In latitudes between the tropics of Cancer & Capricon, there is a day on which you throw no shadow at noon. Delhi is some 500 km north of the tropic of Cancer & thus there are shadows at noon- albeit not very long ones in Summer.
Joya Chatterji is a year younger than me and was born in Delhi. She says her brother, at Modern School, was bullied because his mother was British. I was surprised by that. More surprising was her contention that she thought there was something fake about the Republic Day parade she witnessed in 1970. She asks why Indians had to be persuaded that India was a nation two decades after Independence? No doubt, she would have been equally puzzled by the American celebrations of their bicentennial in 1976. Why did the US have to be persuaded it was a nation two centuries after it had declared Independence? The answer is that nobody needed to be persuaded of anything. They simply liked celebrating being a nation. On the other hand, it is true that the only reason we celebrate birthdays is because we need to be persuaded that we are still alive.
Joya, even at the age of 6, was so astoundingly stupid that the only subject she could be a Professor of was History- that too in England where nobody knows or cares about Indian history. If Britain ruled that country it must be because Indians were stupid. Indian economists or historians are given Professorships in British Universities so that white kids come to understand how & why their ancestors came to rule over India. To be clear, it is because Indians have shit for brains. They don't understand why birthdays are celebrated.
Joya also expresses puzzlement at the partition of India. She doesn't get that Muslims don't like kaffirs. Kaffirs are willing to hang together if the alternative is getting killed by Muslims.
Joya's ignorance of Indian history is quite astonishing given that she was raised in Delhi and got her first degree there.
She says Indians didn't have a common language. They did. Hindustani was the lingua franca. People who travelled for work or who interacted with others in towns knew it well enough.
She says people in the Congress party before the Great War might know two or three languages but could read only one. Yet, if they had been to school, they were obliged to know the vernacular language plus one classical language (Sanskrit or Persian) written in the traditional script. If they were advocates, they also needed to be able to read the 'shikast' script.
She says India had few roads & serious roadbuilding only happened during the Second World War and that too only in the East. This is nonsense. Road building picked up from the 1830s onward when the Grand Trunk road was repaired. When India gained independence there were 221, 690 miles of motorable roads out of which 126,374 were motorable throughout the year. In 1920 the figure was 121,000 miles thought little of this was 'surfaced'. As cars & trucks became more widely available, metalling of roads was undertaken by the PWD. There may been about 200,000 miles of road in 1940. Some 10,000 miles of road through harsh terrain was constructed in the North East as part of the War effort.
She says that till the 1880s the fastest route between Bombay & Calcutta was by Sea. Actually, they were connected by rail in 1870. The sea journey- by steam ship might take one or two weeks. The rail journey might take 2 days. Joya thinks that people in 1885 would take the sea route to Bombay because the rail route was only for soldiers. She is utterly mad. Rail companies want to maximise their profits. They like transporting people- even darkies- because they like money. Rich Indians could travel in great comfort. The special carriages for the rich were splendidly equipped. Servants went ahead to set up luxurious camps. The middle class, on the other hand, couldn't afford such facilities.
Joya mentions Gandhi's astonishment that Tamil Brahmins had separate cooking facilities at Congress meetings. Somehow, she has got it into her head that this had something to do with railways and that Indians of different castes could only 'meet face to face' in London! She doesn't seem to be aware that people could maintain their ritual purity while chatting face to face with almost everybody save particularly low sub-castes associated with insanitary or inauspicious activities. But then, the British King didn't make it a practice to dine with Jack Ketch- the executioner.
Why is Hinduism the religion of the vast majority of Indians? The answer is that Hindu Acharyas- like Sankara- walked or took boats or wagons across the length and breadth of India one thousand years before the invention of the steam engine. Joya says her own picture of India came from train journeys. But if this is true of her, it must be true of every Indian ever. Since there were no trains in India till about 1850, it follows that no Indian could have had a picture of India prior to that time. Even after trains were introduced, Indians could not come 'face to face' with each other because of caste regulations. Thus, to meet an Indian of another caste, you had to go to London. Incidentally, prostitutes tend to be of a different caste to their clients. In order to have sex both had to go to London. Moreover, barbers belong to a different caste to those they served. That is why they were constantly travelling to London where they would shave the client who lived down the road from them back in India.
Joya thinks the Indian students in London in 1865 were very important because, for the first time, they were able to meet other Indians of different castes 'face to face'. Yet, they had been doing so at School & College, not to mention the Bazaar & the Sports maidan back in India.
More worrying is her extraordinary ignorance of basic Indian history. She says RC Dutt was a 'model bureaucrat' who 'sought a meeting with Lord Curzon' to argue the case for tax reform. Dutt resigned from the ICS in 1898 & went to London as a lecturer at UCL. Curzon came to India in 1899. Dutt wrote an 'open letter' to him in 1900 but he himself was in London at that time. Joya seems to think that Curzon was Viceroy at the time of the Nadia famine which Dutt witnessed. But that was in 1874 when Curzon was a schoolboy of 15!
There are innumerable howlers on every page of Joya's book. She says Aurobindo's father- a poorly paid civil surgeon- employed an English nurse & butler! It isn't that she hasn't read books about Aurobindo. She simply can't understand what she reads. Instead she confabulates English nurses & butlers! If British District Collectors could not afford such things, how could an Indian Doctor in Government employ?
Joya says Gandhi's mother was Jain. She wasn't. She belonged to the Pranami (Vaishnav) sect. She says Gandhi's first direct engagement with Indian politics came when he wrote 'Hind Swaraj'. It wasn't. He had attended the INC Calcutta session in 1901 and spoken there of the grievances of the Indians in South Africa. She says there is an 'influential definition' of nationalism as a political movement which seeks to capture state power. This is clearly nonsense. A Communist or a religious fanatic or a bunch of gangsters may want to capture state power. A Nationalist may also be an Anarchist who believes that there is no need for a State. Gandhi, pace Joya, was a Nationalist of this type. His argument against militarism & industrialisation was that India would become like England if it took that road. To retain its Indian identity it should embrace celibacy, non-violence & an austere life-style.
Joya thinks Lala Lajpat Rai was beaten to death by the police in 1919 'in broad daylight'. Actually he died in 1928. That's what provoked Bhagat Singh to take revenge. Bizarrely, Joya couples his name with Bagha Jatin who was killed in 1915 some three years before Bengalis had heard of Mahatma Gandhi.
Joya may be in poor health. Her memory may be failing. But her editors at Penguin should have gone through her manuscript and corrected the more obvious blunders. What nobody can correct is her stupidity. She thinks 'moneyed men' got Gandhi to call off the Non-Cooperation movement which, she says, he described as a 'Himalayan miscalculation'. She has confused the anti-Rowlatt agitation, which commenced on April 6 1919 & which Gandhi called off after the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre and which he called a 'Himalayan miscalculation' with his unilateral surrender in 1922 after the Chauri Chaura violence.
Joya thinks 'violence became embossed on the nation's fabric'. She is wrong. Both violence and non-violence fell by the wayside. People fought elections & formed Governments if their side won. In other words, India followed the path that the Brits had set down for them. Why? There was no alternative. In a poor country, guys who get paid a regular salary to kill people prevail over amateurs who do it for fun. As for non-violence- it either means 'money power'- in which case it should be used for buying vote or bribing officials- or it means sulking in jail.
Shadows at noon is a shit book but, it may be, its author suffers some form of premature senility. What is inexcusable is that no editor at Penguin corrected the more glaring factual errors.
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