In India the Jews have not been absorbed. It is not India’s way to absorb. Instead she has allowed peoples to remain separate, although a part of her whole. Thus the Parsis, that affluent and influential people, who came from Persia centuries ago, have remained intact, their religion still fire worship and their burial grounds the splendid Towers of Silence near the city of Bombay. And in the south of India there remain the black Jews, burned dark by the Indian sun shining upon them for so many generations that they have lost their own color.
The very word color reminds me of the variety of hue that is Indian life, as various as our own American human scene. In Kashmir, where the white barbarian invaders from Europe long ago penetrated India, the people are often fair. Auburn-haired, blue-eyed women are beauties there. A young Indian friend of mine has recently married a Kashmiri man who, though his hair is dark, has eyes of a clear green. The skin color of the Kashmiri is a lovely cream and the features are as classic as the Greek. But all the peoples of India must be reckoned as belonging to the Caucasian race, whatever the color of the skin in the South, though it be as black as any African’s.
And India has an amazing way of appearing unexpectedly in other life, as for example, today in the life of South Africa, the Indians make a third group between the South Africans, and the black and white. For that matter there was our Indian family doctor, and why should there have been an Indian doctor in a Chinese port to tend an American family? And rumors of India persist, for they are a memorable people, dramatic and passionate and finding dramatic lives. Years ago an Irish maid, long with our family during the peripatetic life between New York and Green Hills Farm, happened to mention, when we were expecting an Indian guest, and this only after years of serving us, that she herself had once been in India. Upon my exclamation of surprise she said yes, that her father had been in the British Army, and that his family had gone out there to be with him. She had been only three or four years old and could remember very little.
Whereupon I asked, “How did your father like India?”
And she replied absently, her mind obviously upon sheets and towels. “He liked it well enough, mum, except burnin’ them Hindus.”
“Burning the Hindus?” I repeated, stupefied.
“Yes, mum,” she said, still absently. “They took ’em prisoners by the wagonload and didn’t know what to do with ʼem. But it was narsty, burnin’ ʼem, mum.”
I did not and still do not believe the story, and all my inquiries have since denied the validity of this tale, but it shows how rumor can become stark as reality. The British did commit cruelties, as all colonial masters must if they are to maintain their power over such powerful peoples as the Indian. Thus the famous remark of the English captain, who when he heard of the devastation committed by bombs upon Warsaw in the Second World War cried out in anguish that this European city had been treated as though it were nothing but a Pathan village in India. Pathan villages might, it seemed, be bombed when the inhabitants disobeyed their colonial masters, although, as the Englishman said solemnly in vindication, not until the inhabitants had been duly warned in time to leave their homes.
And then, after the war, a young American ex-GI became our gardener, and after months of pleasant work together over asparagus and roses and such, I discovered that he, too, had been in India and had mightily enjoyed the experience. He had volunteered in the Second World War for foreign service, and he was sent to Asia, his ship crossing the Atlantic first to Africa and thence around the Cape, because of the German submarines and the Japanese also, for by then the Japanese were already using the small one-man or two-man submarines, designed for suicide. Small enough to be cast from a ship, the submarines went down to seek for their target of an Allied ship. When it was found, man and submarine both crashed against it. Suicide is the right word, for if no target were found, the small craft used up its gasoline supply and the man within died anyway. And that also reveals an aspect of the eternal Japanese character.
Around the Cape of Good Hope our young Americans went during the first year of the war and then to Karachi. So there was where my gardener landed, he tells me, and for four years he lived in Lahore, Bombay, Calcutta and New Delhi. He was sensible enough to appreciate the opportunity and he learned to know Indians so well that he was invited to weekends in their homes.
“How did they entertain you?” I asked.
“They took us to American movies,” he replied, seeing nothing strange in this. True, he added, sometimes he was taken also to see dancing girls. Wherever he was I am sure that he was a simple and good American, the son of a Pennsylvania farmer, friendly and accepting each Indian as a friend.
“I’d like to go back now that it’s peaceful,” he said the other day when we were working in the camellia house. “I’d like to see how things are going. I could manage all right living there.”
You see how India has a way of permeating human life? And consider how India has managed, merely by maintaining her independence, and yes, by producing superior individuals, to influence the world in these few short years of freedom. They have put to good use the benefits the English gave and left, the knowledge of the West, the pure and exquisitely enunciated English tongue of men and women educated on both sides of the globe — witness Nehru and with him a host of men learning how to govern, and the first woman to be President of the General Assembly of the United Nations a woman of India, and the man in charge of the prisoner exchange in Korea an Indian general, who won trust from all. Even the blustering and accusations at home and abroad have not changed the quiet confidence of the new India, and this confidence, founded in unyielding idealism, permeates our world life.
I entered India, then, in 1934 and at Calcutta and went straight to the home of an Indian friend. Bombay is the great twin city on the other side of the continent, but Calcutta is not so spruce, nor so English. I reached there in the evening, and the sidewalks were all but impassable with the outstretched bodies of sleepers — the homeless, the vagrant, the wanderer. And I confess that it shocked me to see the depredations of the sacred cows, especially upon the stalls of the vegetable vendors, although the shrewdness of the Bengalis did often devise an outwitting even of the godly cows.
What did I go to India to see? Not the Taj Mahal, although I did see it and by moonlight, not Fatehpur Sikri, although I did see it, and not the glories of empire in New Delhi, although I did see them. I went to India to see and listen to two groups of people, the young intellectuals in the cities and the peasants in the villages. These I met in little rooms in the city, in little houses in the villages, and I heard their plans for freedom. Already the intellectuals believed that another World War was inevitable. They had been bitterly disappointed after the First World War by what they felt were the broken promises of England. The English, they declared, had no real purpose to restore India to the people. I could believe it, fresh as I was from China, where the period of “People’s Tutelage” seemed endless and self-government further off every year. “When you are ready for independence,” conquerors have always said to their subjects, et cetera! But who is to decide when that moment comes, and how can a people learn to govern themselves except by doing it? So the intellectuals in India were restless and embittered, and I sat through hours, watching their flashing dark eyes and hearing the endless flow of language, the purest English, into which they poured their feelings.
The plan then was that when the Second World War broke, India would rebel immediately against England and compel her, by this complication, to set her free. They would not be forced, as they declared they had been in the First World War, to fight at England’s command.