In Spite of Everything

If anything, my experience with James Cameron’s book An Indian Summer (1974) demonstrates the need for magazines like Slightly Foxed. In the 1980s I was working in India as the British Council’s books officer and reading everything I could find about the subcontinent: V. S. Naipaul’s sober tomes; Forster and Ackerley on the Maharajahs; Eric Newby on negotiating the Ganges in a small boat; Sarah Lloyd’s An Indian Attachment, about her affair with a young Sikh. Because of my job I was ideally placed to find the right stuff, yet it was only during my fifth year in India that I discovered what was – and still is – the best book I’ve read on the subject.

An Indian Summer opens in striking fashion. Cameron is in a serious road accident on the border of what is soon to become Bangladesh. The jeep in which he’s travelling is embedded under the bonnet of a bus. In its front seat the driver on one side and a Colonel on the other – both fatally wounded – loll, bleeding profusely all over him. The jeep’s horn blares non-stop. Monsoon rain sheets down. On the mud track hundreds of gaunt refugees trudge past, indifferent to Cameron’s plight. At which point the author switches into flashback, only revealing the denouement of his story 200 pages later. Cameron was a Scottish journalist newly married to an Indian woman. In 1972 he’d taken a year out in a country he already knew well, and described what he saw. Here he is walking at dusk by Delhi’s Kashmiri Gate:

There was a time they called the cow-dust hour. The term came from the villages, as everything in India does, but here . . . anywhere round the perimeter of the Delhi walls, it just meant the vague blue haze through a hundred trees, the smoke of a thousand evening mealtime fires, a thousand Indian wives crouching over chapattis and dhal on mudbrick stoves, the scent of burning fuel-dung, the spectral cawing of the crows, homeward bound like us all. It was preposterously romanticized and possibly even dishonest, but it was my first knowledge of India and it never left my mind.

The passage is typical of the author’s declamatory style. Cameron is a good commentator on India. He makes readers feel they are there. The writing is personal yet universal. He is perceptive and cognizant of other people’s viewpoints, yet admits to the sense of confusion that is inseparable from being in India. If one were to criticize, some of his observations are perhaps a little florid. He is much drawn to the word ‘love’. He ‘loves’ India, and Madras, and fishing villages, and railway trains. He loves walking about. He loves dusk. He used to love coconuts. He has ‘a particular fondness’ for turtles (and describes one tobogganing down a slippery stairway into a lake ‘exactly in the manner of a lifeboat launching itself on to the sea’). Turtles are the least of it. In these pages Cameron addresses a host of contentious themes, large and small: India’s ancient civilizations, Indian names, languages, villages, Brahmins, moneylenders, hill stations, toiletry habits, corruption, the heat, servants and their demarcation lines, Indian spirituality (or not), Hindu versus Islamic architecture, the way shop assistants hover over their customers; the whole rich brew that makes India, in spite of everything (and Cameron insists there is a great deal to be ‘in spite of’), a great country. Many of his stories bring back personal memories. Road signs like ‘To Jodhpur’, with two arrows pointing impartially in different directions, will be familiar to anyone who has travelled in India. He reluctantly visits a guru, protected by his carapace (see ‘turtles’) of cynicism about mystic powers, yet the guru divines three questions that Cameron has written down for him. My wife – even more cynical about such matters – once turned down a fortune-teller on a Delhi street, but as she walked away the man told her ‘Your mother’s name is Lilian’, which happened to be true. And when Cameron describes hair-raising taxi journeys, I’m reminded of my cab to what is now Mumbai airport, which had two men in the front seat; as we veered wildly over the road I learned that the older one was teaching his son how to drive. (‘He’s got to learn some time,’ the man explained.) How much of the book has dated, forty years after publication? Surprisingly little, apart from observations on the Maharajahs and the Raj – two august institutions now fading quietly away. In fact the 1987 Penguin edition featured a cover picture that was a dead ringer for the Old Delhi I revisited just two years ago. ‘From old Delhi to new Delhi was 5 miles in distance and about a century in time,’ Cameron had written. Even that sentence was a warning against generalization, because Old Delhi is the economic powerhouse of the capital. An Indian Summer is enlivened by the author’s sense of fun. He can be ironic, as when ‘Gandhi appeared with a gentle simplicity and rigid austerity that had taken hundreds of important people many a hard rupee to organise’. Other humour is more robust. Cameron liked the entry made on his inoculation certificate by an absent-minded airline doctor: ‘Mr J Cholera has been immunised against Cameron.’ In a Bombay park he relished coming across a man who had ‘planted’ himself upside down, with his head and neck buried in the ground. In the city’s Taj Hotel he was obliged to stay in a vast room with six narrow beds in it. The half dozen bearers who’d brought up his meagre luggage broke into a furious argument about tips until ‘One of my room-mates entered, a heavy man in a canvas hat . . . and boomed “Fuck off” in a powerful voice, at which the entire company vanished with the utmost alacrity. “Worth learning a few useful phrases,” the newcomer murmured.’ There is little orthodox journalism in the book, though the author briefly reflects on his cub reporter days at the pre-Partition All India Congress, held in Simla. He got to know Nehru there because they were the only two people who rode to work on horseback. And he briefly met ‘the emaciated and exquisitely tailored Mohammed Ali Jinnah, apostle of Pakistan’, a man who had, it was said, a difficulty for every solution. Halfway through Cameron’s interview Jinnah glanced at his wrists, went suddenly silent and pale, and left the room. He soon returned to explain: ‘My bearer, like a fool, put the wrong cuff-links in my shirt.’ An Indian Summer has a long section on ‘the extraordinarily perverse and touchy little genius’, Nirad Chaudhuri, ‘by far and away the most interesting and complicated English writer in contemporary India’. Everything about this five-foot figure was contradictory. At home in Delhi he wore a dhoti and worked on the floor: when he left the house he donned a European suit, collar and tie and a sahib’s hat. Chaudhuri’s celebrated history of East Bengal, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, was written in a manner that endorsed the author’s unpopularity amongst his own people. (‘That bastard,’ a Bengali colleague of mine muttered through gritted teeth.) In the 1980s a deputation of British publishers visited the elderly Chaudhuri to discuss the publication (and, they hoped, the shortening) of a follow-up volume that had been years in gestation. The massive Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921‒1952 finally appeared in 1987, irresistible, and egregiously in need of an editor. Cameron is good on the talented, pesky Bengalis, but on reaching Calcutta he forswears his usual romanticizing and describes it as ‘the worst, the most irredeemably horrible, vile and despairing city in the world’. There are two pages on the notorious Writers’ Building, that ‘immense wilderness of bureaucrats’, with its innumerable tiny offices formed from ‘swinging chest-high partitions, grey with age and uttering an incessant symphony of tiny squeals from antique hinges’. The building’s reputation for tax-collecting was well known, and in Thy Hand Nirad Chaudhuri reported an old Bengali gentleman stooping on the stairs to search for a dropped coin, muttering, ‘O Corporation stairs, my children, are you as rapacious as your masters?’ The book’s final twenty pages are a delirious account of the medical problems that followed Cameron’s accident, adorned with a manic humour possibly not felt at the time. In a London hospital he submitted to prolonged heart surgery, had all his teeth pulled out, lived on a concoction of Stilton cheese, eggs and whisky, wrote a prize-winning radio play, held a long, raving conversation with his dead father, and received a pint of blood from his wife that explained the book’s dedication, ‘To Moni, who gave me her heart’s blood, and my life’s hope’. Despite and because of all this he lived on until 1985.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © David Spiller 2016