Hindoo Holiday (2 page)

That this was due to their lives as sexual outsiders is unquestionable. Although it seems unimaginable now—given the prudishness, until quite recently, of modern India, with its covered and secluded women, and where even a kiss was forbidden on a movie screen—it was sexual licentiousness that was at the root of the Raj's horror of the land. The biggestselling book on India before
Hindoo Holiday
was Katherine Mayo's 1927
Mother India
, which claimed that the “degeneracy” of the Indian race was due not to poverty or the tyrannies of its various rulers, but rather to promiscuity:

Even worse than sex, of course, was interracial sex: it is the enigma around which
A Passage to India
turns, and the revulsion of it propels the violence of
The Raj Quartet
. In contrast, the one kiss in
Hindoo Holiday
is merely a funny and sweet moment of no significance. The Maharajah's pursuit of his boy actors is presented as comically as his long drives in search of good omens, or the tutor Abdul's pursuit of better employment. Ackerley's descriptions of the beauties of the boys he sees are as relaxed and natural as his descriptions of wildlife; they are entirely without the psychodrama or the Hellenistic pretensions that were common among gay writers at the time. This offhand and funny presentation of the potentially shocking would become an Ackerley trademark.
My Father and Myself
famously begins: “I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.”

No English writer had such uncomplicated fun in India; none could create such comic characters without condescension; no one, until Salman Rushdie and the current generation of Indian novelists, could write dialogue in Indian English so well. Above all,
Hindoo Holiday
is as perfectly constructed as
A Passage to India
, though because of its pose as a travel book and not a novel, few seemed to have noticed.

—E
LIOT
W
EINBERGER

To My Mother

His Highness the Maharajah Sahib of Chhokrapur

The Dewan (or Prime Minister) Sahib

Babaji Rao, The Secretary Sahib

Abdul Haq, my Tutor

Narayan, the Guest House Clerk

Sharma, his friend, valet to the Maharajah

Hashim, the Guest House waiter

Habib, my servant

When this journal was first offered for publication it was thought necessary to make a number of omissions. Nearly twenty years have passed since then, and the State of Chhokrapur, if indeed it ever existed, has dissolved away in the new map of India. I have therefore taken the opportunity afforded me by this new edition to restore most of the omissions and work in a little extra material.

—J . R . A.
March 1952

He wanted some one to love him—His Highness, I mean; that was his real need, I think. He alleged other reasons, of course—an English private secretary, a tutor for his son; for he wasn't really a bit like the Roman Emperors, and had to make excuses.

As a matter of fact he had a private secretary already, though an Indian one, and his son was only two years old; but no doubt he felt that the British Raj, in the person of the Political Agent who kept an eye on the State expenditure and other things, would prefer a label—any of the tidy buff labels that the official mind is trained to recognize and understand—to being told, “I want some one to love me.” But that, I believe, was his real reason nevertheless.

He wanted a friend. He wanted understanding, and sympathy, and philosophic comfort; and he sent to England for them. This will seem strange to many people who have always understood that Wisdom dwells in the East; but he believed that it abode in the West—and perhaps I should add that he had never been there. There are, of course, quite a number of Britishers already living in India; but I don't think he ever entertained any serious expectation of finding what he wanted among them. No—the pure, unsullied fountain-head; he must go to that—and that was how it happened.

Some one who had met him there said to me: “Why don't
you
go out to him?”

“Are there any qualifications?” I asked.

“Yes, he wants some one like a character named Olaf in
The Wanderer's Necklace
by Rider Haggard.”

So I went.

This isn't a history of India. About all that I knew of that country when I sailed for it was what I was able to recollect from my schooldays—that there had been a mutiny there, for instance, and that it looked rather like an inverted Matterhorn on the map, pink because we governed it. My knowledge, in short, was not exhaustive; it is not exhaustive now. In that muddled land, I am told—for I did not have the opportunity to travel far or much—there is no uniformity; racial, religious, and caste distinctions have severed one man from another, and language, dress, custom, and superstition vary from place to place.

This journal, then, which developed day by day out of almost complete ignorance, and for whose accuracy in fact, since I was depending solely upon my memory, I cannot therefore vouch—this journal, then, concerns itself exclusively with the small Hindoo native state of Chhokrapur (a name for which, since I have just invented it, it will be idle to explore the map)—and it does not pretend to have exhausted even that.

Chhokrapur has no railway station. The nearest is at Dipra thirty-five miles away, and there the Maharajah's car was awaiting me. It was manned by a very fat chauffeur and a small boy. With me was a black-bearded Mohammedan, servant to His Highness, who had met me at an earlier stage in my journey with a letter of instructions.

We drove off, passing about midway through Rajgarh, the nearest British Cantonment to Chhokrapur, and residence of the Political Agent.

A sudden turn from the main road, which seemed to skirt the town, brought us through white gates up a long red-gravel drive on to this small conical hill. The hill is flattened at the top to form a plateau, and is appended, like the full stop in an exclamation mark, to a long rocky ridge which rises in a gradual incline to the south. There are two houses on the plateau, one big and one small, and I was set down in front of the latter. This was to be my abode for some months, so as soon as I arrived I made a tour of inspection. It did not take long. I found an oblong, one-storied building, with thick walls whitewashed inside and out. There were two communicating rooms, two verandahs, one in front and the other behind, and an outhouse bathroom in a corner of the back porch, from which stone steps led down to a small walled courtyard at the foot of the stony ridge. There were no windows, but five doorways, one from each room to each verandah, and one between the two rooms. The house was simply furnished. Canvas carpets, striped blue and red, covered both the floors, and across the thresholds of the open doorways long linen curtains of a rose pattern floated in the breeze. A round table and three chairs completed the sitting-room; in the other was a gigantic iron bedstead and a small table with a mirror on it. The outhouse contained a bath-tub on a wooden platform, some large earthenware water-vessels, a po, a close-stool, and a wash-stand. The washstand contained a little water and a drowned mouse.

When I had inspected my house I returned through the bedroom to my sitting-room and found the Mohammedan, the chauffeur, and the boy facing me in a grave semicircle behind my luggage, apparently awaiting further instructions.

I glanced at them nervously. They all salaamed with one movement and became erect again. I had already tried English on them and failed; so now I gave a “That'll do” nod which was also without effect. Feeling quite at a loss I sat down at the table and opened my notebook to write, hoping that they would eventually fade away for lack of attention; but when I looked up again they were still there, gravely watching me, and they began at once to talk and make signals, at first separately and then together.

“Maharajah Sahib,” I said hopefully.

They nodded agreeably.

Through the open doorway I could see the other house about one hundred and fifty yards away—a massive, square, white building, on the farther side of the plateau.

“Palace Maharajah Sahib?” I asked, pointing to it.

They all nodded agreeably again. Then appeared an imposing figure, very old, with a patriarchal gray beard and a network of wrinkles on his handsome brown face. He was barefoot, and clad in airy white draperies, and a bunch of keys dangling from his waist identified him among the Apostles.

He, too, seemed to have something urgent to impart, but was also unable to speak English. After considerable cogitation, however, he produced the word “Ticket”; I played a visiting-card, and with exclamations of satisfaction St. Peter departed with it, followed by the chauffeur and the boy.

I had already noticed, in the mirror in the bedroom, that my face was spectral with dust, so I introduced the Mohammedan to the drowned mouse, and conveyed by gesture that besides some clean water I would like a cup of tea, for it was now about four o'clock. He went off on these errands, and while I was rolling up my shirt sleeves, an ancient man with bare, skinny legs and a straggling beard crept slowly and soundlessly in, carrying what looked at first like bagpipes, but turned out to be a swollen dripping goatskin of water slung under one arm. The weight of his burden bowed him down, and he did not raise his eyes to me in passing, but sketched a salaam with an unsteady, wandering hand. He looked very like a goat himself. Left to myself, I began to wonder what my first meeting with the Maharajah would be like. I had heard that he possessed a pronounced sense of the theater, and used to send on ahead of him, to herald his approach, a naked warrior armed with a spear. Something as melodramatic, I hoped, was in store for me; but even as I speculated and slung water over my face and neck, I heard a pattering behind me, and perceived, through soapsuds, St. Peter hurriedly returning.

“Maharajah Sahib! Maharajah Sahib!” he whispered excitedly, pointing behind him to my sitting-room.

This was very upsetting. I had spent several months in corresponding and arranging this meeting with His Highness; I had traveled over six thousand miles to accomplish it; he might at least have managed better than to catch me in this state of unreadiness. He wasn't playing up.

“Ask him wait,” I said, with economy of words and effect; and hurrying into the bedroom, I had just time to dry my face and restore my collar and tie when a shadow fell across the threshold of the sitting-room, and a stout Indian of unpleasing aspect, in a black frock-coat, entered and drew aside the curtains for His Highness to pass.

I had been given a detailed description of the Maharajah, but found myself unprepared nevertheless for the curious figure which now hobbled into the room. His face with its bridgeless nose, sunken lips, prominent chin and protuberant brown eyes, over which a faint bluish film had formed, bore a strong resemblance to a pekingese dog; halfway down the collapsed bridge of his nose, from the center of his forehead, trickled some spots of yellow paint; a diamond shone in the lobe of each ear, and from beneath the front of his little round hat, which was made of green velvet and gold brocade, a wisp of dark gray hair upcurled. He was small and very slight, and his stiff-jointed body was neatly sheathed in a long-skirted coat of violet and gray tweed with a high military collar of gray velveteen and cuffs of the same material; his trousers were of white cotton, wrinkling tightly down the lower half of his leg, but expanding above the knee; his socks were bright purple, and upon his long thin feet he wore a pair of patent-leather dancing-pumps. I took in these details slowly.

“His Highness the Maharajah Sahib!” announced the stout person pompously.

Carrying my coat with me, I hastened forward and shook hands, apologizing for my condition; but he took no notice of this.

“But you are so early!” he said. “I did not expect you for another hour, for I intended to come part of the way to meet you; but just as I was thinking of starting they brought me your card!”

He seemed quite vexed about it, and, turning to his companion, uttered some brief remarks in Hindi which caused the other to pass a nervous hand over his jaw and mouth; but immediately he returned to me with—

“Welcome to India!”

—and introduced his companion as Mr. Babaji Rao, his private secretary.

I placed a chair for him, and, leaning on his stick, he hobbled round the table and sat down.