PART II
The English People
What Do They Look Like?
THOUGH I AM going to speak about the English people now, I do not intend to offer even the sketchiest of psychological studies. To try to do so after seeing them for only five weeks would be like attempting to write the biography of a man after meeting him at a cocktail party. My acquaintance with the English people had no chance really of becoming deeper. In fairness to me it should be re- membered that my account is concerned with the superficies of English life, though it might be claimed, even without solving a difficult metaphysical question, that appearance does in some measure correspond to reality. But perhaps some of the most basic things are just those commonplaces which are always meeting the eye, and for that precise reason as frequently evading the mind.
To give only one example. Neither in London nor in the country was I able, by looking at the faces, figures, and clothing of the people, to guess that there had been invasions of England and spells of foreign rule for its inhabitants. In respect of India, this is one of the easiest of things to do even in one street in Delhi. From the verandah of my house in Nicholson Road I can see, first, the representatives of the aborigines of India, to whom the country. belonged in the earliest ages; then the descendants of all the invaders, the Aryans, Scythians, Huns, Muslims, and British; and last of all the Indian minority created by British rule, standing out from all the rest by reason of their clothing. All of them are distinguishable from one another. But I could never make out a Celt, Roman, Saxon, Dane, or Norman in Oxford Street. If one has to understand a people I do not think that such trifles can be ignored, though they may not readily engage the mind.
But however casual my acquaintance with the English people, I should have been able to illustrate what I have to say about them by reproducing conversations. Here I created a difficulty for myself through my own behaviour. Even when I had opportun- ities for meeting Englishmen, some of them very distinguished, I did not allow them to talk, but talked all the time myself. What I was seeing in England was making such an impression on me that, though neither dying nor drunk, I was incessantly babbling of green fields and suchlike. On the other hand, if the conversation turned on things Indian, holding very strong views on them, I inflicted endless harangues on my hearers. Many of them noticed this loquacity and were very much amused by it.
I was not so naïve, however, as to remain completely unconscious of what I was doing, and that at times vexed me. The student of English manners in me was able to see how un-English I was being and at the same time I was too much what I was to succeed in checking myself. Anticipating such a situation, I had, immediately after my arrival, sought the advice of my young friend from the B.B.C. who was to act as my keeper in London. I told him that I was unused to English social conventions, and asked him whether it would do if I were to behave naturally instead of trying to think out what the correct English behaviour was, and being constrained and artificial as a result. He approved. But it was one thing to lay down the general principle of naturalness, and quite another to decide in each particular case what would be accepted as natural in me by Englishmen. So the upshot was, as we fatalists of the East say, what was bound to happen happened.
Besides, during my stay, I did not feel at all like an earnest enquirer after truth, who had been given an assignment to find out quickly and infallibly what was taking place inside England. If I might venture to offer an opinion on this popular method, there is no better one of arriving at untruth. I had indeed agreed to write a few talks for the B.B.C., but even when reminded I steadily refused to discuss or even think about them. I did not feel like a tourist either, and by the time I had reached England I had forgotten the names of the things I had planned to see. I was resolved to go about like a man visiting the houses of his friends, where many things were to be seen and learnt, but where what is now called reportage would have been an unforgivable offence and the loose-leaf notebook an abomination
For all these reasons my account of the English people will be an impression of their collective appearance and behaviour, larded with such remarks on their part as ultimately succeeded in reach- ing my ears and fixing themselves in my memory. Let me begin then with their appearance without more explanations.
(I had been told that Englishmen belonging to the different social strata and professions were very different, not only in speech and behaviour, but also in their appearance, taking it as the sum of their features, figure, expression, and, of course, clothes. Therefore from the very first I was on the look-out for the class characteris- tics of this highly stratified society. On the morning after the day of my arrival I was walking through Hyde Park towards the Wellington Arch between half-past six and seven. I saw a small number of people there, some of whom were obviously passing through the Park on their way to work, and some working in it. Judged by their clothes they could have been anything from clerks to high officials in India, but I assumed that they were English workmen.
A little later, as I was approaching the Arch, I saw another mar coming from the direction of Park Lane. He, was certainly different, for he was tall and slim, had a face which was thinner than that of the others, and on this face too there was a wider range of complexion, the forehead and cerrain parts being almost white, and the cheek-bones and the tip of the nose pink. He was also dressed in better clothes, and was wearing a blue overcoat rather negligently. I am afraid I gave the impression of staring at him, because I was revolving in my mind whether he could be a denizen of the famous Mayfair, come to recover from the dis- sipations of the night. Of course, even now I do not know if the inhabitants of Mayfair are capable of taking the air in Hyde Park between six and seven in the morning on March 29.
At Hyde Park Corner I saw people who seemed to be inter- mediate between the exceptional person I had just seen and the others in the Park. They were in no way remarkable. But when after loitering for some time I reached the corner of Great George Street and Parliament Street, I saw a very striking apparition-a tall, well-built man in a neatly pressed dark overcoat, wearing a bowler hat and holding an umbrella in his hand. He looked like a Cabinet Minister of my conception, but was not walking with the long strides which I had seen them taking when going down to the House, in the pictures in the illustrated papers. This man was walking slowly, almost absent-mindedly. 'Must be an agent of the New Tyranny an English civil servant,' I said to myself. As I walked on farther, more bowler hats and umbrellas began to make their appearance, and I was able to discover that there were bowler hats and bowler hats, and umbrellas and umbrellas, which piece of observation enabled me later to buy a really good umbrella, although to my great regret I could not acquire a bowler hat.
Exercising my faculties of observation in this manner I became able within a few days to guess the station in life and class affilia- tions of a fair number of Englishmen, though my perception of these differences could go nowhere near the native's. I could see that the professions did contribute to the external appearance and behaviour, and that a civil servant was not quite like a don. But to my thinking they showed many more common traits than differences. They all conformed to what to my unpractised eye seemed to be the upper middle-class type, to be distinguished from the lower middle-class, which I could also recognize. Lastly, I could also make out the workman type.
Yet all the differences that I was able to detect, and which are great by Western standards, fell far short of what I was used to in my country, where the variety needs no observation but literally saute aux yeux. This will be considered natural because India is more a continent than a country, has many languages and regional cultures, and is, so to say, a U.N., or even a Dis-U.N. like the real J.N., rather than one nation. All this is true but still not an adequate explanation. It does not account for the very wide range of variety that exists even within one cultare group within one province, where one can find greater variations in dress, to speak of only one kind of difference, than in the whole multi-continental area from the Urals to California. It does not explain why after taking over the European male dress the anglicized upper middle- class in India, which forms a very small section of the population and is very homogeneous in other matters, has already evolved about a dozen variations of it, working out all the permutations and combinations, omissions and inclusions, of its separate com- ponents. To this particular kind of differentiation even the Government of India has made an official contribution by intro- ducing a new coat after Independence. To give yet another example, in England the politicians, including the Ministers, and the officials are clad in the same manner. In our country there are two standard dresses for the politicians and two for the officials, all derived from separate culture complexes, and minor variations are appearing even within these. The mere size of the country could not have brought about this heterogeneity, deeper forces must have been at work.
If I were inclined to be philosophical I should have said that. Nature imposes on every people a severe penance for the system of philosophy it creates. Thus we Hindus who have propounded the philosophical system of the Vedanta, which denies changes and bids us to seek salvation only in the formless Absolute, are driven in our actions to proliferate variations in the most patently biological manner, but the Westerners who have put forward the theory of evolution have to do everything in their power to approach the undifferentiated Brahma. But certainly this is far fetched, and in any case I am no metaphysician. So I would look for an explanation of the greater range of difference that we show in more matter-of-fact circumstances.
It would seem that climate and weather have shaped different modes of exercising individual liberty in the East and the West. Living in the tropics we like to relax, lose control of our appear- ance and behaviour, and thus create differences through our failure to keep to the track. The people of the West aro-braced up by the cold to exercise greater will-power in casting themselves in a uniform mould. Lush growth in the tropics is not a phrase which applies only to vegetation.
However that may be, I failed to see in England one great distinction which is basic in my country. When I was there I was always asking myself, 'Where are the people?' I did so because I was missing the populace, the commonalty, the masses, or, if I may use a military term, the other ranks as distinct from the classes.
In India, on the other hand, wherever we go we notice two kinds of people, the ordinary folks who dress in their own way, that is both traditionally and scantily, speak their own dialects, behave in their own way, without sophistication and without affectation, as against the minority who wear the older Hindu or Muslim aristocratic costumes, speak both English and the standard forms of the Indian languages, and have what in the West would be called a middle-class pattern of behaviour. This distinction has suggested an image to my mind. Our society seems to me to be like a ship which has a large black hull and a white superstructure. In England I did not find the hull. The people seemed to be all superstructure, all saloon, upper-deck and bridge.
When I spoke about this to the head of an educational institu- tion in the East End, he observed that it was partly a matter of dress, for in a cold country everybody had to wear a certain amount of clothing, and that gave an impression of uniformity. No doubt he was right, because the distinction between the classes and the masses, which I did not see in England, is felt in the first instance in India on account of the bareness of the body. None the less there must be other reasons as well. The uniformity was clearly a recent creation, and the latest social changes have certainly made sa substantial contribution to it.
Now I must record a different set of impressions about the appearance of the English people, which will seem not only ungracious but also unintelligent. Nevertheless I shall set them down in all honesty. My eyes (O my poor eyes!) could see very few beautiful and fashionably dressed women. The comparative rareness of beauty puzzled me so much that I more than once asked my friend from the B.B.C., 'But where are your beautiful women, whom of old the painters painted and the poets raved about? Where are they to be seen?' 'Why, in the streets,' he replied to my astonishment. As regards fashion, I saw an immense number of beautiful dresses in the shop windows, some displayed by themselves, others on the lifeless models. But I missed the living counterparts of the latter. The majority of the women seemed to be in very ordinary clothes, so far as I could judge.
After some time, however, my eyes began to acquire the faculty of picking out fashionably dressed women. But towards the beginning the working women appeared to me to be the more obviously chic, so I asked the wife of a friend, who had lived for some time in India, 'How does it happen, Mrs M-, that in your country the chambermaids seem to be much more smart than the mem-sahibs?' 'Because the chambermaids have been getting richer and richer, and the mem-sahibs poorer and poorer,' was her prompt reply.
Some days later her husband was driving me through the West End, and he suddenly asked, 'Mr Chaudhuri, you have now seen people of the upper middle-class, and people of the intellectual type, but have you met fashionable people, who live about here (he waved his hand towards the west and south-west), who are busy the whole day and yet do nothing? For instance, a person like that.... He looked up from the wheel, and turned his eyes in the direction of a lady who was standing on the opposite footpath. I scrutinized the Mayfairienne, but could not discover anything very special, although the distinctiveness of the man in Hyde Park had been easily seen by me.
At the next stage of the training of my senses, I began to notice that some women were dressed in a manner which suggested the fashion plates 1 had seen, and the realization came first with the sight of a lady in a very large hat, whom I saw at Stratford-upon- Avon, where I had gone for Shakespeare's birthday celebrations.
Finally, only two days before I left England, I saw a whole bevy of fashionable ladies at a reception in the house of a European diplomat, to which I had been invited. It was as if, with the coming of spring, they had burst into bloom overnight like the azaleas and rhododendrons I had waited so many weeks to see. Yet I must confess that these beautiful and smartly dressed women pleased me more in the manner of well-designed motor-cars than as women. Shocking as it may sound, I have yet another confession to make. Paris struck me as being even more ordinary than London in this respect. The women appeared to be plain and dowdy, and there was the same contrast between the shop-windows and the world of living women. It was only in Rome that I saw a fair number of pretty women going about in the streets. The north seemed to have made a hidden treasure of its beauty and fashion to 'me. Since for something like two years before I went to Paris I had been handling a large number of photographs of the creations of the Parisian haute couture I was very much surprised by what I actually saw. But I could not leave it at that. After thinking long over the subject I have found that the impression I formed was due to my way of seeing, which was conditioned by a whole series of antecedent circumstances, and had nothing to do with the reality. I shall set down these circumstances seriatim, without making any distinction between my purblindness in regard to beauty and to fashion.
In the first place, we who live in the tropics are susceptible to the texture and colour of cotton and silk, but cannot easily detect the elegance of woollen garments, and as it happened I was in England too early in the year for the women to have shed their winter coat to go into their summer plumage, which was on display in the windows. Besides, it must be said that there is some difference between the winter coat of animals and that of women. A silver fox or an ermine is much more resplendent in winter than in summer, but with the women it is the opposite.
I am sure that the ladies of the West will forgive an Oriental's insensitiveness to their furry and somewhat otter-like elegance if I tell them that many of us do not see any beauty even in a leopard or a tiger, regarding both only as very strong and ferocious beasts. It was only after disciplining myself over years in zoological aesthetics that I was able to admire the roundness of a puma's tail or the grace of a polar bear's profile. But I did not stay long enough in the West to be able to extend my zoological sensitiveness to the human species, more especially to its female.
Secondly, in India physical beauty is largely associated with a fair complexion or what we regard as such, and this among a people who are generally dark attracts attention immediately. Moreover, the relatively dark faces reflect light unevenly, throwing the features into greater prommence. The pink Western faces send out, at least to our eyes, almost equal light from all points and surfaces, and thus the features tend to be flattened out.
Thirdly, the proportion of handsome women being somewhat low in India outside the Punjab, the wonyn who are considered beautiful or consider themselves to be beautiful--the two catè- gories not being equal in all respects are very self-conscious. They never allow anybody to overlook them, and certainly they are more noticed than they should be not only for the good of their soul but even for that of their body.
Fourthly, the relatively dark complexion makes lipstick, rouge, and other aids to natural beauty more obtrusive than on the faces of the Western women, where they appear to merge in the natural appearance of the face and thus lose their power to draw attention.
Fifthly, all women in India, and more especially those who have pretensions to fashiort, have the habit of overdressing. They will go out in the morning dressed as if for a dinner, and there is no time of the day which is hot jewellery time for them. Some even rush into their dressing-rooms if a casual visitor arrives, and do not show themselves until they have renovated themselves from head to foot. It is an open question, however, whether the visitor considers himself recompensed for the long vigil.
A man like me, who was used to this background of feminine beauty, was bound to have some difficulty in attuning himself to the wholly different style of beauty and display in the West. But in my case an additional personal factor was present. My idea of human physical beauty was derived almost exclusively from art. Therefore I had a fair amount of difficulty in appreciating it when it was not presented in the nude or in the historical costumes from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. At the most the crinolines were my lowest limits. Therefore I think it will be understood why I thought that today there were no beauties in the West comparable to those to be found in painting or sculpture. For that very reason, again, the most glorious impression of human physical beauty that I brought away from the West was of its amazing nudes.
They remain in the foreground of my recollections of the visit. I looked for the pictures I had admired most in reproductions. I went in search of the beautiful Rokeby Venus of Velazquez in the National Gallery, and looked for Giorgione's Concert Champêtre in the Louvre. Ingres' La Source was not in its place, but I saw a version of it at Chantilly. The Venus of Cnidus by Praxiteles was also not on view in the Vatican Museum when I went there. but there were many others to be seen, and of course I saw the locus classicus of the nude in European art in the Sistine Chapel.
We Hindus too have a large number of nudes in art, and in its treatment have gone much farther in frankness than the Euro- peans, but the two unclad worlds are as different as the two draped ones. Perhaps I could illustrate this best by repeating an anecdote which I have heard. At Rome I had the good fortune to be able to see the Palazzo Farnese, which is probably the most beautiful of the Roman palaces. I saw the famous Carracci Room, and also another room with a very beautiful ceiling in carved cedar wood. A little boy, descended from one of the princely families, was showing the rooms to a visitor. He duly identified the figures in the painted ceiling as this or that notability of a bygone age, and then pointing to an ample female said, 'And that is my great- great-... grandmother.
I do not think that any Hindu, standing in one or other of the great national galleries of the nude in his art, Konarak or Kha- juraho, would care to point to one of the simpering ladies and say, "That is my great-great-grandmother.' Hindu art has made it impossible to look at a nude without a leer, it has resolved flesh to its most fleshly elements, the Europeans have made it the expres- sion of the spiritual in man. I have no wish, indeed I have no qualification, to join issue with any art critic who says that every kind of nude in art is erotic. All that I know is this: there are many forms of the crotic.
If anyone feels disinclined to believe me, he might go into the National Museum in Diocletian's Baths in Rome, and contem- plate the Venus of Cyrene. She is only a torso, headless and therefore bereft of the seat of the spiritual in the hupan body, the face. But the amazing thing burns up all dee. Or he might look at the Vénus de Milo. As I contemplated her from all sides I thought it was legitimate to ask, 'Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo? She is no ordinary Venus, not the perilous goddess of Swinburne, not the evil blossom born of sea-foam and the frothing of blood,
"but the eternally beautiful mother, of whom sleeping children dream before they have learnt to dream of mates or mistresses. She is sister to the noble Demeter of the British Museum.
But what of Rubens? He is certainly a challenge to the view of the European nude I have put forward, and I never liked anything in him besides his magnificent technique. But I must give him his due, and I think that even with him one can say that he was only providing too much of a good thing, and not something inherently anti-spiritual. I could not remain insensitive to the staggering series in the Louvre which he painted for Marie de Médicis, and which now hang together in one room. I believe a better day will dawn for India if our politicians could allow themselves to be painted like that. I put the reason for thinking so in the partial obscurity of Latin: nil cupientium nudus castra peto!
