One approaches a book titled Memories of Belonging somewhat warily. Could it be an outpouring of mushy nostalgia or, worse still, a B-grade erotic novel? Fortunately it is neither. The ‘Memories’ are those of the Raj, not the grandiose highway of its political history but its lanes and byways, with reproductions of lithographs, paintings and old sepia photographs, largely from the author’s collection. These ‘Images’ of the sub-title preceded and inspired the writing.
No chronological order is followed. In a series of impressionistic pieces, and a style of beguiling charm, Karlekar recreates the colonial past through its surveyors, its birders and flower-lovers, its tea parties and hill stations, its architecture and modes of travel, and the individuals who shaped it.
There are musty old dak bungalows ‘with handy little cemeteries in their compounds’, as Kipling darkly observed, generally believed to be haunted; for in India’s inhospitable climate many young lives came to an untimely end. In contrast there are the magnificent testimonials to the work of British architects: Bombay University; The Gateway of India; Victoria Terminus, now for some strange reason named after a warrior king; and the official buildings of Madras, India’s first British port.
The chapter on the Taj Mahal is not about the monument but Lord Curzon’s obsession with it. Describing it in a gush of florid prose as an ‘entrancing spectacle of singular loveliness… pouring in waves over my soul and flooding my inner consciousness’, he returned to it repeatedly. “Agra,” says one of his biographers, “knew the fearful joy of 5 Viceregal inspections in 6 years.” Each time he bombarded the hapless officials of the Archaeological Survey with orders for the ‘improvement’, not of the building, mercifully, but of the surroundings that obscured its beauty.
And so Shah Jahan’s Mughal garden with its luxuriant fruit trees and flowers, where visitors were received and poets and musicians poured out their hearts to appreciative audiences was turned into an orderly English park, planted with cypresses and low shrubs. There are pictures of the Taj pre-Curzon (1886) and now.
William Carey, a missionary who had the Bible translated into Bengali and Sanskrit, was an expert horticulturist with a less than saintly character. A much-married man, his first wife was driven to insanity yet he had two more. Instrumental in importing English flowers such as tulips and daisies, he set up the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, of which Dwarkanath Tagore became a member. A meticulous observer of fauna, he wrote of the birds in his garden, “We have sparrows and water-wagtails… teals, ortolans, plovers…”, 12 kinds of grasshoppers, and even “8 or 10 sorts of ants”!
Another colourful personality was Mary Jane Corbett, whose 13th child was Edward James to become famous as Jim. Twice-married, this intrepid and energetic woman proclaimed herself ‘Naini Tal’s first estate agent’ and sold or rented out cottages until they were destroyed in the deluge and landslip of 1880.
The British loved their hill stations. A watercolour of Mussourie in 1840 by Emily Eden with about 10 bungalows dotting the open hillside, and a lithograph of Simla from a photograph dated 1865 make us weep over what they have become. Matheran has remained comparatively unspoilt because it lacked a motorable road. Instead the toy railway, 20 km long, was financed by a single wealthy family and continues to delight us to this day. A weekly postal service functioned from the mid-19th century, as did a school where the monthly fee varied from two to five annas. As many thousand rupees would be considered chickenfeed today.
An entire section is devoted to travel, without which comparisons between then and now are incomplete. Civil servants moved constantly with their families, and the women wrote extensively about their experiences. Going up into the mountains involved being carried in hammock-like slings by sturdy coolies, and Indian women observed purdah at all times using palanquins, or bullock carts shrouded in thick cloths draped over a bamboo frame.
VIP travel was more elaborate. When Governor-General Auckland moved from Calcutta to U.P. in 1837 with an entourage of 12,000, at least 10 modes of transport were used, including boats, elephants, palanquins, horse carriages, carts and much else. A lithograph showing the death of Bishop Heber on one such tour is reproduced on the front cover.
