Savaging the Civilized by Ramachandra Guha

Author:Ramachandra Guha [Guha, Ramachandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143427667
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2016-11-22T18:30:00+00:00

In March 1949 Verrier was granted a Decree Nisi granting the divorce and custody of the elder child, with the Decree Absolute due in another six months.14 All that now kept him in the Anthropological Survey was the money, and in the end it was not enough. He left the Survey in April, concluding what he called the ‘most wasted and uncreative’ period of his life.15 Back in Patangarh, without job or wife, Verrier was now ‘rather oppressed by many anxieties.’ If he had the money, he told Archer, he would go ‘to live in Micronesia or Tahiti or somewhere.’ In another letter he listed the places he wished to visit or stay in—‘Paris, the South Seas and Oubangui-Chari, in that order.’ After twenty years in the hamlets and forests of India Verrier was, with reason, tired of it, fantasizing of a move to a glamorous, disease-free environment.16

His reservations about life in India were as much political as personal. The Congress, having moved from being a party of protest to the party in power, was now enforcing its command on a not entirely willing populace. Verrier dared not openly criticize the new rulers of free India; but more discreet methods were available. From this period date two murder mysteries that he wrote under the pseudonym of Adrian Brent. In plot and portrayal of character these novels are undistinguished and were not to find a publisher. Each makes playful reference to the ‘anthropologist Verrier Elwin,’ author of The Muria and their Ghotul, ‘a book which discusses primitive sex in an amiable and reticent manner’ and which had attracted German anthropologists to the study of Indian tribes. However, the novelist’s comments on the state of Indian politics are penetrating and deadly serious. The first novel is set in Bombay, a colourful, cosmopolitan city, much loved by the author, but at this time ruled over by a pious and interfering Congress. The provincial government is headed by Morarji Desai, the most ascetic and humourless of Gandhians. This government ‘with Puritan enthusiasm was banning more and more of the legitimate human pleasures [drink and sex], with the natural result that people turned to those that were not so legitimate.’ One of its ministers, in a cameo appearance, is caught ‘hurrying from a meeting of the Anti-Vivisection Society, where he had had tea, to preside at a conference of the Bombay Anti-Contraceptive League, where he would be given lemonade.’ The cloth of these politicians, the handspun khadi, once the ‘symbol of insurgence against British rule,’ is now ‘an almost official uniform, the sign of authority and power.’17

The second novel, set in Calcutta, more directly addresses the status of Europeans who stayed on. Here an unidentified white woman carries out a series of murders. After this story breaks in The Statesman, the newspaper’s sales that day ‘broke all records. Marwaris, who had never read anything but the financial news, Congressmen whose literature was confined to the Harijan and the Amrita Bazaar Patrika, sent their servants to Chowringhee Square to obtain copies.

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