Postscript

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cricketer Keith Miller and even managed to interview one of my journalistic heroes: Anthony Howard, then editor of the New Statesman. In India, by contrast, I had, as the Indians say, no ‘pull’in the media.

In business my family contacts made life easy, in the media I knew nobody and, unlike London, cold calling was not welcome. The editor of a Kolkata paper did finally see me but treated me with the sort of disdain that my grandmother inflicted on the untouchable woman who cleaned her toilets. And the head of a sports radio station made it clear to me that if I wanted to broadcast cricket commentaries I would have to keep giving him and his wife presents.

After three years of such an existence – material comfort in an intellectual desert – I decided to abandon India and take my chance at becoming a writer. When I arrived back at Heathrow I was almost the archetypal struggling writer: I had one completed book with a publisher, another incomplete manuscript in my case and pounds 400 in the bank, but no job or even offer of one.

Three months after I had given up my comfortable partnership, the Sunday Times, which had begun to use me, closed down for a year and I confronted the hard realities of the world of freelance journalism.

Since then much has changed for me and the partners I left behind in India. They have grown immensely rich as the Indian service sector has boomed. They earn at a conservative estimate five times what Iearn, live in houses that are virtual palaces, do not have to worry about doctors’ waiting lists, or traffic, as they are invariably driven everywhere. And when they travel abroad, which they do frequently, they always go first class while I rely on my wits to upgrade to premium plus.

But while I feel embarrassed that I cannot reciprocate the lavish hospitality they shower on me when I visit India, I have never had any regrets about abandoning accountancy there for journalism here.

For although I have not quite fulfilled my dreams, to be a cricket writer like Neville Cardus, a broadcaster like John Arlott, or a foreign correspondent like James Cameron – I did have the privilege of meeting all three – I like to think I have not done too badly and whatever I have done has been achieved without any nepotism or pull or toadying to unpleasant people.

I am well aware that there still remain immense barriers of colour and creed in this country and I have always felt there is a glass ceiling beyond which I cannot go, but within such boundaries it has provided me with opportunities which I would not have had in India.

It is an immensely open, intellectually alive and culturally curious country and it surprises me that in the endless debate about immigration these virtues are not talked of but the stress is only on filthy lucre.

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True, the lure of money drives many immigrants to this country, but there are quite a few like us who live here not for the money but more for its values.

I was forcefully made aware of the mixture of scorn and lust that Indians have for pardesis – Indians living abroad – during my coverage of the Rajendra Sethia story, the Indian-born British businessman who for a time in the 1980s was the world’s biggest bankrupt. At the height of the story Iwas visited in my London offices by an Indian doctor practising in Harley Street, who claimed to be a friend of Rajendra Sethia and who told me thatas an Indian, and a fellow Bengali, I should stop writing about Sethia’s business exploits. I was harming the Indian business community in London and did I really want to help the white men finish off this outstanding Indian businessman.

Some years ago a friend of mine said I was the second best known Indian professional – Salman Rushdie being the first. She was grossly exaggerating, of course, and reacting to the fact that just then, with interest in India revived and Raj nostalgia in the vogue, I found myself asked to become the expert on almost everything Indian from books, to fashion, festivals, cinema, food and, of course, cricket. Within minutes of MrsGandhi being shot, I was on the air explaining what it meant and how things might develop. Years later when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated andthen, later still, when his Italian wife nearly became Prime Minister Iwas again called on to play the pundit. The money is good, although occasionally it can be tiring. It is one thing earning money pretending to be an expert in all things Indian – it is another constantly advising friends and acquaintances which Indian take-away they should frequent but thepleasures outweigh the problems. It is certainly better than being askedby Indian newspapers to write for next to nothing – merely for the love of India.

I sometimes even become enough of a professional Indian to find myself aroused by some slight to India or Indians. When I first arrived in this country my Indian nationalism was pristine. Though born eight months before the British left India and brought up in a mixture of cultural traditions– large doses of P. G. Wodehouse and William Brown, queuing up to see the Queen, yet hailing Mahatma Gandhi as the father of the Indian nation – I, like most of my contemporaries, held the British responsible for India’s problems. My contemporaries who have remained behind in India have grown ever more nationalist and bitterly anti-British, fed on a constant stream of stories of the behaviour of immigration officers. Ifind that apart from my loyalty to the Indian cricket team, and some personal ties, my links are less secure. Some years ago I gave up my

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Indian passport – India does not allow for dual nationality – but not withstanding the ridiculous Norman Tebbitt cricket Test, which only exposes Tebitt’s failure to understand sport (and which incidentally was not much talked about when Australians in England moaned about Australia’s defeat by England in the Rugby World Cup) I find no disloyalty in loving India and being British. Only the petty minded or the insecure would see that as a threat to the British identity, or politicians with their own particular agenda, as Tebbitt clearly has.

When I came to England I had hoped to lose myself in the cosmopolitan world of London, but I find that I cannot. Perhaps as Naipaul says Indians do not understand the word cosmopolitan – it was a word much used in my childhood to describe Mumbai. We meant Mumbai was cosmopolitan in that it contained the different Indian communities which perhaps betrayed how we saw the Indian nation. Since 9/11 and the debate on clash of cultures and civilisations I feel Naipaul did India and Indians a disservice. I grew up with Indians but if we were all of one race what a remarkable range of religions there was: my best friends were Muslims and Catholics, and my sister’s best friend a Jew. More remarkably still we never dwelt on religious differences.

London is indeed cosmopolitan, but it is also English, and I occasionally tire of those well-meaning English acquaintances who, trying to make me feel at ‘home’, enquire whether I ‘eat everything’and solicitously ask my opinion about the latest Indian fad. That blonde who wants to see Passage to India with me – is she interested in me or in keeping up with Raj nostalgia; that editor who says we must talk about the Raj revival, is he offering me work or just keeping himself informed about different views?

But all exiles must feel that, except perhaps English exiles who seem to have a remarkable ability not only to carry their England intact with them, but impose it on others. My India crumbles every time I visit India, and Iam very like an Israeli friend of mine who has similar feelings about his country – I look forward to going ‘home’, but often hate it while I am there. I resent Indians trying to label me as pro-Indian or anti-Indian – like children playing with the toy of nationalism. I hate it even more when in India– because of my name, I am not only quickly identified as a Bengali but told I must hail from Kolkata when, in fact, I consider Mumbai my home town. And I am often confused by my own reactions to the country of my birth. This was vividly brought home to me some years ago.

Some time before I left England in the mid-1970s for a brief return to India I, along with a group of theatrical friends, had put on a show called The Black Man’s Burden, or, to give its more graphic subtitle, It Gets Dark Earlier Since They Came. After the first night the thing was thrown open for discussion. Somebody opined that the British reaction to India was the

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result of the brutalisation they had gone through as a result of climate, behaviour of natives and many other factors. I believe the man was Indian, though he had a rather English-looking wife who seemed embarrassed by his question. Nettled, I reacted angrily and played the part of the aggrieved Indian nationalist with some effect. Three months later I was in Kolkata’s main street – Chowringhee.

My watch strap had broken and I had it repaired from a fairly established place. The service was courteous, I was given a bill (which has to be asked for in India) and I was reassured about the guarantee. A few days later the strap broke in very peculiar circumstances – it fell into the loo. The watch was damaged and I decided to go back to the shop. Three months had taught me a lot and I quickly worked out my strategy. Themoment I entered the shop my voice was well above reasonable complaining terms and without any preliminaries I demanded to know the name of the shopkeeper’s solicitor. The man, obviously puzzled and dreadfully worried, tried to mollify me: he smiled, he shook his head, he walked up and down behind his counter; with folded hands and head bowed he walked all round me; he offered me a chair. I refused to budge from the straight and narrow legal path. ‘I want to know the name of your solicitor.’ Even as he replaced the strap, repaired and serviced the watch and even the glass case – all at no expense – I stood fuming. As I left the shop, he smiled and bowed and I was convinced of the virtue of behaving occasionally like a colonial satrap. Later, when I wrote about it to a friend I made the point that had so nettled me in London: this is the inevitable result of living among an elite that has adopted and preserved the worst instincts of its colonial masters. The cycle was complete. Philosophically unreconciled to India, physically part of it.

Every Indian, says Naipaul, sees himself as unique, to be the only one of his sort to be recognised abroad. Nehru was often described – and liked being described – as the lonely aristocrat. Aristocracy is easy in India as the English cricketers have often discovered and Tony Lewis realises every time he visits the country, instantly surrounded by Indians who still recall his captaincy of the England tour of 1972–3. I have no illusions about my uniqueness or of being an aristocrat. English friends of mine have suggested I straddle two cultures. I doubt that – I merely exist in the slipstream of both, one ruled by caste and money and the other by class and accent.

Caste and money are the great arbiters of Indian society just as class and accent divide the English. Caste is a more invisible barrier in India than people in the west think. You cannot tell Indians’caste by their looks, and in modern, middle India, people of different castes live side by side, eat together, club together, play sport together and often do business

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together. Where they draw the line is marriage – then the many myriad caste and sub-caste distinctions surface to preserve the ancestral barriers. Unlike the west, integration in India stops on the threshold of the bedroom.

Outwardly, class is more manifest in England and signified, very often, by accent. I did not realise the variety and importance of accent in England until I arrived in this country. Brought up on the ‘export only’ version of English, I thought everybody spoke like Brian Johnston or Alvar Liddell. John Arlott didn’t, but then he was the equivalent of God giving ball by ball commentary, and I can still recall the chill in my spineas that unique voice conveyed the fear of Indian batsmen facing up to the menace of Trueman. I could almost imagine them getting out before Trueman had approached the crease. To me, as to most Indians, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh existed in the jokes told by the English, but they were not separate entities.

This idea of an English stereotype who always wore a three-piece suit whatever the weather, and read the Times, is even now prevalent in India and one reason why Don Mosey, the BBC’s cricket commentator, found life a shade difficult in India during the 1981–2 tour of the country. TheIndians were just not used to BBC correspondents who did their commentaries dressed in beach shorts and spoke in a Yorkshire accent. Ican well recall the conversation of a group of Indians who encountered an Englishman visiting India during that India versus England series and could not understand why he was not interested in the score or English cricket fortunes. ‘But isn’t he worried about how his country is doing?’ asked the puzzled Indians.

The English do have great pride in their country – as they have every reason to – despite the self-deprecatory air they normally adopt. But this pride surfaces as patriotic fervour only when England play Australia at cricket, Scotland at football or the Welsh at rugby. Then my English friends seem to discover a patriotic zeal nobody could imagine existed. The only other time I have seen it surface in this fashion was during the Falklands crisis.

The Indians happened to be touring England then and some of them were surprised by what they saw as a reassertion of the old imperial lion. I must confess I was not entirely surprised since it seemed to me very evidently a working-out of an imperial nostalgia which has lain dormant since 1947 and the withdrawal from India. For many people this is still seen as a ‘loss’– an unplanned and unnecessary defeat brought about bythe conspiracy of foreigners and their collaborators in this country. I do not believe the British sought the Falklands War, nor do I share the Belgrano conspiracy theory. The war was forced upon Mrs Thatcher, but