The book was My Diary in India in the Year 1858–9. The author was William Howard Russell.
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Plunder of the Kaiserbagh’. It had been done later in England, and was an illustration of Russell’s text: ‘It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen; but it was also most exciting ....Imagine courts as large as the Temple Gardens, surrounded with ranges of palaces, or at least buildings well stuccoed and gilded, with fresco-paintings on the blind windows...From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder. Shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms, splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust of gold – literally drunk with plunder...I had often heard the phrase, but never saw the thing itself before. They smashed to pieces the fowling-pieces and pistols
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harder perhaps to bear Russell’s accounts of Lucknow before its destruction, ‘more extensive than Paris and more brilliant’. From the top of the hunting lodge in the Dilkusha, this was the view: ‘A vision of palaces, minars, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long façades of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs – all rising up amid a calm still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for miles and miles away, and still the ocean spreads ... Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this
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It is ironical that – as with Bernai Díaz del Castillo’s account of Montezuma’s city of Mexico in 1520 – the first account of the splendours of 19th-century Lucknow should also be an account of its destruction. It is ironical, yet not unexpected: the history of old India was written by its conquerors.
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Before History The country was run on principles that assumed that kings would change, that wars would be fought, but that society would go on, pretty much undisturbed by those events. ... We preserve Bhaskara and Charaka.’ Seventh-century scientists. ‘Among the things which are preserved are not the names of kings or their battles – that is not part of our tradition. We know Bhaskara and Shankaracharya.’ ... ‘But if you ask, “Who ruled this part of the country in 1700?” people wouldn’t know, and basically they wouldn’t care.
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Living Instinctively
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The British forces the correspondent William Howard Russell had seen at the siege of Lucknow had been made up principally of Scottish Highlanders and Sikhs. Less than 10 years before, the Sikhs had been defeated by the sepoy army of the British. Now, during the Mutiny, the Sikhs – still living as instinctively as other Indians, still fighting the internal wars of India, with almost no idea of the foreign imperial order they were serving – were on the British side.
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From Russell’s book I learned that the British name for the Indian sepoy, the soldier of the British East India Company who was now the mutineer, was ‘Pandy’. ‘Why Pandy? Well, because it is a very common name among the sepoys – like Smith of London …’ It is in fact a brahmin name from this part of India. Brahmins here formed a substantial part of the Hindu population, and the British army in northern India was to some extent a brahmin army. The Indians who were now being used to put down ‘Pandy’ were Sikhs, whom the British had defeated less than 10 years before.
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wider world is unknown; who are without the means of understanding this world; people who after centuries of foreign invasions still cannot protect or defend themselves; people who – Pandy or Sikh, porter or camp-following...Hindu merchant – run with high delight to aid the foreigner to overcome their brethren. That idea of ‘brethren’ – an idea so simple to Russell that the word is used by him with clear irony – is very far from the people to whom he applies it. ...The Hindus would have no loyalty except to their clan; they would have no higher idea of human association, no general idea of the responsibility of man to his fellow. And because of that missing large idea of human association, the country works blindly on, and all the bravery ....the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before; that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country
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It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see (perhaps with a depressive’s exaggeration, or a far-away colonial’s exaggeration) how close we were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought freedom and wide human association – which give men self-awareness and strength, the accidents which have brought us to the point where we can in a way meet William Howard Russell, even in those ‘impressions made on my senses by the externals of things’, not with equality – time cannot be bent in that way – but with something like lucidity.
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Awakening
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All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again.
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To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.
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In Christian thinking the eternal opposites are the forces of good and evil. In Hindu or brahmin thought the opposites are worldliness and the life of the spirit.
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itself, by a mixture of styles: the increasing naturalism of Indian art in the 20th century had turned ancient Hindu icons into things that looked like dolls.
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that every reform movement degenerates into a sect – the Lingayats, the Arya Samajists, everybody. Buddha rebelled. Mahavir, the founder of the Jains, rebelled. Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikhs, rebelled. It’s a long list. They rebelled and degenerated into sects...
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Dr Ambedkar, the hero of the Dalits, didn’t like communism. Every Dalit has Dr Ambedkar’s picture in his house. So the Dalits hate communists.
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Even at school – this would have been in 1951 or 1952 – the scheduled-caste boys would have to sit outside the school-room. They weren’t allowed to touch any source of water; water had to be poured into their cupped hands. A teacher couldn’t touch a scheduled-caste child. When a teacher wanted to punish a child from one of those castes, he threw things at the child.
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Mahars
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Mahars had to summon people to the revenue department. That was an official duty, for the government, and in the old days it could mean travelling long distances in all kinds of weather. Other duties were more traditional. When someone in the village died, it was the Mahars who were entrusted with the task of informing all the relatives of the dead person. Mahars also disposed of dead bodies. In return, the Mahars were given an allowance of grain three times a year by the upper-caste villagers.
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Mahars, Namdeo said, had the right to call on the upper-caste houses every day and ask for bread. The Mahar who had that task would leave his house early in the morning with a woven basket or a metal basket on his head. When he got to the upper-caste house he would make his obeisance and ask for bread. He would ask for bread twice. If the bread wasn’t given then, it was the right of the Mahar absolutely to demand it. The Mahars did this every morning. And the upper-caste people would give bread, letting the bread fall into the basket, without themselves touching the basket.
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Mahars were the only ones with the right to own land.
- raja of Bidar. He wanted to send his daughter to a certain place. The Mahars were the people who traditionally carried the palanquins, and the raja ordered the local Mahars to carry his daughter to where she had to go. The Mahars understood the seriousness of what they had been asked to do; as a precaution, to avoid accident or misunderstanding, they castrated themselves before setting out. The raja’s enemies started to spread a story that the raja’s daughter had been carnally used by the Mahars. The raja summoned the Mahars and questioned them. They displayed themselves to him, and said they had castrated ... The raja was so pleased he gave the Mahars land. That was how the Mahars became the only scheduled caste in the area to own
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The chawl was called ‘Dhor Chawl’, after the Dhor caste, a caste who disposed of dead cattle and ran the tanneries. Only people of that caste were living in the chawl. So Namdeo didn’t leave caste behind in his village; caste followed him to Bombay.
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Brahmins
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Food
- spices (true brahmins don’t get on with spices)
- So it was a serious matter if the shadow of a lower-caste person fell on your food. If it happened while you were eating, that was that. You stopped eating. The food became impure. And nobody should touch you while you were eating, and you had to eat in a certain posture. Some people were so “orthodox”, in inverted commas, they couldn’t even hear the voice of a lower-caste person while they ate. These people ate deep within their houses.’
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The pundit said, ‘I did a mad thing. I borrowed my father-in-law’s uniform. We were the same build.’ And that was a mad thing to do, because a brahmin shouldn’t wear other people’s clothes: it was as unclean as drinking from a vessel used by someone else.
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brahmins could use only well water for drinking, because well water had a direct connection with the earth.
- In 1971 I had gone to India to follow the election in a drought-stricken desert constituency in Rajasthan, in the north-west. One of the candidates, a God-fearing old Gandhian, much admired, had repeatedly spoken, on the grounds of morality, against the taking of piped water to the desert villages. ‘Good old water from the well’, he kept on saying, was good enough; piped water would ‘tell on the health and morals’ of women in the villages.
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The very idea of the latrine was a non-brahmin idea: to enter such a polluted place was itself pollution. No old-time brahmin would have even contemplated the idea. Good brahmins, traditional brahmins, used open-air sites, a fresh one each time.
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Menstruating women and girls were segregated during their periods. There was a special room for them in a corner of the colony. This room had two doors, and both were kept closed, so that people walking outside wouldn’t be polluted. Kakusthan told me that a menstruating woman was polluting at a distance of 10 to 15 feet: if for some reason you had to talk to a menstruating woman, that was the distance
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And even today in strict brahmin homes coffee is not drunk, because of its intoxicating effects – the caffeine.
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old Sanskrit saying: The poison of the cobra is in his tongue alone. The poison of the brahmin is from head to foot.’ ...‘If you see a brahmin and a snake, kill the brahmin first.’ (I had heard that years before in a different version, and I had been told then that it was a household saying of the people of south-east Asia: ‘If you are in the forest and you see a snake and an Indian, kill the Indian first.’
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Mudailar
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Every day we got sermons from some of our teachers that we were only fit for grazing cattle. We heard that from three teachers in particular. They thought that non-brahmins shouldn’t study, and the words they oft repeated
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It was a brahmin hotel – a hotel where people don’t stay, but take their meals. It was a middle-class hotel. The proprietor was terribly angry when he saw my brother putting his hand in the brass bowl and taking water. He emptied the whole bowl outside, and started shouting at my brother.
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When I joined the engineering college, I found that in the mess in the hostel the brahmin boys were fed in the nearest enclosure to the kitchen, and their enclosure was separated from the rest of the mess by a wooden partition. ...All the cooks in the mess happened to be brahmins. So brahmins had a lion’s share of the advantages of the mess.
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I could hear the wife of that brahmin officer telling the servant maid not to take the vessels I had used inside the kitchen, but to put them in the back yard for further washing and cleaning, because those vessels had been touched by me.
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S. India:
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Non-brahmins were not allowed free entry to temples. ..Sometimes non-brahmins were not even allowed to walk on the lane in front of a temple.
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In those days the brahmin priests treated their non-brahmin devotees with contempt. The devotees took it for granted: it was the tradition. I used to take it for granted too, in my early days. The priest used to throw the sacred ash with contempt at the non-brahmin devotees, from a distance,
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whereas the brahmins were allowed to go to the sanctum sanctorum, where the idol actually stands. The non-brahmin devotees could see the idol only at a distance.
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In those days there were two compartments in any brahmin hotel, one for brahmins, one for the others.
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One of those sayings, virtually an incantation, was very famous: There is no God. There is no God. There is no God at all. He who invented God is a fool. He who propagates God is a scoundrel. He who worships God is a barbarian. This was how Periyar began all his discourses.
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Gandhi was a vegetarian. Periyar made a point of eating beef. Gandhi struggled to control the senses. Periyar ate enormous quanties of food, and was enormously fat.
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In 1925 Periyar founded the Self-Respect Movement, and it was his brilliant idea then to symbolize his cause by wearing a black shirt. Black-shirted, he campaigned for the rest of his life, for nearly 50 years, against brahminism, caste, Congress, the Hindu religion, the disabilities of women. He established the idea of Self-Respect marriages for non-brahmins, marriages conducted without priests or religious
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Periyar prediction: ‘Communications will mostly be by air and of great speed ...Radios may be fixed in men’s hats...Food enriched with vitamins will be encased in pills or capsules sufficient ... a day’s or week’s sustenance. The average life may stand at 100 years or more ... Motorcars may weigh about one hundredweight and will run without petrol ....Electricity will be everywhere and in every house, serving the people for all purposes...No industry or factory will run for the private profits of individuals. They will all be owned by the community at large, and all inventions will cater for the needs and pleasures of all people ...When the world itself has been converted into a paradise, the need to picture a paradise in the clouds will not arise.
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Where there is no want, there is no god. Where there is scientific knowledge, there is no need for speculation and imagination ...
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What Periyar did was to take this ...discourse – not lecturing down. An educated volunteer would go to a slum area in a city, or to the village square, and he would start reading aloud from a paper. In no time he would have a crowd around him.
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DMK
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The anti-brahmin movement was not a movement of all the non-brahmin castes. It was a movement mainly of the middle castes. ...The Dravidian Movement had been founded by the middle castes. When their government came to power, they became the oppressors.
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Vandalized temples etc.
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The rationalist movement of Tamil Nadu, the anti-brahmin movement, also contained this idea of Tamil glory, past and present.
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c.f. to Muslim in a Muslim ghetto in Mumbai: "I had grown up in Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, a member of a minority, and I knew that if you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were."
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Anwar said they had no television in their own house. His father said that television was against Islam.
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Emigration
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Many of the middle-class Muslims of Lucknow had migrated to West Pakistan. The Muslim culture for which Lucknow had been known – the language, the manners, the music, the food – had disappeared. Where once Muslims had ruled, there now remained, after what could be seen as 300 years of a steady Muslim decline, the cramped, shut-in, stultifying life of the Muslim ghetto of the old town....
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So, in 1951, a lot of the zamindars or big landlords who had big houses in Lucknow – absentee landlords – had to adjust to changing times. A lot of them left for Pakistan.
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1971 war was a watershed not only in Muslim lives, but also in Hindu-Muslim relationships. The myth of Muslim superiority was all finished. Here was India playing a decisive role in the sub-continent. Every Muslim had a soft corner in his heart for Pakistan, and everyone was sad that the experiment had failed after less than 25 years. The dream had died. Then the Pakistani soldiers were prisoners of war for two years. That was a constant reminder.
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Visit to Pakistan
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He said, ‘In India the beggars asked for small change. In Pakistan they asked for a rupee. The customs officers in Pakistan were taller and better built than on the Indian side, and this was the first time I’d seen a Punjabi Muslim. But then I thought – and I wonder whether you’d understand this – “What’s the use of their being Muslims, if they speak this crude Punjabi, and not chaste Urdu?” You see, I had associated Muslims with Urdu and culture.
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I felt relief to be back in India, after the claustrophobia of an Islamic society. I liked seeing women again on the streets.
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Pakistan were relaxed enough about their religion. It was just the wretched laws, hanging like a cloud over one: the call to prayers, the moulvi coming to my friend’s house and asking why he hadn’t seen us at the mosque recently. The thought police. Islam on wheels.
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‘Most of them are Shias. The highlight of their year is the Mohurram.’ The period of mourning for Hussain, the son of Ali, the Shia hero. ‘Elsewhere Mohurram runs for 12 days, or 40 days. Here in Lucknow it runs for two months and eight days.
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Muslims in India weren’t doing well, because after partition there were no jobs for them, and a general lack of opportunity. There was the resentment of the majority community. It was but natural. First you fight to get a country, and then you refuse to go. ... My brother did brilliantly in his studies, in India and then in the United States. When he came back to India he couldn’t get a job for six months. He went to Pakistan and got a job right away.
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With a group as small as the Sikhs, where distinctiveness of dress and appearance was important, there couldn’t be this internal intellectual life;
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Founded on memory of persecution (ala Shias)
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Sikhism, Bhindranwale had said, was a revealed religion; the Sikhs were people of the Book. I was struck then by the attempt to equate Sikhism with Christianity; to separate it from its speculative Hindu aspects, even from its guiding idea of salvation as union with God and freedom from transmigration.
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One day, when I was a child, I had water from a well in the village. I didn’t know it was the harijan well. My uncle didn’t allow me to enter the house. I had to sit there in the entrance, and the village granthi – the reader of the Sikh scriptures – was called, and he gave me some water, to purify my misdeed.
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The Nirankaris are as old as independence. They were a reform movement started in Sikhism in the late 19th century. And then one Buta Singh took over that movement,
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There is an irony, though, in the 18th-century Sikh borrowings from the Mogul enemy: today, long after the disappearance of Mogul power, the decorated 18th-century Mogul dome lives on in the Sikh gurdwara, as much an emblem of the Sikh place
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From the outside, it seemed that the Sikhs had brought this tragedy on themselves, manufacturing grievances out of their great success in independent India.
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Terrorists
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Hymn-singing, from the central gold-domed temple in the pool. ‘And they were singing a couplet: “Nobody can kill one whose God is almighty.” Jisda sahib dada hué usnu marna koi. This inspired us.’
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One such idea was the idea of seva or service. When terror became an expression of the faith, the idea of seva altered. ..Inderjit used to come to Darbar Sahib [the Golden Temple] and ask for any seva from Bhindranwale.
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Then I wanted to become a lecturer in chemistry or physics. The life of a lecturer seemed to me very easy, very peaceful.’ I understood him. His words took me back to my own beginnings, to my own uncertainties, when (just the second person in my family to go a university) the life of the university did seem to me peaceful and protected, and I wanted to prolong my time there.
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When I had asked Dalip what he thought attracted people to Bhindranwale, he had said, ‘Frustration.’ I hadn’t absolutely understood what he meant. But now, from what Kuldip told me about his wandering, stop-and-start, and still unresolved career, I began to understand a little more about these men from farming communities who had been cut loose from one kind of life, and were without conviction or vocation in the new world.
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Shoddiness
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But I also recalled something else: the shoddiness of the Indian books we bought, sometimes out of piety towards the ancestral land. I remembered the poor paper, the broken type, the oily ink, the sloping lines, the uneven margins, the rusting metal staples. The idea of India was part of our strength, and it received part of our piety; yet there was this other idea of the Indian reality, of poor goods, of poor machines poorly used.
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We saw Indian things as not so good quality. I think that people of my father’s generation must have had a remarkable mental or intellectual strength to preserve their souls in the middle of all this Indian shoddiness. People knew that things were not very good. But they had some inspiration they drew from a real or imagined greatness. They had some innate feelings of old cultural strength, which preserved them.
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My feelings went the other way. In richer countries, where people could create reasonably pleasant home surroundings for themselves, perhaps, after all, public squalor was bearable. In India, where most people lived in such poor conditions, the combination of private squalor and an encompassing squalor outside was quite stupefying. It would have given people not only a low idea of their needs – air, water, space for stretching out – but it must also have given people a low idea of their possibilities, as makers or doers. Some such low idea of human needs and possibilities would surely have been responsible for the general shoddiness of Indian industrial goods, the ugliness and unsuitability of so much of post-independence architecture, the smoking buses and cars, the chemically-tainted streets, the smoking factories.
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Shiv Sena: But the mayoral chair had a saffron cover. ... Saffron satin filled the Gothic arch below the gallery on one end wall of the chamber. ... It made me think of the Christian cathedral in Nicosia in Cyprus, taken over by the Muslims, cleansed of much of its furniture, and hung with Koranic banners.
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the other building’ – the neighbouring block, architecturally similar – ‘are mixed vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Property values are higher here because this building is vegetarian. -> Bombay
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These are company reports.’ He took one out. This is the annual report of a South Indian company.’ He showed the photographs at the front of the report. They recorded the visit of a holy man to the company’s headquarters, and showed him standing in the middle of the board of directors, all the directors standing stripped to the waist and in puja garb.
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Political Innovation: Seven years before, Gandhi had arrived at the idea of the nonviolent political march.... (Dandi)
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This was the identity I took to India on my first visit in 1962. And when I got there I found it had no meaning in India. The idea of an Indian community – in effect, continental idea of our Indian identity – made sense only when the community was very small, a minority, and isolated. In the torrent of India, with its hundreds of millions, where the threat was of chaos and the void, that continental idea was no comfort at all. People needed to hold on to smaller ideas of who and what they were; they found stability in the smaller groupings of region, clan, caste, family.
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Indian Family .... It all comes down to double standards, a lack of sensitivity, a touch of cruelty.’ Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood: an early introduction to the ways of the world, and to the nature of cruelty. It had given me, as I suspected it had given Kala, a taste for the other kind of life, the solitary or less crowded life, where one had space around oneself.
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To me, India was a land of caste costume. (Though it was a good deal less so than a country like England, where a whole ritual of costume and colour, marking different jobs, groups, social ranks, sports, activities, gradations of meals, different times of day and year, kept many people in a constant pacific frenzy: in India everyone just had his one costume.)
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"The oldest profession is not prostitution. It is the priesthood."
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"Bombay is a crowd."
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often poor conditions, told only half the story: that the remnants of the old civilization we possessed gave the in-between colonial generations a second scheme of reverences and ambitions, and that this equipped us for the outside world better than might have seemed likely.
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What I’ve realized is that a film writer has to know a lot about film technique – the limitations, for instance, and where you can do away with words totally. We write visuals – that’s what a screen writer is supposed to do. The screen writer is actually a link between all the crafts of film-making, and I’m talking of the actors as craftsmen also. Much of it is in technical shorthand – it’s much better if you write it like that. The technicians understand the technical shorthand. They understand it emotionally. The cameraman understands not only the visual of a close-up, but also the emotion.
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We rent a hotel room for five days or seven days. And we talk out the film. Then I’m left alone, and I’m given four weeks or six weeks to write the treatment – basically, scenes without dialogue, in sequence. And then we get together for another three days. And then I’m left alone again. This time it comes out with dialogue, and it takes about two weeks.’