This was 1967, and the Vietnam War was a favorite theme of the anti-American left, but Pearl was no radical, and Campion no training ground for revolutionaries. She had no political message to deliver to the audience of parents, teachers, and VIP invitees in our seething hotbed of social rest. All she was trying to do in changing the script was not to offend Bombayites.
At the time, aged eleven, I gave it no more than a passing thought. We were all aware of the change from our cyclostyled scripts and I believe we all thought it was justified: after all, we were the children of Bombay and we weren't starving, were we? It was only very much later that I realized what I had lent my innocence to. It was the Christmas after the Bihar famine, when thousands had lost their lives to hunger less than a day's train ride from Bombay, and massive infusions of food aid were being shipped in to keep Indian children alive. But we, insulated in the security of our Campion existence, and too young to pay attention to the front pages of our parents’ papers, remained unaware of our own people's plight. We could have changed “Bombay” in the script to “Bihar” or “Calcutta,” and the play might have had a startling relevance to its audience. But a pointed reminder of the reality outside our ivoried bower would only have proved embarrassing to our distinguished well-wishers. We needed an alien cause — popular with the educated class we were being trained to join, but far enough from our daily lives to cause no discomfort — to provoke our carefully rehearsed outrage.
And yet that too was Bombay: cosmopolitan yet conventional, both creative and conformist. It was a remarkable city to grow up in.
17. Nothing to Laugh About
THERE IS, SADLY, VERY LITTLE EVIDENCE TODAY that Mahatma Gandhi's puckish sense of humor has been inherited by his political heirs. Asked once what he thought of Western civilization, the Mahatma replied, “It would be a good idea.” Upbraided for going to Buckingham Palace in his loincloth for an audience with the king-emperor, Gandhi retorted, “His Majesty had on enough clothes for the both of us.”
Gandhiji was an exception: the Indian nationalist leaders and the politicians who followed them were in general a pretty humorless lot. I yield to no one, except perhaps Dr. Sarvepalli Gopal, in my admiration for the extraordinary intellect of Jawaharlal Nehru, but dig deep into his writings and speeches and you would be hard-pressed to come up with a good joke. The best might be the one classic epigram he uttered. Reacting with undisguised culture shock to his discovery of America after a trip there in 1949, Nehru said: “One should never visit America for the first time.”
Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was no better. While researching my doctoral dissertation on her foreign policy, I read practically everything she ever said between 1966 and 1977. I can honestly say I came across only one line that was remotely witty. “In India,” she remarked once, “our private enterprise is usually more private than enterprising.” But from what one knows of the lady, the comment had probably been scripted for her. Sharp, if not particularly amusing, was her answer to an American journalist in 1971 about why she had refused to meet with Pakistan's General Yahya Khan: “You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.” Both these remarks have the merit of provoking thought beyond the immediate reaction to their cleverness.
But neither, alas, was typical. In his shoddy Reminiscences of the Nehru Age, the former secretary to our first prime minister, M. O. Mathai, cited only one remark of either father or daughter that he found witty. When Nehru and Indira expressed astonishment that Mathai had slept so soundly after the death of his mother, he apparently replied, “That shows I have a clear conscience.” To which Indira retorted, “It can also mean that you have none.” Sharp enough, but hardly an example of great wit.
As for the other remarkable figures who have marched the national stage, as far as political humor is concerned, our national cupboard is bare. During the national movement, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, “the nightingale of India,” came up with a couple of good cracks: her classic comment about Mahatma Gandhi's frugal lifestyle and his army of aides—“If only he knew how much it costs us to keep him in poverty”—is of course one of the great one-liners of the independence struggle. Some also ascribe to her a crack about Sardar Pateclass="underline" “The only culture he knows is agriculture.” I had heard the line before, but was unaware it had been spoken in a political context, nor indeed that Sardar was its intended victim, so full marks to Sarojini Naidu there.
We have had our share of political buffoons (does anyone still remember the egregious Raj Narain?), but buffoonery does not count as humor, any more than slapstick can pass for wit.
But where are the Indian equivalents of the great political wise-cracks of other democracies? British parliamentary tradition is replete with examples of often savagely cutting humor. In 1957, Labor leader Aneurin Bevan was attacking Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd in the House of Commons when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan walked in. He promptly interrupted himself: “There is no reason to attack the monkey,” he said, “when the organ grinder is present.” Bevan is still worshiped by misty-eyed old Laborites, but he was not universally loved within his own party. The most famous put-down of him came from his near-namesake, the Labor Party's postwar Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Someone remarked to Bevin that “Nye [Aneurin Bevan's nickname] is his own worst enemy.” Bevin snapped back: “Not while I'm alive he isn't.”
Of course, a lot of political humor involves invective, which the rules of decorum oblige politicians to embroider creatively. In 1978, Britain's then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, reacted to criticism from the Tory who would succeed him, Sir Geoffrey Howe, by dismissing it as “like being savaged by a dead sheep.” The remark is still recalled fondly by political observers nearly three decades later, though both protagonists have long since ended their careers. Decades earlier, Winston Churchill had scornfully described the mild-mannered Labor Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald as “a sheep in sheep's clothing.” This was kinder than his most famous assault on the same prime minister. In a 1931 speech about MacDonald, Churchill described going to the circus as a child, for “an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities.” He had, he said, most wanted to see “the boneless wonder, but my parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes. I have waited fifty years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”
The British are also fond of showing erudition in their humor. Churchill was echoing a famous line of the sixteenth-century thinker John Bradford when he commented about Sir Stafford Cripps, “there, but for the grace of God, goes God.” Few could have escaped the allusion to Helen of Troy when a left-wing parliamentarian in the 1960s called a female education secretary, Barbara Castle, “the face that had sunk a thousand scholarships.”
Indian literature and mythology offer plenty of material for similar humor, but few have taken up the challenge. When in the early 1970s Karan Singh, as minister for health, proved slow to act during a junior doctors’ strike in New Delhi, posters went up on the streets asking, “Are you Karan or Kumbhakaran [the mythological figure who slept six months a year]?” But no MP thought of expressing such an idea in the Lok Sabha.
From what we know of them, our politicians have less reason than most to take themselves seriously. Fearing that perhaps it was I who was uninformed, I asked the readers of one of India's more literate newspapers to send me examples of great Indian political humor that I might have overlooked. The results offered slim pickings indeed. The sharp-tongued Krishna Menon proved a particular favorite of Malayali readers. Advocate P. S. Leelakrishnan of Quilandy in Kerala reminded me of Menon's cutting comment when American arms aid to Pakistan was described as not being directed at India: “I am yet to come across a vegetarian tiger.”