Blackness

Hunting for a reference to something that I remembered reading as a child, that Merle Oberon damaged her skin by excessive use of 'Fair and Lovely', a skin whitening cream popular in India, I googled my way to this blog about a New York mother who was shocked at the blackness of her adopted Indian daughter's skin color (does every emotion, however crass, make its way into the public domain these days?). Interestingly, I happened to be reading this:

The doctor was a blackish Indian, about twenty-five years old. None of us now, of course, suffers from colour prejudice--it is so low brow--but I must confess that it was rather a shock to see so dark an Indian in this Shan interior, and when I looked at his little wife, the Karen, colour prejudice did not seem so far-fetched. ........... I looked at her husband again. He must be a nice man if she was so happy. But it was hard to believe it on account of his appearance, though Rossiter told me afterwards that he had an admirable character.

This from Maurice Collis (Lords of the sunset: A tour in the Shan States, New York, Dodd Mead and Company, 1958) after he has repeatedly self-congratulated himself on how, unlike the other English in India, he could treat the Indians as equals. What is it about the blackness of the Doctor's skin that so shocked Collis in the 1930s? And, how could someone in the cosmopolitan twenty first century be surprised or shocked by black skin?

No answers. Just thought I'd share this. Meanwhile, my millions of readers, any ideas on a reference that shows that Merle Oberon destroyed her skin by using whitening creams?

More on the Mutiny

The one question that always puzzled me about the Indian Mutiny is how often the mutineers lost in battles against the English. In most cases, the Indians were something like ten times the strength of the British troops and they seemed to have had a much greater motivation to fight than the Indians (Sikhs, Madrasis) fighting on the side of the British. Still, battle after battle ended with thousands of Indians dead for a couple of hundred British troops.

Forbes-Mitchell (The Relief of Lucknow by Williams Forbes-Mitchell, The Folio Society, London 1962) provides some answers. Forbes-Mitchell was a young NCO in the 93rd Highlanders and he took part in the British rescue of the beseiged English men and women in the Lucknow Residency during the mutiny. Here he makes fun of the Pandies:

... in addition to the regular army, there was a large body of archers on the walls, armed with bows and arrows which they discharged with great force and precision, .... Looking at the arrow, 'My conscience!' said White, 'bows and arrows! bows and arrows! My conscience, the sight has not been seen in a civilised war for nearly two hundred years. Bows and arrows! And why not weavers' beams as in the days of Goliath? Ah! that Daniel White should be able to tell in the Saut Market of Glasgow that he had seen men fight with bows and arrows in the days of Enfield rifles! (Page 53.)

Enfield rifles are, of course, the infamous grease coated bullet using rifles that were the trigger for the mutiny. New to the army and not in the hands of the rebels, they were a great weapen for the British. In this next extract, Forbes-Mitchell talks about the superior range of the Enfield rifle. The rebels had brought their big guns outside the Padshahbagh to shorten the distance across the Gomti river assuming that they would be out of range of the British rifles:

They evidently as yet did not understand the range of the Enfield rifle, as they now came within about a thousand to twelve hundred yards of the wall of the Shah Najaf next to the river. Some twenty of the best shots in the company, with carefully cleaned and loaded rifles, watched till they saw a good number of the enemy near their guns, then, raising sights to the full height and carefully aiming high, they fired a volley by word of command slowly given ... and about half a dozen of the enemy were knocked over. (Page 66.)

What chance did the poor mutineers have with their bows and arrows against Enfield rifles and the heavy naval canons that the British used to level defensive walls! Interestingly, from the description above, even the British were new to the longer range of the rifles and presumably that's why the author describes the process, including raising the sights and aiming high, so carefully!

Shame on India!

Well, went to the Australia vs. Ireland match this morning. This morning because the match was over before lunch! The West Indian on the street is really disgusted with the Aussie team because they chose to bat second. The taxi driver said, "that's not cricket man. These guys have paid thousands of pounds to come see their team play and the Aussies should have given them a proper match by batting first. I hate the Aussie's and I hate the fans." He was half kidding of course, one of us here is an Aussie and he knew it!

A video of the most interesting t-shirt in the match. And, for entertainment, a brief view of Calypso Cricket.

India in the World Cup Cricket

So, here I am in Barbados watching the cricket world cup. Today's match was between Bangladesh and England and the match itself was ho hum bad. Sloppy fielding on both sides, and lousy batting from what should be a mature English side. Giving some truth to the movement of the center of cricket to India, Kensington Oval was full of Indian fans. The stadium was a little less than half full and about half the audience was Indian (the other half was English with the occasional Aussie and South African or West Indian dotting the stands). Shouting, playing samba music, singing songs, and cheering an India that is no longer in the World Cup. One section was on its feet throughout the match, Brazilian football like but for much longer than the duration of a football match. Take a look at the following two videos (you have to ignore the lone Australian with his huge flag in the first one!)


It says something about the maturity of India that all these fans showed up for the cup even though India was out of it. And, rather than morosely trying to pick another team or just sit around watching the matches, the Indian contingent (labeled the Bharat Army by the Barbados press) decided to go ahead and have a good time. And, a good time they did have. The action in the stands was much more entertaining than the dismal cricket on display. The English fans may be known as the "Barmy Army," but the real 'Barminess' is in the Bharat Army.

The Untouchable (L'Intouchable) Benoit Jacquot (2006)

It is always interesting seeing India through the eyes of the West. The India I see is transparent, familiar and easy to navigate. The crowds, the bazaars, the poverty, social hierarchies seem natural and go unnoticed by my conscious eye. To Western eyes, however, as is obvious in Benoit Jacquot new film The Untouchable (L’intouchable), India is a mysterious, crowded, and hard to fathom place. His India is across a border that the Western visitor cannot hope to cross. His India is, in a sense, untouchable.

Like many great French cinema directors, Jacquot is the master of understatement. Nothing much happens in the film. Jeanne (Isild Le Besco), a penniless young actress drifting through life discovers that her father might have been Indian. Her mother is not totally sure, but who else could it have been. Obviously confused about this new Indian side to her, she impulsively decides to visit India. Since she doesn’t have the money, she signs up to act in a simulated sex scene to pay her way (the emotional distance with which Isild Le Besco plays this scene is worth the price of admission alone).

When Jeanne arrives in Delhi, the picture changes. From the muted colors, empty streets, and soft sounds of France, the film is suddenly full of the sound, people, and vibrant colors of India. In the India part, Jacquot lets the camera do the talking and one can see the wonder that is his India - populated, anarchic, and overwhelming. Jeanne immerses herself in India and the camera does the same. In one sequence, the camera stays still while a seething mass of humanity rushes by on rickshaws, motorcycles, cars; each vehicle competing for the limited space available on the road. She buys a 3AC ticket to Varanasi but ends up traveling in unreserved second class, perhaps to experience the India she thinks that Indians do (or perhaps the director was careless!).

In Benaras, she meets the son of the Dom she thinks is her father (no, not a gratuitous coincidence, she asks around for the Dom by name) and is invited to his sisters wedding. At the wedding, she discovers that her father, if he is indeed her father, is not the Dom but rather is the Dom’s brother Arnab, a school teacher in Delhi. She returns to Delhi where she follows Arnab from the school but then returns to France without meeting him. He, in a sense, remains the last untouchable.

While the India/France contrast works well in the film, Jacquot, unfortunately, overplays the untouchable angle. On the flight to Delhi, Jeanne is seated next to a mysterious Indian, an untouchable himself, who mysteriously disappears mid-flight through the machinations of the Flight Attendants. This episode, designed presumably to lecture the audience about untouchables, is seeped in the mysterious ways of the Orient of books like The Moonstone. These mid-nineteenth century ideas have no place in a modern film.

In another episode, a gay French man takes Jeanne along to visit his cousin, a sister of St. Theresa at a convent near Varanasi. In the conversation that follows, the gay man and his cousin seem to be on different planets and one can only assume that Jacquot is trying to imply that all human relationships are untouchable.

In summary, the film is worth seeing just to see the familiar sights of India through the eyes of an outsider. But, as cinema, the film was a little disappointing with a simplistic message and a storyline that is, um, untouchable.

The Last Mughal and Indian Muslims

The thing that is the most striking about The Last Mughal, for me anyway, is that for the first time I got some perspective on why the Indian Muslim disappeared from public life. After a thousand years of being the ruling class in Northern India, they were, at best a marginal force in pre-independence India. What happened to them is a subtext of The Last Mughal. At the time of the Mutiny, Delhi was still a Mughal city, marginal to the British led power structure of the Raj, but still an important center of Mughal, and thus, Muslim power and culture. For six months during the Mutiny, the Mughal empire returned, but this was a Mughal empire that depended as much on Hindus as it did on Muslims. In a sense, it was the first sign of a nationalist India. Once the Mutiny was over, the British took a series of steps that left the Muslim population of India out in the cold.

1. For almost two years Delhi's muslims were excluded from the city! By the time they returned, they had lost control of business and property and, even in Delhi, the punjabi hindus were in ascendance. The economic and cultural impact on the muslim community was enormous.

2. They excluded muslims from the army. Read anything about the Mutiny in 19th century histories and you realize the extent to which the pre-mutiny Company army was drawn from the muslim population. It seems to me that at least 40 to 50% of the army was muslim. Post-mutiny, the army was drawn from the "martial races," the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, who also happened to be the main sources for the British army that fought the mutineers. The Sikhs were a part of British India by then, but the Gurkhas were the offering of an opportunistic Nepali king who joined the British when he had figured out who would win.

3. The creation of a Babu class that was mostly drawn from loyal Hindus and actively excluded muslims. The large recruitment of Sikhs, Gurkhas, and "Madrasis" in the army, and the creation of a loyal english speaking educated babu class, largely left muslims out of the two avenues of government service open to Indians, the army and the civil service.

The Indian Mutiny

So, how long and how important was the Indian Mutiny or the War of Independence anyway? I always thought it started and ended in 1857. Asked around and almost everyone thought the same thing. No one came even close to the actual length of the mutiny, two years and two months from the first incident in Berhampore near Calcutta in February 1857 (the 19th Regiment Indian Infantry refused to take their bullets on parade and was subsequently disbanded), to the capture of Tantia Tope, or rather the opportunistic betrayal of Tantia Tope by Man Singh, in April 1959. From the history I read at school I always got the impression that the First War of Independence was fought by a few kings (Nana Saheb, Tantia Tope, Rani Laxmibai) and that it was a brief affair that resulted in the crown taking over India from The Company. I'll give a timeline of the mutiny in a later post.

I am reading "History of the Indian Mutiny," by G. W. Forrest. Three volumes, two published in 1904 and one in 1912. A fascinating book. The entire mutiny is discussed from the point of the view of the British and gives absolutely no mention of the strategies, troop movements, etc. of the mutineers. Much more of a victors view than a real history. (Yes, I have read William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal.) With a lot of stuff about the brave English soldiers fighting to save the empire. Don't get me wrong, they were brave. One only has to read the history of the siege of the Residency at Lucknow to see that. But surely the Indians fought with equal bravery on both sides.

The other striking thing is the degree to which the English were hated by their own men. They, the English i.e., thought that they had loyal soldiers who would follow them anywhere. Many of these soldiers were veterans of other battles fought under British command. But, almost to a man, entire regiments not only deserted but also hacked/shot their commanders to death whenever they got the opportunity. Here is an extract from Forrest (writing about the evacuation of the British from Kanpur at the start of the mutiny):

“A litter containing Colonel Ewart, commanding the First Native Infantry, who had been severely wounded, fell into the rear, and when passing St. John’s Church was stopped by seven or eight men of his own regiment. ... The sepoys then mockingly asked their wounded commander [Colonel Ewart], “Is this not a fine parade, and is it not all well dressed up?” Two of them then cut him to pieces.” (Vol.1 462). They then killed his wife as well. One boat that managed to cut loose was chased for days and almost everyone killed.

Colonel Ewart's men were clearly passionate about killing their masters. Time after time, as one regiment after another mutineed, their officers were caught off-guard. "My men will remain loyal," they said.

This Blog!

I read. I read a lot. Almost everything I read is connected with South Asia in some way or the other. Because Burmese history is so tied up with Indian history, think British Raj, I include Burma in South Asia. This blog is all about my meandering thoughts about the books I am reading, with thoughts on film and art thrown in for good measure.

Saouq is the Burmese word for book.