Nicholas Dawes - Home is Away - India in 3 years and 3 centuries
Around me in the
newsroom, in the 9pm television brawl, and on social media, I can hear hurt,
insistent, voices reaching back to the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, or the
accession of 1947, and out across the border to Pakistan and the breeding
grounds of extremist terror, searching for a narrative to redeem the violence
of the state. Answering them is Kashmiri rage shaded with despair, and the
small, vigorous, chorus of Indian opinion counseling a political solution...
The same conversations
play out wherever the crisis at the geographical margins of the country, or
among its marginalised, confronts the democratic centre with contradictions
that cannot be sustained: over caste, over sexuality, the Armed Forces Special Powers
Act or a broken penal code...
I won’t be plucking
any swimmers from these currents, but it is in their tug toward justice, and in
the terror of the breach, that India feels the most like home.
My first political
argument with my paternal grandfather was about India. It was 1983, and I was
11 years old. It has taken me more than 30 years to trace the roots of that
half-forgotten conversation in a gloomy living room, where an impossibly
intricate walnut table from Kashmir stood in one corner, and faded photographs
of men in uniform hung on the wall. I loved that table, I used to run my
fingers over the tiny, perfectly regular flowers that stood in relief on its
dark surface, and the leaves that flared from its borders. “It took a year to
carve”, my grandmother would say, at once completely believable and beyond
comprehension.
Some foreigners come
to India to find themselves, seeking a stage set for the drama of their
self-discovery. I didn’t. I also didn’t come to tap a “vast market”, to
arbitrage costs, or to report India’s story for a global audience. Instead I
came to do the work I love, at an important Indian media company focussed on
making better sense of a hugely complex and dynamic news environment for Indian
audiences. My own biography, I insisted to myself, would not feature. In fact I
would avoid talking, or even thinking too much, about it, and I made no real
effort to seek darshan of my family history.
But I grew up under
the shadow of empire, and live in an age of fraught globalism, both born in the
India trade, and if there is one cliche about this place that survives living
here, it’s that you can’t escape your past, even as you rush headlong into the
future. As I prepare to leave India this week, I no longer want to. In 1983 South Africa’s
struggle against apartheid was finding new, and newly powerful forms. The
United Democratic Front, which led unprecedented domestic resistance, was born.
The state, meanwhile, took violent repression to new levels with PW Botha’s
securocrats firmly in control of the country.
It must have been in
the spring of that year that my father took me to see Richard Attenborough’s
Gandhi at the Golden Acre Mall in central Cape Town. I remember the newness of
the multiplex, smaller screens, velour seats, a lavish concession stand, and
the slightly heightened atmosphere of a special trip into town. But mostly I
remember a few flashes of imagery: Ben Kingsley’s young lawyer, slightly too handsome
for the part, on the platform at Pietermaritzburg station, passes being set on
fire in Johannesburg, General Reginald Dyer’s troops jogging through the alley
to Jallianwala Bagh, and the well filling up with bodies as their guns
stuttered.
In Cape Town, in 1983,
this was clearly a film about South Africa just as much as it was about India,
even to an 11-year-old. It was thrilling to watch. And so when next I saw
my grandfather - my grandfather who had a picture of himself as a kurta-pyjama
clad teenager in Peshawar hanging above his desk, who practised yoga daily, and
who loathed South Africa’s ruling Nationalist Party so much he had modified a
fishing-rod to turn down the volume on his Sony Trinitron when cabinet
ministers spoke - I asked, “Have you seen Gandhi?”
“I don’t watch horror
movies”, he curtly replied. The tone of the discussion deteriorated from there
until he ended it with half-an-anecdote: “When my uncle, your two-greats uncle,
drowned rescuing an Indian man, 10 000 coolies went to his funeral”.
I now realise that he
probably used coolie in the Indian sense, labourer, rather than in its racist
South African sense, as a slur for people of Indian descent, but it was a moment
of both clarity and extreme discomfort, not just because I loved and admired my
grandfather, but because I began to understand how English-speaking South
Africans like me, just as much as the Afrikaners we had been taught casually to
blame for Apartheid, were heirs to a globalised system of racism.
The strand of my
ancestry I know most about is a long line of soldiers in India. They were
ducking Tipu Sultan’s rockets in the 18th Century, patrolling the Arabian Gulf
with the Bombay Royal Marine in the 19th, and enforcing the fragile peace
around the Khyber pass in the early 20th. I was taught to identify with them,
but until that argument in 1983, it had never really occurred to me what their
history meant for my own place in the world. And for some reason, I had never
heard the story of my “two-greats” uncle, and I didn’t until decades later,
when my father began to dig into the archives.
In June 1909 Nicholas
Bernard Dawes was appointed by the Maharaja of Mysore to officiate as Chief
Engineer and Secretary to the princely state until a suitable Indian candidate
could be found to take over on a permanent basis. He had perhaps
established his claim through the work he had done as Deputy Chief Engineer,
writing what we would now call a business case for a major new dam on the
Cauvery. Revenue earned from selling power to Coimbatore and Madras, as well as
the Kolar gold fields, he argued, would eventually fund the construction of a
huge irrigation network. “The state will then be the owner of a property free of
all charges except Rs 8 lakhs for maintenance and bringing in a revenue of Rs.
60 lakhs per annum and this on an original borrowed capital of Rs 175 lakhs”…
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