the Grand Trunk Road, and there s the delicacy of a vegetarian thali , or tray, in Gujarat.
All these keep me in India, but they are not the whole. It would need a poet to describe what India means to me, and I am no poet. I can only say that I m not alone among foreigners in believing there s nowhere like India, and no people like Indians. I am perhaps more unusual for a foreigner in that I have been accepted as a part of India.
I am unique in the privilege I have enjoyed of having my reports carried for many years by the Indian-language services of the BBC, services listened to in villages all over India. I have been the correspondent in what I believe will turn out to have been the heyday of BBC radio in India. I started my career with the transistor radio which brought cheap and easily portable sets to Indian villagers. I ended it just as television was beginning to have an impact on BBC radio audiences. During my time the government-controlled All India Radio allowed no rivals, so those who wanted independent news on radio had to tune into international stations. Now there are signs that the government is loosening its stranglehold on the electronic media. This will mean more rivals for the BBC too. Of course, BBC radio has a big future in India, but my successors will not have it as easy as I did. There is also BBC World Service television, but I have found that radio builds up a more intimate relationship between a broadcaster and the audience. Perhaps because of that intimacy, I have been shown great affection in India, although my reports were by no means always what the listeners wanted to hear.
These stories may seem a poor way to repay that affection. They do not paint an idyllic picture. But Indians do not expect uncritical acclaim. They do not deny reality. So I hope the stories will be accepted as what they are intended to be-a tribute to the Indian villager.
Mahatma Gandhi said, India lives in her 700,000 villages, obscure, tiny, out-of-the-way villages I would like to go and settle down in some such village. That is real India, my India. Madhukar Upadhaya, a friend of mine who reports for the BBC, celebrated the 125th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi s birth by repeating one of his great symbolic protests against the British, the Dandi salt march. Madhukar walked for twenty-two days, covering 241 miles and visiting all the villages through which the Mahatma had passed. He ended his journey on the coast where the Mahatma defied the government by making salt without paying tax on it. On his return Madhukar said to me, The old village ways are dying out and nothing is replacing them. But the best-known writing about modern India has for the most part ignored the plight of the villagers who are losing their old moorings and not finding new ones. Writers have concentrated on urban, middle-class India. I hope these stories will do something to restore the balance.
I am a journalist, so I decided the best way to write about the Indian villager was to go into the villages and towns of the eastern half of Uttar Pradesh to look for stories and then report them. However, I soon realized that it would cause grave embarrassment, and in some cases even danger, to many of those who told me their stor