The Last Englishmen Read online

  Krol Hill was nothing like the Pennines. The highest point on a sixty-mile strip of limestone just south of Simla, in the Lesser Himalaya, it was the culminating point in a chain of five limestone basins, all strung out along a break in the earth’s crust, or thrust fault. A thrust fault is where older rocks from far beneath the earth’s surface are pushed up and over rocks of a more recently established stratum, like an ancient history reasserting itself in the present. Auden christened this limestone chain the Krol Belt.

  John would spend the better part of four hot seasons and one cold season working his way back and forth and up and down the Krol Belt. During periods of leave and outfitted at his own expense, he would return again and again, bothered by the questions that first occurred to him during Mallory’s screening of the 1922 Everest footage. How and when did the Himalaya first arise? Clearly the underlying structures of the region held the answer as to how and perhaps even the problem of when, or over what period of time, the Himalaya were upthrust.

  As sedimentary rocks of the same age can look completely different because of the conditions under which they were laid down, the only way to date them is through index fossils. The general absence of fossils in the Himalaya made it difficult to assign precise time periods to individual thrust blocks. The mountains were like a work of history without dates. In the Krol Belt, however, there were great caches of fossils. The Garhwal district had the added advantage of being in easy reach of railheads, in case GSI duty called.

  John drew cross sections so the thrust could be visualized, the fault lines made apparent, the bands of rock identified, and their folding, slips, synclines, and orientation shown. He took photographs of unusual formations and brought samples of microcrystalline rock back to his office to study under a microscope. He did a multicolor map in which the sixty-mile arc of the Krol Belt overlay sheet number 53 of the Survey of India map, showing the patches and pools of limestone, slates, red shales, and dolerite. In the Krol Belt, there were rocks bearing evidence of exposure to the heat and compression of the deep crust mixed haphazardly with sedimentary rocks of the upper crust.

  There were other puzzling aspects. Whether from a distance or face-to-face the rock formations were amazingly complex. Apart from the limestone, there were varieties of slate, shales, schists, sandstone, quartzite, grits, dolorite, and conglomerates. Sometimes they came in the form of huge boulders, sometimes intricately colored pebbles. While the limestone was generally dark in color John also found instances where it had been transformed into a fine-grained white marble or deformed by some kind of extreme stress.

  The area was also distinctive for the ways in which rocks abutted one another. There were immensely intricate folds and twists of shales and limestone; there were layers of two-inch slabs of alternating limestone and shale oriented entirely vertically. Unlike the workaday field mapping he’d done in Ranigunj, here there were signs of a cataclysm. It was hard to account for the chaos. A volcanic eruption or earthquake? The map he drew didn’t try to answer the question of how the Himalaya first arose, nor did the paper that accompanied it. Instead it posed a challenge and a question: Explain this. How did this happen?

  CHAPTER 3

  Bengali Baboo

  Hatibagan, 139 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta,

  Early Twentieth Century

  Calcutta, the capital of the province of Bengal, was once known as the Second City of Empire. Like London, the First City of Empire, it sat astride a river, the Hooghly, that carried traffic rivaling the Thames. For most up-and-coming Bengali youth of the city, and the handsome and quick-witted Sudhindranath Datta most certainly was one, attendance at Oxford or Cambridge, combined with access to unlimited credit, entitled them on their return to full membership in the high echelons of the Anglo-Bengali elite, otherwise known as the Set. Perhaps because the First World War had prevented Sudhin from attending Oxford, he tended to cast a gimlet eye on his milieu.

  Following British traders with imperial pretensions, members of the Set built homes that mixed classical motifs with abandon. Whimsical palaces and stately homes were crowded with Empire sofas, gilded clocks, and candelabras. The walls displayed copies of sentimental paintings by Landseer and Leighton. In Sudhin’s maternal grandfather’s home, after-dinner music recitals were held in a Paris-style salon, accessorized with nymphs made of alabaster, porcelain from Sèvres and Dresden, and a billiard table. Family libraries of the Set boasted calf-bound copies of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, illustrated folios of Shakespeare, and the entire run of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, reflecting the Set’s boundless respect for the worthies of English literature. Many also acquired a taste for English mustard, marmalade, cheese, and roast beef. They kept exotic birds, bred dogs and racehorses, and dressed their bearers in whiter liveries and larger turbans than the English had theirs wear. Prodigal sons returning to Calcutta after a ruinous fling at Oxford introduced themselves loftily as “England returned.” Deprived of cutlery, they ate their rice with ladles in run-down mansions mortgaged to pay for their English airs.

  Though Bengalis relished their halcyon days at Cambridge or Oxford as much as anyone, they were destined to always fall short of that exemplar, the English gentleman himself. For Calcutta’s English residents, the Bengalis’ cultivation of English habits was more evidence, should more be needed, that their rule was the destined natural order. They granted Bengalis a kind of imitative intelligence as well as a capacity for breeding more and more Bengalis. But unlike the manly warrior races of the North-West Frontier, the Bengali was believed to lack the spirit, physique, and sense of honor required of a ruling race. Consequently, the Anglicized Bengali was reviled and ridiculed.

  “By his legs you should know the Bengali,” Winston Churchill’s favorite globe-trotting journalist wrote. Whereas an Englishman’s legs were straight with a tapered calf and a flat thigh, the Bengali had the skin-and-bone leg of a slave. “Except by grace of his natural masters,” this writer concluded, “a slave he always has been and always must be.” Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, another author whose violent prose style Churchill did his best to emulate, agreed. The Bengali was “thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.” A British Resident once pointed out the perfidy of hymning the praises of liberty and democracy to Bengalis when everyone knew their realization was unlikely. Think of the bitterness, hatred, and resentment that will eventually arise, he warned. “If the baboo had a soul, it might well demand a reckoning.”

  Bengalis had met the arriving waves of eighteenth-century Englishmen with little of the hostility or indifference the East India Company would encounter elsewhere. Initially, baboo or babu simply referred to an English-speaking Bengali clerk. Yet while Bengalis may have begun as clerks, they quickly progressed to revenue agents, solicitors, and High Court judges. As Bengalis ascended these rungs, English mockery of the baboo facility with the English language became as unrelenting as the contempt for the figure he cut. “What milk was to the cocoa-nut,” Lord Macaulay quipped, “Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is to the polysyllabic baboo.” Similarly, Bengalis were “quick to discern the fire of ideas behind the smoke of guns,” whether that was Darwin’s theory of evolution or the rights of widows to remarry. That the conquered should so quickly embrace the language and notions of the conqueror was curious, but that is what happened and Bengalis could argue all night as to why this was. The simplest answer was the most obvious. They were poets and philosophers. They had minds that liked to roam where their lives could not.

  Sudhin believed that Viceroy Curzon’s 1905 decision to partition Bengal was the result of confusing this Bengali embrace of English fashions, language, and ideas with an abandonment of Bengali ones. As the line Curzon drew divided the largely Muslim eastern half from its largely Hindu western half, Sudhin also understood that the viceroy wanted to empower Bengali Muslims, encourage their loyalty to and identification with the Raj, while sowing suspicion of their Hindu brethren. In this way the babu, with his Engli
sh pretensions and the mounting political aspirations that accompanied them, might be isolated. It was also true that the viceroy partitioned Bengal simply because he could.

  It was a fantastic miscalculation. A boycott was called; bonfires of Manchester cotton and English goods burned at crossroads throughout Bengal. Swadeshi—self-sufficiency—was proclaimed. Prefiguring Gandhi’s later call for noncooperation, the well-heeled and powerful bhadralok class left government service, withdrew their children from educational institutions, and deprived the courts of solicitors. The Raj was paralyzed. Lastly, someone tried to assassinate the British governor of the new state of West Bengal. That and other acts of terrorism gave Bengalis a means to prove they could be fearless; they, too, had a sense of honor. In this way “baboo” ceased to denote a figure of ridicule and came instead to refer to an out-and-out traitor, soon encompassing any educated Indian with nationalist leanings.

  The partition of Bengal proved the undoing of one of Sudhin Datta’s many uncles. In 1901, this uncle had led a ten-mile-long barefoot cortege mourning the death of Queen Victoria. He worshipped the liberal philosophies of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. For this uncle, however, the presumption that an attachment to things British trumped his love for Bengal was intolerable. His outrage over partition was such that he impetuously forked out twenty thousand rupees to an unlicensed barrister who promised to shoot the viceroy on his behalf. Of course the fellow disappeared with the money and Curzon returned to England unharmed.

  It took a further six years of unceasing unrest before partition was reversed and Bengal was again made whole. To spite the triumphant baboos, the capital of British India was wrested from Calcutta and planted in more expansive style in Delhi. A surprise announcement was made at the 1911 durbar marking the coronation of George V. With the departure of the viceroy and thousands of his minions, Bengal lost its largest source of patronage. Calcutta remained an important center of British trade with an unsurpassed nightlife, but its metropolitan glow began to dim. The statues of long-forgotten British officials on horseback still held court on the Maidan—a flat open green that hosted a racecourse, a promenade for Calcutta society, and a memorial to Queen Victoria—but the park itself looked less and less like the Hyde Park it aspired to be.

  The twilight of the Set had begun.

  The knowledge that the Datta family fortune derived from an alliance with India’s occupiers was part of the complicated legacy Sudhin Datta’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, shared with Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather, also named Dwarkanath. Dwarkanath Tagore’s vast fortune had been made in Ranigunj. When he sailed to England in 1842 he traveled on his own steamship, the India, powered by his own coal. Tagore coal also powered jute mills, sawmills, and brick factories on the outskirts of Calcutta. It filled the tinderboxes of trains, tugboats, and steamships on eastern trade routes. In England Dwarkanath was graciously received by Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington, but he was astonished to discover that while his English friends might decry the starving coolies of India, he found equal distress in the coal mines of Newcastle. He watched legions of unemployed in Glasgow be violently set upon by British troops.

  Dwarkanath Tagore was a pillar of the Bengal Renaissance, a golden age born of the young marriage of England and Bengal. His fortune underwrote colleges and newspapers. His sons founded a Calcutta dynasty of poets, painters, dramatists, and composers. Dwarkanath Datta, too, spawned a dynasty of gifted offspring. The Dattas, too, could trace their ancestry to one of the three fishing villages that formed the backbone of the settlement and trading post that became Calcutta. When plans for the new Fort William encroached upon family land, the East India Company deeded the family property in the city center. The two-hundred-year-old parchment deed might have been an ancient Vedic text, for all the family reverence bestowed upon it.

  A mansion was soon built, one that would grow to over one hundred rooms, seven courtyards, and two acres of private orchards. As guarantor of one of the city’s largest commercial houses, Dwarkanath became the family’s financial mainstay. But after a feud with his brothers over his allotment of rooms, he left to set up a less encumbered household in North Calcutta called Hatibagan. His grandson Sudhindranath was born there in 1901.

  Sudhin’s childhood visits to the ancestral haunt took place during the annual holiday of Durga Puja. He and his brothers would be ushered into a great hall decorated with mottled Belgium mirrors and Venetian chandeliers wrapped in dusty sheets. Slowly, in ever increasing numbers, distant relations emerged from darkened cubbyholes to inspect his family. A goat was sacrificed, adding to the luridness of the memory.

  The shabbier and more quarrelsome these relations grew, Sudhin noted ruefully, the more tightly they clung to the venerated parchment, the more fiercely they upheld their social pretensions. Such affectations were as unseemly to Sudhin as the profligacy of his contemporaries. After witnessing a debauched cousin charge down the street in a charabanc loaded with half-naked women, Sudhin concluded it was an obligation of wealth to behave like an idiot. One scion he knew boasted that he had spent fifty thousand rupees on the wedding of a cat belonging to his mistress, only to be reminded by his wife that her father had spent twice that on her marriage to a monkey. Yet Sudhin was as much a product of the marriage of England and Bengal as his more dissolute cousins.

  At Hatibagan Sudhin and his brothers grew up in the company of aunts, uncles, and cousins. While his uncles ran wild, his aunts were ruled by his querulous grandmother, a woman who worked her networks of spies to maintain family propriety. His mother could only leave the house in a shuttered palanquin. The women of the household spent long afternoons in toilettes with a hairdresser who carried gossip from house to house. Every evening was taken up with the worship of the household deities ensconced in Hatibagan’s central courtyard. Ghee lamps, bells, conch blowing, and gongs accompanied ceremonies that, on fast days, might last from sunrise to sunset.

  After Sudhin came of age, he refused to attend the daily pujas and only reluctantly agreed to marry. Like his aunts, his wife had no formal education and spoke only Bengali. And when, a year into their marriage Chhabi delivered a stillborn child, neither knew how to speak of the loss. After that Sudhin rarely saw her outside their bedroom. For Chhabi there was no escaping Hatibagan’s rigid caste prohibitions and its sequestered, nattering women, but when Sudhin was offered an opportunity to travel to the West, he abandoned his law studies without a second thought to accompany the sixty-eight-year-old Rabindranath Tagore as his traveling companion on yet another of his world tours.

  Sudhin went with the blessings of his father, a sober and upright High Court solicitor, renowned author, and contemporary of Rabindranath. His father shared the poet’s belief that European civilization had enriched Bengal and challenged the more backward notions of Hindu society. Though Sudhin differed with his father on many questions, on this he was inclined to agree, particularly in regard to English laws and English literature. Sudhin’s school friend Apurba Chanda accompanied them as the great poet’s secretary. The three men embarked in February 1929; Sudhin was just shy of thirty.

  By 1929 Tagore’s fame had obscured his genius. Always something of a dandy, he dressed in flowing robes, wore his hair long, and sported a sage-like beard. Was it surprising, Sudhin began to wonder, that the West projected an oriental mysticism onto his work, one that existed only in their own woolly minds? With the impatience of youth, he blamed Tagore for doing little to discourage the admirers who mobbed him wherever they went. Then, a few days after they arrived in Los Angeles, Tagore abruptly returned to India with Apurba. An immigration official had asked the 1913 Nobel laureate in Literature if he could read. The insult was too grievous to overcome.

  Sudhin continued on alone, disillusioned. After Chicago and New York, he spent six months in London. In Germany he disarmed a band of young Hitlerites by courteously insisting in excellent German that as a true Aryan he was not required to return their Heils. He arrived back in late 1929, his
education completed by a love affair with a German woman. Leaving behind the woman he loved for the one sitting in wait behind the curtains of his marital home filled him with a furious distress. The love poems he wrote on his return expressed this anguish, not with the sweet serenity of Tagore, but with bitterly controlled wrath. “The fury of the storm as it pressed upon the shutters,” he wrote, “echoed the useless rage of my ruined heart.” He would never see the German woman again.

  Sudhin’s feelings about Calcutta had also undergone a sea change. “A more ill-assorted metropolis you cannot imagine,” he wrote despairingly. Unlike the great European capitals he had seen, he now saw all that Calcutta lacked. There were no buildings of grandeur or distinction or archaeological interest, though its climate was such, he noted acidly, that it generated its own ruins in record time. The city was not laid out with radiating avenues but had grown in an ungainly, higgledy-piggledy manner. Factories, godowns, and shipyards had gobbled up fishing villages as the city spread out along the Hooghly River. Tiny, smoke-black workshops were everywhere. Grocers slept among vegetables in elevated bamboo huts along crowded roadways. The turreted mansions of Alipore stood cheek by jowl with overcrowded shanties and desolate tenements whose windows rained garbage on the streets below. For every grand avenue like Chowringhee or Park Street, there were hundreds of dead-end lanes so narrow and twisted one had to walk sideways to get through their dark passages. Finally, because Calcutta was built upon a swamp, when the monsoons arrived its streets turned into fast-flowing rivers. As a child Sudhin would sit on the veranda and wait eagerly for unwary pedestrians gingerly navigating waterlogged streets to be swallowed by potholes. It had been one of his greatest delights. Now such sights filled him with anguish.