The Last Englishmen Read online

  But here, too, was the question of money.

  Launches flying the Union Jack greeted the SS City of Venice in Bombay harbor, reminding those venturing east for the first time that there really was such a thing as the British Empire. If the ICS officers on board burst out singing the verse chorus of “Rule, Britannia!” John’s voice wasn’t among them. He regarded the empire much like some family heirloom that has outlasted its usefulness, as relevant to him as his family’s descent from John of Gaunt (a point of maternal pride). As a scientist, he imagined himself aloof from the fusty paperwork of British rule, the petty snobberies of bungalow life.

  But then here it was: Malabar Hill catching the first light, the Gateway to India on its narrow jetty. Only the viceroy and a handful of extremely important officials were allowed to pass through it. All else scurried around, trunks once again leading the way. What residential buildings John saw were in the style of Kensington, only shabbier. The air was suffused with an unidentifiable but not unpleasant smell.

  It is at this point that a newcomer’s impressions will outrun any ability to keep track of them, and John would have been no exception. He let himself be hurried along to the oriental-looking Taj Mahal Hotel where waiters in turbans swanned between tables serving tea on the veranda.

  There were few words to describe the circus before him. The infernal hubbub sounded as if a riot were under way. There were men in loincloths and men in frock coats. There were dozens of children, some handsomely decked out, others stark naked. An eye might light on the unexpected beauty of an apricot saree against nearly black skin or on the line of motorcars and shuttered horse-drawn carriages competing to make their way through the streets. Every veranda held a crowd, every window a curious face. Then there was the wretchedness: a one-legged beggar, a half-dressed old woman with a flyblown baby, a fingerless leper, hands trailing bandages, all of them trying, winningly or soulfully, to catch his eye. At the next table a young woman might titter nervously while a matron looked on in frozen alarm. Perhaps John dropped his gaze in embarrassment, his journal open but empty.

  Two days hence the director of the Geological Survey of India will welcome John Auden at Calcutta’s Howrah station. The instructions John will receive will be the same as those meted out to other new arrivals, at other rail termini across the country. Between dawn and dusk he must never venture outside without a solar topee on his head. And he must never befriend an Indian, give way to an Indian, or let any Indian imagine that he knows something about India, indeed about anything at all, that he doesn’t. By the end of his first day John will be outfitted for camp life and put up in the United Services Club until he leaves for the field. After a week upcountry, he will abandon the preposterous topee. He will realize that most of what he has been told, like most of what he has purchased, is useless or absurd, like the lines and props for a play whose run is long over. And before his first month is out he will ask himself for the first time if India is the right place for him.

  But for now his train trundles slowly east, toward the shimmering Deccan Plateau.

  Satyagraha Ashram, Banks of the Sabarmati River,

  outside Ahmedabad, March 1926

  Earlier that year Michael Spender’s uncle had made the same sea journey to India. Alfred Spender had attended the 1911 Imperial Durbar in Delhi marking the coronation of George V as king and emperor fifteen years before. The ruling viceroy, Lord Curzon, had praised the book on India he had written on his return. Alfred now had it in mind to write another, monitoring how far India had progressed in the fifteen years since. His wife accompanied him. Aunt May prided herself on her deep understanding of India. It took her no more than a glance to assess any “Oriental” she came across. Every morning over breakfast, she shared her Night Thoughts with her husband. Long married by then, he only half listened.

  For Alfred the British Raj was rooted in a steadfast Liberal doctrine: once India had imbibed the great ideas of liberal democracy and scientific enlightenment, once it had risen above its backwardness and superstition, it would be welcomed into the family of the British Commonwealth, taking its place as a dominion alongside Canada, Australia, and the like. This lofty prospect never failed to inspire him.

  But Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement had taken place since his last visit. Hundreds of thousands of Indians had foresworn British goods and taken up—of all things—spinning. In less than a year the imperium was brought to the brink of collapse. It was only after some hotheads set fire to a police station that Gandhi finally called a stop to what, in Alfred’s view, he had so calamitously begun.

  The Government of India Act of 1919 had also been ratified since Alfred’s last visit. A new constitution had been drawn up mandating that certain ministries in the provincial assemblies be entrusted to Indian ministers. Anything touching on finance or security would, however, be off limits. And any British governor could veto any legislation emerging from the assemblies he deemed troubling. The 1919 act also established the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi where elected and appointed Indian officials might work hand in glove with the viceroy to learn the craft of ruling India.

  To Alfred’s mind this elaborate power-sharing arrangement between British officials and Indian ministers, called a dyarchy, was the real news and constituted a monumental step forward on India’s path toward dominion status. But the Indian members in Delhi had recently staged a walkout—a dismaying setback. How would Indians ever learn to rule themselves if they refused to partner with the viceroy?

  Gandhi, Alfred knew, had wanted no part of the 1919 act. Released in 1924 after serving two years in prison for sedition, Gandhi had retired to his ashram and washed his hands of politics. Only now could Delhi high officials admit to Alfred that while the Non-Cooperation Movement was under way, Gandhi had wielded more power than any man since the Buddha. Yet while in Delhi Alfred had heard rumors that Gandhi had objected to the walkout of the assembly. Had Gandhi changed his mind? Did he now understand that England only wanted what was best for India? This was the question that had brought Alfred and May to Gandhi’s ashram. While the departing viceroy considered Gandhi a spent force, Alfred had noted that none of India’s other nationalist leaders dared make a move without consulting him. Indeed, the incoming viceroy would soon discover Gandhi remained a man to be reckoned with.

  When Alfred and May arrived, Gandhi was in the middle of being weighed. To repair a rift between ashram factions, Alfred’s fixer told him, the Mahatma had pursued one of his fasts a bit too zealously. This news was imparted in a matter-of-fact manner, leaving him no opportunity to inquire further. Alfred supposed Gandhi undertook fasts when things went wrong in an effort to put them right again. He tried to imagine the present British prime minister, the patrician Stanley Baldwin, refusing his food and turning his face to the wall in response to a threatened strike.

  Alfred’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the man himself, cutting a hunched but sprightly path to a low wooden desk covered with books. He had hoped for an intimate tête-à-tête, but a half circle of adoring devotees settled cross-legged around him. Alfred got straight to the point.

  Was it true that he considered the withdrawal of Indian members a mistake?

  A mistake? Gandhi repeated. Perhaps.

  Many in Congress felt that Gandhi’s calling off of his Non-Cooperation Movement had been a mistake. Motilal Nehru, a prosperous Kashmiri barrister and Congress leader, was one. His Harrow- and Cambridge-educated son, Jawaharlal, along with Subhas Chandra Bose, a young firebrand of the All India Youth Congress, agreed. Though Motilal had initially embraced participation in the legislative councils mandated by the 1919 act, it was he who had orchestrated the walkout, calling for a new constitutional convention. His son wanted to go further. Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose called for immediate Purna Swaraj—complete independence.

  Wasn’t politics made up of mistakes? Gandhi continued, as if defending his own decision to suspend his Non-Cooperation Movement. If they are honest
mistakes, then there is something to be learned from them. Motilal Nehru has sacrificed a great deal in service to his country; he has given up his expensive cars and let his magnificent gardens go to seed. If Motilal is wrong about the walkout, and I am by no means saying Motilal is, he has earned the right to be.

  It was answers like these that tied British officialdom in knots. Alfred was undaunted. Why was every British proposal to move forward on constitutional reform greeted with suspicion? Was not the 1919 act tangible proof of His Majesty’s Government’s good intentions? Alfred assured Gandhi that the king regarded the prospect of India’s reaching full political maturity with cheerful resignation. Yet every proposal was met with hostility and fantastic notions of English duplicity.

  I can very well understand why it might seem so to you, Gandhi replied.

  During the Great War India had suffered more fatalities than any of the dominions. In recognition of the one million Indians who had fought and the tens of thousands killed, Britain had pledged India would be rewarded with self-government. Instead, there had been a crackdown on seditionists (Gandhi foremost).

  As for the Government of India Act of 1919, it hadn’t taken Motilal Nehru very long to realize that the bureaucracy could be finessed so that anything sensitive was withheld from Indian members. Proposed policies were left unfunded or quietly blocked without the viceroy or the British governors even having to exercise a veto. Apart from an increase in the number of files labeled secret, the exercise of power remained where it had always been, in the hands of the eleven British governors of the eleven Indian provinces, the viceroy, and the Secretary of State for India in London. By demanding a new constitutional conference, Motilal had simply drawn back the curtain to reveal the puppetry.

  Gandhi turned Alfred’s query on its head. Weren’t the British just as quick to cast aspersions, to impute equally impure motives to Indians?

  Alfred bore down, zeroing in instead on the true obstacle to progress: the inability of Hindus and Muslims to see eye to eye on anything.

  This was a ritual invocation. Indeed, even Alfred despaired when he heard it coming. He wrote of sitting for nearly an hour while a British high official insisted that no concessions could possibly be made to the “Hindu dominated” Congress Party without alienating the nascent All India Muslim League, the organization founded to protect the rights and advance the interests of India’s minority Muslim community.

  Yet here Alfred was, sitting in a room with Gandhi, making precisely the same argument. He was astute enough to realize that Gandhi sat through it with more patience than he had.

  Tensions between the Hindu and Muslim communities were greatly exaggerated, Gandhi replied calmly. He went on to suggest that England had a hand in stirring the pot.

  Alfred vociferously objected.

  Yet Gandhi never seemed to lose his easy and friendly manner. With the sounds of spinning continuing without ebb, he pivoted neatly back to his main line of argument.

  I personally do not hold any unfriendly feelings toward Englishmen. Just as with Indians, there are good ones and bad ones. But as an Indian I can think only of India and her suffering. Had British rule brought happiness I would not complain. But, foreign rule has put a stake in the heart of India’s rural economy. With the flood of textiles from Lancashire mills, Indian weavers in the millions have become landless peasants. Where the peasant was once self-sufficient, he is now dependent, poor, and unhappy.

  Even the Great War had failed to puncture Alfred’s passionate belief in the inevitability of progress. His conviction that India’s present was an improvement on a far darker past was sharpened by a near desperate certainty that her future was destined to be even rosier. Alfred spent the rest of the interview struggling to propose an English remedy for India’s afflictions. His new book would require just this sort of ennobling vision of India’s bright prospects and England’s guiding hand in them. He had yet to settle on a title.

  Gandhi brushed his suggestions aside.

  To appeal to the masses, I must think of something simple. Like spinning. Every member of my ashram, no matter how accomplished, is directed to spend part of every day at the wheel. Village-based industry will secure India’s economic independence—swadeshi, self-sufficiency through locally produced goods—not mass manufacturing.

  Alfred was only half listening.

  Ranigunj Coalfields, Burdwan District,

  outside Asansol, Bengal, 1927–1928

  John Auden’s first assignment took him to the coalfields of Ranigunj, one hundred miles northeast of Calcutta. A successor to the “Coal Committee” of the British East India Company, the Geological Survey of India’s mission on its 1851 founding was to field-map the Bengal coalfields, the Black Country of India. This remit was soon expanded when an ambitious director argued it was not possible to find further coal reserves without first mapping the underlying geographical structures of the entire subcontinent. This epic undertaking was duly approved. New recruits, however, began with six months of fieldwork at Ranigunj with a month off in a hill station to write their report.

  Once a scrub forest infested with bandits, Ranigunj was then a landscape of smoking chimneys, winding towers, and wheels silhouetted against the sky. In the course of mapping a thirty-meter coal seam John hired porters and shot jungle fowl. Bullock carts carried him, his kit, and equipment from place to place. Pit mines worked by tribal colliers with blackened faces surrounded him. Santhals, Mundas, and Kols lived among the slagheaps. Kaurias had worked the mines for so many generations that they believed the work to be an ancient function of their caste.

  As John sweated through fevers and shirts, drawing up maps detailing the dimensions of the seam and quality of the coal within it, memories of curlews, lapwings, and golden plover swooping over meadows reminded him of how far he had come and how homesick he was. In England no leeches insinuated themselves into his boots, soaking his socks with blood. When illness or exhaustion overcame him, he was ready to surrender the Ganges for a cool day’s walk along the Roman Wall. Unlike the life of an ICS officer, comfortably ensconced in well-appointed offices with evenings at the club, this was a dog’s life.

  Long letters of complaint went off to Wystan.

  When John confessed that a pounding concupiscence had driven him to seek relief in a brothel, Wystan ragged him about risking fellatio with women who bite. As for John’s account of the rank philistinism of a certain memsahib, Wystan replied that he would gladly leap into her lap to escape home life with dear Mother. Similarly, John’s complaints about his work met with no sympathy. If hunting for coal was so dire, if he was sincere about wanting to write, he should simply chuck India and start writing. What purpose did weeping over hardships serve? To offset the sting, books began to arrive in the Calcutta post, accompanied by lists of titles to find in the library. As for John’s fears of turning into a sahib, Wystan told him the same thing he told himself when fears of turning into a bugger waylaid him: consciousness of his own superiority would save him.

  A year in, John and a few colleagues with a shared interest in the Himalaya had launched the Mountain Club of India. No sooner was this club launched in Calcutta than it was upstaged by the Himalayan Club in Delhi, its founder a high-ranking ICS officer and big-game hunter, and its members a powerful mix of brigadiers, major generals, a commander in chief, and a former viceroy. When the two clubs merged John suddenly had an entrée to the high tables of the Royal Geographical Society and the London deliberations of the Mount Everest Committee, the body that in 1922 and 1924 had tried and failed to put an Englishman on top.

  When the Dalai Lama asked a British consul why the English were so keen to climb Everest, he was told that a successful ascent would benefit all humanity. Yet as the expeditions had instead exacted a great human cost, it stood to reason His Holiness might think the man wasn’t being entirely candid. In 1922 George Mallory had watched in horror as seven porters were swept away by an avalanche. Another fell to his death in a crevasse. A
fter the tragic outcome of the 1924 attempt when Mallory and Irvine were lost, the ministers of Tibet had written a strongly worded letter to the British undersecretary in Gangtok, Sikkim, the kingdom in northeast India through which Everest expeditions had to pass. Permission to access Everest via Tibet would never be granted again, they wrote. Should His Excellency hear that members of the Everest Committee were preparing a new petition, he should “please, kindly stop them.” The Committee had been moribund ever since.

  The founding of the Himalayan Club changed nothing as far as Everest was concerned. One of its initiatives, however, was to publish a quarterly. Modeled on the Alpine Journal, which celebrated the adventures and scientific pursuits of European mountaineers, the mission of the Himalayan Journal was to “encourage and assist Himalayan travel and exploration and to extend knowledge of the Himalaya and adjoining mountain ranges through science, art, literature, and sport.” John’s GSI supervisors were not persuaded that his study of the high ranges would produce any material results. But what better way to bring himself to the attention of the Everest Committee than to document the underlying geological structures of the Himalaya? During his first hot season in the hill station of Simla, when he might have been casting about for female company at the Gaiety Theatre, John’s eye lit upon a limestone outcrop known as Krol Hill.

  Limestone is made up of skeletal fragments of marine animals such as coral and mollusks. Though a hard, sedimentary rock, it can be dissolved by the slight acidity of rainwater. The limestone moors of the North Pennines were a day’s walk from the Auden family’s holiday cottage in the Lake District. Though only four miles east of Keswick, the open heather moors of the Pennines were an entirely different landscape from the Lakes. The area was riddled with crannies, bogs, caves, and sinkholes, and the gurgle and drip of water could sometimes be heard working its way through tiny catacombs beneath the ground like a telltale heart.