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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Aspects of Indian Life

Aspects of Indian Life

Not long ago I was travelling on a train, on the thirty-hour journey between Calcutta and Delhi. My neighbours in the second-class compartment were reading, eating, talking to each other, and drinking hot sugared tea from clay cups. They were Brahmin farmer people, on their yearly pilgrimage to the holy places of the north – a sixty-five-year-old grandfather, grey-headed and long-bearded, a magnificent figure of a man, who had brought up his three sons single-handed when he was left a widower; his eldest son, lean and active, who was able to discuss the development of village cooperatives with me in fluent English; the son’s wife, in a blue sari, handling her two little girls with the greatest patience and affection; and a widow, in a white sari edged with black, who ate only fruit, and sat withdrawn in a corner of the compartment. I thought her excluded from the family group until I heard her laugh at a sally of her brother-in-law.

This family is representative of the 80% of Indian people who live in villages. It often happens that a foreign visitor gains his impression of Indian life solely from contact with the officials and businessmen who live in the towns, his own servants, the taxi-drivers who overcharge him, and the crowd of beggars, fortune-tellers, acrobats, and snake-charmers who regard him as a legitimate source of income. Yet he has only to walk down a side street from his own back door to find himself in the heart of one of those villages whichpage 381 exist, distinctive and self-contained, within the boundaries of the town itself; or take a bus ten miles into the country, to meet the farmers and ‘village level workers’ who will constantly surprise and humble him by their hospitable warmth and intimate knowledge of the needs of modern India.

One has to grasp something of the structure of village life in order to understand the distinctive problems of education in India. As I have often heard it expressed by Government officials and villagers themselves, Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life – a way of life which has grown up over millennia in the Indian villages, intricate, stratified, and essentially static. In the last generation that way of life has encountered and absorbed the revolutionary force of Western technology; and India is now in the middle of an immense, though extremely slow, process of reorganisation. The construction of schools, the development of village sanitation, of village hospitals, cottage industries, veterinary clinics, and agricultural aid and advice given to the farmers by trained Government representatives – these are the vehicle and symbol of the new educational revolution. One expects to see textbooks, and one is shown a grain store.

The basic Indian problem of adult illiteracy does not exist in New Zealand. It would be all too easy to assume that the difference represents a simple educational gap; and Western observers do perhaps unconsciously assume this, while the literate Indian suffers from an unnecessary sense of national inferiority in the educational sphere. I have often heard, in the past three months, a headmaster or librarian apologise for sparsity of equipment or some small defect in organisation, with the inevitable proviso – ‘Of course, you must give us time to catch up. India is a poor country, and our problems are vast. We are still suffering from the bad effects of the British Raj.’ In fact the apology is unnecessary. The Indian educationist rarely recognises that literacy and education are not coterminous. In the communal life of her villages, India already possesses a constant cultural reservoir, independent of schools and book learning, which New Zealand, for example, has never had. The average villager, though not fully literate, is by no means uneducated. Mahatma Gandhi, instigator of basic education in the villages, intuitively recognised this essential fact; and the present revolution in Indian village life is in effect the wakening of a gigantic constructive force, under the stimulus of Gandhi’s ideas, modified to suit changing conditions.

In the large towns of India a veneer of Western manners has overlaid the Hindu way of life. Most educated Indians, though they will pay lip service to the official policy by which Hindi is taught in all schools, want their children to learn to speak and read English well. Families are limited in number. Girls are educated for careers, in conflict with the older Hindu domestic pattern; and marriages are not now invariably arranged by parents. England, Europe, and above all America, is the Promised Land. This last feature of modern Indian thought is a natural product of the reflection of an Indianpage 382 youth upon the economic conditions of his country. However nationalist his feeling may be (and the ideals offered as part of character training in Indian schools are often disturbingly nationalistic) he is well aware that his salary, even as a business executive or as head of a Government Department, is unlikely to exceed a thousand rupees a month, and will probably remain at half that level. Furthermore the tribal habit of nepotism is firmly established in the Indian civil service. Whether or not the objective situation is one of strangulation of the talented, he judges subjectively that it is so. He may never meet a poor American or Englishman; and from observing Embassy officials and representatives of foreign powers concludes that their countries flow with milk and honey. He over-estimates the material advantages of Western civilisation. As Toynbee has pointed out, the Easterner (Indian or Chinese or Japanese) has encountered early the massive technological and economic modes of Western thought, and judged the West accordingly.

The Indian villager, however, is likely to remain unaffected by the desire to emulate the Westerner, except in the immediate practical sphere of seed selection, improvement of herds, irrigation, and soil conservation. He sees the world from the framework of a semi-tribal society and a ten-acre farm. In discussion with Indian villagers I have found it extremely difficult to convey an impression of a country (New Zealand) in which most farms are large, and village communities are all but non-existent. The immediate concern of the villager is to make two grains of millet grow where one has grown before; but his material impulse is curbed by a strong communal bias in his thinking. While the Indian townsman is normally motivated by a strong desire for the material success of himself and his family, the villager, less solitary, feels bound to consider the welfare of the village as a whole. He is governed by the need for social approval, even when he is in a position to lend money at interest to his poorer neighbour; and social approval is the lever by which the Government of India, through its village level workers, has accomplished many reforms.

The Hindu way of life, so strong and even formidable in its close-knit family structures, so difficult to grasp in Western terms, remains essentially unchanged in the villages. I remember a visit which I made one frosty morning with Mr H—, a village level worker of the Alipur Land Development Block. We had often discussed the implications of Hindu thought in the village revolution, and he had confessed that whenever he reached an impasse in his own relation to the villagers, he would seek advice from a certain ‘holy man’ in a neighbouring village. This morning he had invited me to accompany him on such a visit. We walked along the tarmac road, where a vulture by the roadside was tearing with its strong beak the sinews of a dead calf, run over by a bus or truck, and women stood gossiping, balancing brass pots and baskets of cattle dung on their heads, their heavy ankle-rings of hammered silver clasped on dusty bare feet. We crossed a ploughed field, the propertypage 383 of a local landlord, winding through clumps of sugar cane, where a girl was sifting millet in an iron pan, standing on high ground close to an open well, letting the grains pour down from a height and the wind blow away the husks. We entered the dirt street of a poor village, among the buffaloes and gazing children. We opened a small gate and walked along the path to the village temple – a roughly cone-shaped structure, carved and whitewashed, containing in its innermost recess the images of Shiva, god of power and death; of Kali, his wife, and Ganesh, their elephant-headed child – the Hindu version, perhaps, of the Holy Family. This temple was the hub of the village. A grass hut stood near it; a calf chewed its cud outside with an air of great calm; a squirrel leapt and chattered in the doorway.

I had expected to meet some emaciated begging sadhu, smeared with ashes; but the man who sat on the temple step, chatting unaffectedly with the villagers, was vigorous, smooth-faced, with neat clothing and carefully tended brown hair hanging to his shoulders. A mother approached him, carrying her sick child. He leapt to his feet, and entered a building near the hut, emerging with dried herbs in his hands. His speed of movement was astonishing, in the painful wooden sandals which left calluses between his great and second toe. The woman received his instructions, and before departing, bent down to the dust and touched his feet with her hands. Later he joined us, greeting Mr H— in a friendly fashion, then stretching out on a bed of plaited cloth and offering us some sweets, presents from the villagers. Mr H— had already told me that he distributed all the presents he received, keeping only enough for his own very meagre diet. His conversation, though valuable for me personally, is scarcely relevant here; but he was undoubtedly a highly intelligent, broad-minded, and practical man, with a training of some twenty years in yoga and meditation. His manner towards the villagers was unfailingly gentle, warm and courteous. It was evident they regarded him as a true father, and brought all problems of village life to his notice. His reputation had been increased by an accurate prediction of the course which would be taken by a cattle disease which had recently menaced the district; but there was no trace in him of the showman or bogus prophet. Such men occupy an indispensable position of trust and authority in the pattern of village life.

Each Indian village is in effect a culturally autonomous unit. A school teacher or village level worker has to meet the people on their own terms; what he or she has learnt in another village may not apply. Certainly the cultural distance between a village of the Punjab and a fishing village of the Madras sea coast is far greater than the distance between a Southland dairy farm and a Ratana Pa in the King Country. Language, customs, traditions vary enormously throughout India. India is theoretically a political unit; but there are extremes of cultural diversity. A child in a high school in Madras may be required to learn English, Hindi, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Forpage 384 each language he must acquire a knowledge of a different script. It is as if a child in an Auckland high school were required to learn English, Anglo- Saxon, Greek, and Russian. The use of regional languages, and the choice of Hindi or English as a universal language (the Government has recently made Hindi compulsory in all Indian schools) constitute probably the most difficult formal educational problem in India today. There is the salary and status of teachers also to be considered. Perhaps in twenty years Indian and Japanese primary-school teachers will be as well paid as factory workers. But to consider these problems adequately would require greater expert knowledge than I possess.

1959 (187)