1996

KIPLING AND KHANNA

LONDON LETTER

BY: T.R.K

I was browsing through dog-eared fiction paperbacks at my local library books repaired with glue and tape, with gently browning paper and a smell of oxidation and mould. I came across a 1985 Penguin paperback, a novel  called A NATION OF FOOLS by Balraj Khanna, with a pleasing set of reviews used as blurb. One of them compared Khanna's novel to A CATCHER IN THE RYE, that legendary first novel by J.D.Salinger, a little epic about an American boy's slow maturation to adulthood and loss of innocence along the way.

I had heard about Balraj Khanna, a well-known and financially successful Indian painter living in England since 1963. I remembered him as a handsome, sober-suited Punjabi with dark flashing eyes and an arrogant demeanour.

The novel is an uproar. It is a no-holds-barred , picaresque, A Catcher in Punjab Wheatfields, and a description of maturation of Omi, the only son of Khatri , a Hindu refugee sweet-meat-Halwai, who settles down near Chandigarh in a no-hope dusty camp with his family.

I rang Khanna and arranged to meet him for a drink at my Club. I referred to his novel in mildly adulatory terms over the phone. "Did you laugh" Khanna was concerned to find out. I had never laughed so much in a long while, reading a book of fiction, I told him truthfully. "So did I" came his reply, "while I was writing it!".

We discovered that we had met before. We were nearly the same age, both having arrived on these shores within a year of each other. We were both married to French women. We were both greying handsomely, or so I thought.  Khanna exudes not arrogance, I realised, but the hauteur of success. In the throes of writing my own first novel, 30 years after I had set course for London to do just that, I was anxious to find out about the mechanics of creation, and share the despair of failing again and again to rouse the Muses. Khanna vanquished my hopes of hearing that he suffered too. "Writing was easy, it just came, it wrote itself. I laughed so much writing that my family looked at me with alarm and concern". Then he threw me a life-line. "Write from your heart" he said with uncomplicated directness, "Rely on your intuition and instinct. Just write".

I referred to my surprise at the simplicity of his writing, the economy of words, fluent use of dialogue with picturesque transcription of Punjabi swear-words. This small novel has a vista that is epic in its unfolding: sexual awakening of Omi the boy hero, against the backdrop of his ambitious Halwai father Khatri's struggle to succeed in setting up a shop in nascent Chandigarh. The machinations and the skulduggery that accompanies it, the high price that Khatri pays in achieving his status, his awareness of the pleasures of his craft as a mitthaiwalla, his pride rooted in the quality of his efforts, his final solution to the dilemma of living with success provide the rich matrix of the story. Omi on his side surprises even himself as an achiever; as an auto didact, growing out of the coarseness of a camp-dweller to a polished undergraduate of Chandighar College (where Khanna also studied), eager to be on equal terms with the sons and daughters of the Simla Public Schools set. It is a baptism of fire, emotionally and romantically for Omi. Khanna himself is no mean mitthaiwalla: layers upon layers of sweet and subtle and rich confection of relationships are lovingly assembled: between husband and wife, the fervour of open sexuality; between mother and son, the mutual helplessness to influence events; irreconcilable division of loyalties between the families of Khatri and his wife; the perfect chiselling of minor characters like the local police chief Chandu with his unerring sense of instant justice that he demonstrates to an errant man in the camp who ritually beats his wife; the high jinks of no-hope kids on these enchanted banks of childhood and approaching youth. The book is a treat.

If one were to read Kipling's Kim set in almost identical geographical boundaries, along the Grand Trunk road, it is possible to imagine Kim anticipating Omi some fifty years earlier.

Khanna has had a further success with his second novel SWEET CHILIES and his third novel set in Simla about the public school set with their hot-house values, provisionally titled The Simla Tigers is near completion.

I have not seen Khanna's work as a painter. I would like to use such an opportunity in the future, to see how our community of Indian painters living here since the sixties have been getting on. Dozens of names spring to mind: Souza, Laxman Pai, Lancelot Ribeiro, Rama Rao, Khanna, Dhawan, Vidya Sagar.  Painters, I am constantly told in mitigation, are individualists needing to act on a platform of high ego, generally uncomfortable with fellow artists, eager for self-promotion, racked by petty jealousies. When I met a number of these burgeoning artists in a dark upstairs moslem cantina in Connaught Circus in Delhi in the mid sixties, you could not hope to meet a finer bunch of comrades. I have dreamt of re-unions of these artists under a similar backdrop with myself as a fly-on-the-wall observer of this tableau. Perhaps a word portrait of this place and these times would in part restore this torn tapestry. I shall return to paint that picture in a future despatch.

The news of pneumonic plague sweeping India filled our television screens with telling pictures of India's general state of public hygiene. All one could see were piles of human detritus, mid-screen, being swept up and burnt. This to any European is the grossest assault on the senses. I underwent a serious "culture shock" and a mental decline when I returned to India after a 5 year absence in Europe. It was not just a matter of the mountains of refuse of a metropolis waiting on street-corners to be collected. This you see in England any summer, when the street sweepers and refuse collectors agree on some form of go-slow.  It was total lack of basic civic sense in the ordinary shop keeper or householder with a public street front, who keenly swept his own little personal space to a sparkle and flung out the debris on to the street in front of him. The mental boundaries of sanitation were selfishly practised and enforced. A beautiful city like Jaipur had, when I last walked down its crowded and colourful markets, unsanitary refuse and overflowing open gutters choking and swamping its streets. It seemed to me that the direct  result of this medieval epidemic would be a shock therapy and an induction of a sense of responsibility towards civic sanitation, beyond personal thresholds.

I have just read for the first time Ruth Prawer Jabvala's OUT OF INDIA, a collection of short stories, with an introduction titled "Myself in India". Although this collection was published in 1987, I cannot date this introductory piece which first appeared in London Magazine. A highly gifted, sensitive and cultured foreigner living amongst Indians, immured in an emotional prison of her own making, Jabvala is irritable and irritated by all that is India. There is a fierce honesty in all her anger at the lassitude of Indians at large; at the meretricious hollowness of foreign-educated children of India's elite re-embracing and accommodating their "ancient" culture as a centre-piece of their party-culture, whilst reciting Herbert Marcuse dialectics. Can one lose sight of the fact, rages Jabvala, that this beast of a society is still very poor, and anyone who insulates oneself against this, pretending to live in peace, is living on the back of a giant diseased and wounded animal.

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