There are many beginnings.
The East India Company, the Crown and Parliament, the English language, the Indian Civil Services, the Catholic nuns, these are all beginnings.
My father, born in 1924, went first to a madrasa and learnt Urdu, Arabic and Persian. His four brothers did the same, except perhaps the youngest, born in 1938, because things were already changing by then. His five sisters did not; girls did not go to madrasas. There were teachers and governesses who came to the house to teach all the children. After the madrasa, my father went to Lucknow Christian College. One of the original missionary schools in Uttar Pradesh, Christian College made him interested in the humanities. Like many others, he fell in love with English Literature. He did his B.A., and then M.A, in Literature from Lucknow University. He wanted to become a poet and an author. He had a terrific library of everyone who was anyone in English Literature. Sometime in the sixties or seventies, when government policy took a certain direction, he learnt to read and write Hindi. But just for the purpose of official letters and documents. He never read a word of Hindi for pleasure. From as soon as I was conscious, the delicious dust from all those books, Steele, Addison, Spencer, Marlowe, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics, the Victorians, the Moderns, hundreds of books of poetry, essays, fiction, drama, criticism, went into my nose.
My mother, born in 1931, was educated carelessly, as was the wont for girls. She spent a large part of her childhood, together with cousins, at her grandparents’. Her grandfather was an advocate, an aristocrat, and an anglophile. He brought up his grandchildren in English style, even taking them to England to study for a year. Only when she came back to her own parents, did my mother go to regular school. But not for long. She was set up to be married by the time she was sixteen. Having done High School privately at twelve or thirteen, she was hurried up now to graduate. The subjects chosen for her were those that would supposedly be easy to study and also aid her as a home-maker: sitar, Sanskrit, and Home Science. She also studied violin and dance at the Bhatkhande School (now University) but again, briefly and carelessly. She was not careless; her parents were.
Careers, in those days, were seen strictly pragmatically. They were what gave you the wherewithal to live as you liked to and do what you enjoyed, and bring up our children in the ways you preferred and attain the status you were interested in. That a career fulfilled your curiousity or passion, involved you in a certain subject area or made you excel because of an innate talent—these were thoughts so foreign to everyone that they had never been thought.
My father, it may be said, spent the rest of his life floating on the nice cloud of literature and language provided by his education. He joined the Indian Police Service and shone. My mother shone, likewise, as the most gracious hostess, officer’s wife and social service volunteer. That she continued to always feel less educated than she would like, no one could have guessed. She did one course after the other, learning any number of things, but this only seemed wonderful. Her private awareness that she did not have an academic base stayed totally private.
All the childhood photographs I have seen show how proud they were to have me. When parents are proud, their happiness is tinged with worry. They want to give the best education to their children. But how are they to do that? My father, forced to abandon his literary dreams and join the Indian Police Service, was posted in the first seven years of my life in backwaters with no modern school. I have vague memories of village-like schools. I have strong memories of my mother teaching me at home.
We lived in bungalows. Bungalows are a shady nest of rooms, deeply recessed by verandas all around. They have screen doors that close by themselves on springs after they are opened. They have high echoing ceilings. The screens and the verandas make you feel, when inside, that you are separated from the world. You are definitely separated, because a bungalow is like an oasis, or an island. All around it is a compound. The compound has a garden on one side, maybe vegetables on another side, even grains in some bungalows, fruit trees, and some decorative things like rockeries and pathways, ponds and statues, that no one uses but that express the creative energies of memsahibs.
The layout of the rooms is always similar: a hallway, anteroom, or veranda set up with seating for visitors; a drawing room; a dining room; three or four bedrooms with attached dressing rooms and bathrooms, the dressing rooms large enough to be convertible to additional bedrooms; the kitchen outside; large, old-fashioned bathrooms. Every mistress uses the verandas and the gardens differently. But the rooms cannot be used in too many different ways. They are cavernous compared to an average family’s possessions. They have wide pathways and big spaces for children to career about in.
Maybe Indian leaders, on achieving Independence in 1947, should have dismantled the administrative services in its fundamental possession of privilege, embodied in the bungalow with all its rituals. I used to think that the bungalow and its lifestyle reproduced elitism in the children of the administrators, and was a direct cause of India’s backwardness.
Then I looked closely at my own case. Yes, the bungalow produced in me specific habits and traits. It made me lonely and dependant on my own resources. It spoilt me because I never had to lift a finger. It made me take servants and luxury for granted. Driven around, waited on, separated and shielded, it gave me an unvoiced sense of power. Subconscously, I knew that a bungalow-dweller was special.
But we were not rich. I did not own many toys, or anything else. When I escaped my mother’s tutoring or was not attended to, I played outdoors with leaves and stones, balls and dogs. For company I had servants and servants’ children. When I had emotional or psychological needs, there they were and no wizard appeared to make them go away. I often felt deprived, since many of my school friends had nicer clothes or more treats than I. I often longed for movies or ice cream or visits to friends’ homes and was on principle refused these by my parents. Study, study, study, was my lot, and then in my free time, learn music and dance; read and write whatever I liked; play with the dogs or my brother or the compound children; go swimming in the club or horse riding; and walk around kicking stones or observe the servants in their manifold tasks.
I am not sure the bungalow made me so very privileged. And ‘Indian’? My parents were as Indian as anyone could be. We spoke Hindi, ate Indian food, albeit always with a pudding to end it, celebrated the festivals, went to a Hanuman temple on Tuesdays, and had nothing to do with any other country, including England. The attachments of older Indian educated people to England had taken the form of old biscuit and chocolate tins now used in the puja or pantry. They had some memories of their travels to England, but not very live or meaningful ones. They relished the anecdotes about their own grandparents, but as a time gone by, to be smiled at and not to be re-created.
On the whole, I was only a little bit the product of my bungalow childhood, and only a little bit of the small town schools I started life in. Mostly I was the product of my mother’s teaching.
Here is what I remember and what I know:
I would have a desk and chair, a copy book and a pencil. I would write and practice, and repeat and learn. We went on and on and on, with what I cannot say. Except that it was only words and numbers, nary a project or an activity. Every now and then I would revolt and we would have a tiff, my mother and I. She would say, “Then go and play!” and stalk off. I would breathe the air of liberation and start collecting my playing things. Before I had barely got past stage one, she would re-appear and say, “Come on, you errant delinquent, come on to study!” I would understand that her injunction to play had been only rhetorical. The machine ground on, very regular and very fine.
Nita Kumar
