The Public Squeeze

In the 1950s, the balance between private and public life shifts, separating out ideas from behaviours; the ideas creating ideals which we believe in rather than perform. Our destiny to be a rich executive or high official; or, if you can’t run Delhi, make a fortune in tea, at least manage a local franchise; be a hippopotamus in some tiny swimming pool. So quick. Easy! School and its credentials will get you there. That post-Independence promise of the Indian future: fast cars on tarmac, leaving behind slow carts on dirt and dust. However, few roads have been built…. Ideas. They drive far ahead of our dilatory realities, the pedestrian self. One reason for modernity’s inauthenticity; that feeling things aren’t quite what they seem; that what’s actually going on, behind the closed doors of family and business, is not what we see on plaza and in city hall. A huge gap opening out between idea and the reality that idea supposedly represents. This new India learning to live with this strange way of being. It confuses! Causing a retreat to old ways in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Nature of Passion. When novel notions hit the buffers of life. When new images of status conflict with the old proprieties needed to keep this status intact.

Tradition can triumph, even where traditional modes are rejected and tragedy seems assured. The surprising conclusion of this sensitive study of changing times. The happy end is unexpected; and I, misled no doubt by the title - so clever to include in the plot - am relieved: not to lose a night grieving over our unlucky heroine. I should have known. After all, this is India in the 1950s, when nothing is quite what it seems; change more apparent than real. A topsy-turvy place! and in more ways than one. Even tradition’s triumph no simple return to the past. Nimmi, college educated, going to clubs and kissing a Parsi, willingly accepts an arranged marriage; not just because husband is a handsome chap; Kuku is also up-to-date. Nimmi’s wifely future to be a more sedate version of her adolescent years; salons and banqueting halls replacing cafés and nightclubs.

The tensions of modernity in a culture still run through the mores of the past. In a family these tensions cut across age and gender; disempowering those glued to the old ways. Lalaji is a self-made millionaire, who wants all the signs of success. A typical parvenu he has to glaringly announce, flash in neon lights, his new status; that big house, an office overwhelmed by supplicants, his expensively dressed wife and well-educated daughters. Not all signs are material. The best families, though no longer the richest, send their children to England to learn the cosmopolitan graces, and work in places - the state - not polluted by money. The signal that you have arrived in the elite is to be awarded one of the highest jobs in the state bureaucracy; less a job than a moral code, whose principles define your social position. Government a new kind of brahmin caste, where abstract ideas not birth are the defining characteristics. Success in the Civil Service requires refinement, achieved through a college education and time at a top English university, where you learn the art of public management. Such cultivation is not for Lalaji, too old to acquire these delicate ways. He doesn’t care. He will rise to the top of Indian society through his children; the bright Chandra has already entered government employment, while the beautiful Nimmi goes to college to learn the grace of beautiful living; her education a training in manners, acquired through the company she keeps, from the likes of Rajen Mathur and Indira Malik, daughters of those best families. College is a finishing school. A beautifully decorated catapult into the very citadel of the elite.

Nimmi sees it differently. Of course! Not so smart, with no intellectual or artistic talent, our heroine is a typical student, who innocently imbibes the rhetoric of school; that she can freely choose an independent future. Nimmi admires Kanta, Chandra’s wife, who acts, thinks and talks like a European. A model to emulate. But there’s much Nimmi does not understand; like Kanta’s culture - they come from different communities - which has taught this young woman how to navigate the narrow channels of a tricky estuary to reach the safe, deep harbour of home: a prosperous marriage. Nimmi, yet to learn how public life really works, is oblivious to its dangers, as she falls in love, goes to dances and kisses a nobody. What risks she takes! In a society where marriage is tightly tied to status, she could lose caste and these newly acquired liberties. Foolishly she cuts her hair - it’s the fashion for the more daring of these upper class girls. For the women in the family it is proof she has gone too far. Poor Nimmi! Confined to private quarters. Allowed out only for college classes.

A weakness of school, with its separation from the everyday, is its tendency to prefer ideas to realities, to think that words alone can transform a life. This foolishness is thoughtlessly retailed by Rajen, who tells Nimmi to leave home. Rajen, so carefully trained to live safely in the ‘outdoors’, and who’d never rebel against her own mother, is telling her friend fairy tales. Fortunately, Nimmi rejects this advice, which is too far out from her own experience to be sensible. Lucky she’s not smart. The tragedy of the brilliant is to take such nonsense seriously, acting it out, making it real. Whew! Saved by her mediocrity. This why, faced with the maternal reality, that reaction to her rashness, Nimmi accepts her mother’s command, and with the lightest of rebel touches: she insists she stay at college. Poor girl! Resigned to unhappiness.

Forced by Nimmi’s foolish act to submit to his wife’s authority, Lalaji reluctantly agrees to arrange her marriage. Already approached by the wealthy director of the Happy Hindustan Trading Company, he has dallied with the proposal, for he likes to have Nimmi around the house. No longer! Through that reckless haircut his wife has regained her domestic authority, and Lalaji must agree to her wishes. Nimmi sold into a life of emotional bondage…is this what you think? No! She leaves the novel in ecstasy; after marrying a pretty, intelligent and sophisticated boy, who she’d seen around town. This arranged marriage an ideal match. Though with a modern twist: Kuku suggested it after seeing Nimmi in the clubs and restaurants. By breaking with tradition, by stepping out of the women's quarters, she has gained this wonderful husband, who is likely to fulfil her dreams of a fashionable, cosmopolitan existence. Their honeymoon will be in Europe! And how! With such wealth and charm they will meet the very best people (how jealous this makes Rajen and Indira, whose families cannot reach these social heights). Here is change, and an important one: in modern India wealth and beauty is trumping birth. Life is changing more quickly than first appears; for we had forgotten the West’s presence; around for centuries, working its influence, accelerated with Independence. Indian more Western after British rule….

A brief excursus into sociology. This novel reminds us that the sociological history of the last century wasn't a simple conflict between New and Old, a passive tradition falling before an aggressive modernity. Elites, forever adapting themselves to historical forces, endlessly evolve to incorporate those techniques and attitudes which maintain their power and status. An ancient civilisation, with a highly sophisticated culture, absorbs social and economic change, providing the changes aren’t too big, too violent, too dam-breakingly calamitous. Inevitably there are tensions; but the evidence suggests that here the old ways are strong enough to deal even with the crassest of novelties, and the stupidities that result.

Chandra paced up and down. His nerves felt taut and strained. He could not bear it. He was a man who needed peace and quiet, and peace and quiet for him depended on certainty. He had to be certain what he was dealing with, have it all clearly defined before him in the shape of a minute or a report with correctly headed sections. He did not know how to face, how to deal with things that depended not on cerebral clarity but on emotion, cunning, psychological astuteness. His work had taught him to ignore these things. He was an administrative officer, he knew only facts and figures; in dealing with any situation he was helpless until he had the facts and figures before him; he could not deal with things indirectly.

Suddenly he stopped short in his pacing and, looking towards his father with unhappy eyes, he blurted it out: ‘Pitaji, I have the file with me, it is lying here at home at the back of the wardrobe.’ Kanta looked at him with astonishment, for what, she asked herself, was the point of bringing this unpleasant subject up without any provocation?

Lalaji continued to sit there, placid and immovable. He only shifted his pan from one corner of his mouth to the other. Inwardly he was shocked at his son’s clumsiness. No, he thought, he would have done no good in business. For this was not the way things were done, so abruptly, tactlessly, crudely. Lalaji’s mind, and the minds of those with whom he was accustomed to deal, worked the other way round from that of his son. For him facts and figures were a vague goal in the distance. The ultimate desire was to reach that goal, but before this could be done there were any obstacles that had to be overcome. And these obstacles all lay in the minds and feelings of the man with whom one had to deal. A man could not be expected to state his meaning directly; one had to guess what it was. Then one had to allow him to guess one’s own; because, again, it would have been indelicate, as well as injudicious, to voice it outright. And when one was sure that mutual understanding had been achieved, then, slowly, warily, one drew near to the point, by hints and circumlocutions, by apt parables and philosophical generalities.

This Dummkopf has been safely deposited in the State administration, where he can do little harm, and might be of some use. But oops…his mind has been turned by the place. No matter! Wise Lalaji knows how to handle such accidents and bend them to his own means and will.

The Schloss butts in and mentions the far future. Yes, my friend, I expect in the long run it will be the mentality of Chandra, the ethos of the institution, that wins; as Indian business modernises on the American model. But not yet; not for a few, for many, years yet.

Lalaji’s sister and wife, who think of tradition as a temple to be rigorously maintained in its original state, are not so flexible as Lalaji. Nothing must change. All things referred to a past believed to hold the monopoly on truth. The opposite extreme is Chandra and Kanta; whose fixed beliefs are all modern ones; their ideal England, with its public service culture; that religion of the organisation, whose codes of integrity, clarity, efficiency, have the force of moral laws. To emphasise the future, that promise of a middle class career, with its conveyer belt of promotion, produces an odd kind of civility; where ambition is the virtue, although dressed in softer, brighter, sweeter clothes: the progressive official who puts the abstract idea - institutional integrity or social equality - before his own interests. This creates a large obstacle you have to be clever to see around: the idea, and its proper role in a life. Characters like Chandra and Kanta are the naive dupes of school; for taught to believe in absolutes they believe them absolutely; blind to a concept’s relations with the encompassing culture. Fine in low-level admin jobs where ideas are little more than facts. Not so higher up the promotion pyramid, where it becomes ever harder to carry those cumbersome concepts; which are apt to get in the way when we negotiate with others or make decisions for our self. The high-flyer knows when to ditch the idea; is smart enough to mould their persona around the culture they inhabit, the people they meet, the money to be made. It is to carry a light ideational load. The reason they can scamper right to that pyramid’s apex. Nor must we forget that India is not England, the public realm not yet developed into a semi-autonomous zone where abstract ideas do play a key role, because embedded in an abstract public culture embodied inside individuals. In India in the 1950s, public life nearly always takes second place to family life; forcing ideas to accommodate to its feelings and needs. To navigate one’s boat between these two banks…no, let me switch metaphors: to have your flag flying across the battlefield; to win the battle, defeat you rivals, requires far more wisdom, skill, courage or fanaticism than Chandra has in his mental arsenal: he was a good but not outstanding student. With such ordinary chaps, with their limited capacities, Mr Reality is bound to come calling. He’ll demand a heavy price.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘of course it is very bad that things are so and that a man like our father should have so much power through bribing people…’ She sighed and soothed her sari over her lap, looking down at her hand as it smoothed.

Her idea very swiftly communicated itself to him. It made him almost a happy man, but he owed it to his conscience to look displeased. ‘It is true,’ he said in a voice which conveyed gloom he did not feel. ‘He has much power, even in Government circles, so if it should come to an inquiry… Unfortunately, Kanta,’ he continued in a severe lecturing tone, ‘there are always officials, people in high places, who care more about money than about their duty and responsibility, and it is just these people who put so much power into Pitaji’s hands.’

‘It is a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘Bribery and corruption.’ She laid her hand lightly on his shoulder. ‘Of course you and I and all the people we know, like the Ghoshs and the SankarLingams, are very much against it, but what can a few honest people do when it is so deeply rooted in political life.

‘It will take generations,’ he said gravely, ‘ to eradicate this evil from our midst.’

The ordinary tend to make easy compromises, because they lack the fanaticism of the brilliant. Already Chandra and Kanta are learning the secret of English hypocrisy, which is the art of speaking nice thoughts whilst committing ugly actions; inevitable in a culture where public life plays such a large and crucial role in a person’s life. 

Lalaji is too powerful, too cunning, too smart for his son. It reminds us that universities de-educate as much as educate; a truth that can take decades for a classroom-victim to learn. The university makes us stupid, if taking ideas too seriously, we believe them literal truths, treat them as facts. Such simple-minded faith a by-product of an undergraduate degree whose purpose is to train productive citizens; but where concepts float free of that training, to live their own conceptual life, free of a society’s constraints. If not careful ideas become the Truth, to which all things are compared and found wanting. Yet only the mad to live this way. Most of us have to pretend. The reason so much of modern life feels inauthentic; for across the culture ideas are more imagined than lived; a Bollywood movie not a Satyajit Ray meisterwerk. The successful know this. Dunderheads like Chandra do not. Most of us are flexible with our concepts; we keep them in the background, bringing them forward only to advertise our virtue and sophistication. Fashionable ideas the mirror in which an elite admires itself. In 1950s India Change and Modernity are what they see in the looking-glass. These ideas far more image than reality; the smart knowing how to adjust the balance, fashion’s thermostat: Indira knows when to take off the dress and put on a sari.

Ideas do change behaviour, but this tends towards the surface of life (it takes decades to seep down into a culture’s foundations); the old mores still retaining their hold. It is why Rajen and Indira are allowed go to clubs and restaurants; attend parties where respectable girls meet respectable boys; with a leavening of the outrageous to add frisson. It looks risky but is safe, for those who have learnt the new rules, know how far to go with an idea before returning it to the handbag. These the early years of a new sub-culture, where for a short time a young bourgeois can be free, as they acclimatise themselves to living in a public world, loosening the ties with family. But this not Beatnik America or London Bohemia, where the outcasts - the impoverished writer Bahwa, the equally poor artist Zahir-ud-din - call the counter-cultural shots. No! No! These boys and girls are strict in their liberties. The proprieties constructed inside the head rather in the architecture of home; the sexes separated now by ideas not physical space.

Modernity is drawing new patterns in the sand. To belong to the fashionable set, to be a member of this elite, one has to learn to dance around these patterns with skill and grace. Lalaji knows this; it is why he wants Chandra in government and Nimmi college-trained; also why he is insouciant about Nimmi’s lax behaviour, knowing it’s what other rich girls do. The codes are changing. ‘Immorality’ now a badge of status. For one’s action determined less by an abstract caste moral than the actions of class peers. A certain fluidity has entered this world, canalled between well-maintained banks. Going to night clubs is ok; but never step into an artiste’s dressing room. These girls and boys know this. Lala Narayan Dass Verma (Lalaji) knows they act on what they know; he more attuned to the new India than his wife; even though in character, outlook and behaviour he is an archetypical traditionalist. What makes him special, it marks him out, is his flexibility; he reads the times and its people, adapting his ideas to each new scene and social occasion. His success growing out of his relationships with businessmen and officials, so reliant on atmosphere and tact. A sign of the clever and adaptable man, who, flexible with ideas and institutions, nevertheless keeps to the old values, where private interests are all. The public realm not a means in itself - an idea for innocents - but an instrument to increase a family’s esteem.

Family is first. There is a wonderful scene in the hospital, when Shanta is having her baby; the female relatives turn the ward into a bedroom, and disregard the nurses’s advice in favour of their own motherly expertise. The family is the centre of existence, even if, as with Lalaji, business takes up most of a man’s time. Thus the freedom of the emotions, along with the complex codes which manage and discipline them; these codes controlled by the women, who act like domestic despots. Lalaji is a powerful figure, who usually gets his way, even when he interferes in the family; yet he’s also a benign patriarch, who knows when to compromise with his wife, whose power he cannot wilfully transgress.

Such flexibility, his openness to the modern, his tolerance of Nimmi’s behaviour, is hurting his wife and sister, who are losing control of the home, as their authority trickles out of the family compound. The private quarters, run by the eldest women behind its closed doors, is a domestic panopticon that modernity is threatening to demolish; for Lalaji’s tolerance - they call it laxity - undermines their monopoly over the lives and (more importantly) the marriages of their youngest children, who, through their father’s influence, are freeing themselves from this female hold. Nimmi’s young brother, Viddi, touched by aestheticism, hangs around with riff-raff, those poor painters and writers forever grumbling about their poverty and the injustice of the times. A bad case of infection, think his mother and her female kin; who believe the family’s name is in danger.

Tensions increase inside the home. The chief conflict is between husband and wife; for in inclining towards the modern, Lalaji encroaches on a mother’s domain, weakening her influence on the children. It is the problem of modernity, when the public realm invading the home, shifts the balance away from family towards society; the older women especially feeling this loss of power; while their life thins out, as the men and older children spend less time in the house. In the early decades of the Modern Age the male extends his territory; only later - the time of the Suffragettes - do the women find the appropriate response, demanding equal access to the public sphere.

The female quarters is a place of intense rivalry; where the women compete for status, defined by the family’s adherence to conventional standards, whose ultimate measure is the quality of one’s in-laws (chosen from within the community). Any chance to wound another’s honour is gleefully taken; it is why Shanta’s mother loves to let Phuphiji know of Nimmi’s indiscretions; while Rani is terrified her sister-in-laws will, after hearing about her niece’s lost of caste, tease her mercilessly. If the children let you down, it is because the mother is weak, the family in decline. A terrifying prospect. Lalaji knows better. But does he…. Shanta’s revelations creates a crisis, raising doubts about his judgement, so putting him back into his wife’s power. Now he has no choice. He must agree to her demand that Nimmi marry. Nevertheless, her victory isn’t complete. It is Rani, the eldest daughter, who phones him; her intelligence and sophistication giving her an authority her mother lacks. Lalaji knows the situation is serious. He must act on his wife’s wishes.

The modern. By disturbing the balance between public and private modernity gives too much influence to men and the young; making the women vulnerable. All the positive propaganda pushing ‘Progress’ disguises this effect.

….Much of the blame must also be given to the women of your family. It is the duty of wives and mothers to see to the morals of a family, that nothing shameful and dishonest is done. But the women in your fathers’s house are too stupid and uneducated. They are,’ she added with an intellectual air, ‘victims of society. The society in which they were born does not believe that women also have a mind. They think women must stay all day in the women’s quarter and bear babies. Therefore they can give no intellectual companionship to their men.’

‘How happy I am,’ said Chandra, though he did not sound it, ‘that I am married to you.’

‘Darling,’ she said and pressed his hand, ‘we are quite different. Thank God I have had some education and also come from a class of society which is more advanced. Your father - just think - would have married you to someone like Om’s Shanta.’

‘You should have seen the letter,’ he said. ‘It was written by Om and it was in very bad English. There were three spelling mistakes and the grammar was quite wrong. How ashamed I feel that such a letter should  have been written by my brother.’ He had not shown it to Kanta and she had not asked to see it. It was something unclean which had to be thrust out of sight as quickly as possible.

The authentic voice of the educated. That tart dismissal of those who are not like us. Supercilious. Smug. I see it all time. It is the tone of middle ranking official, the semi-educated graduate, the clerk. Scraps of knowledge. The ability to write a memo. With a modicum of authority that comes from knowing the official language. Small minds which think themselves capacious; buckets not reservoirs….

Poor Kanta. So ignorant! Her worldview as limited in its own way as that of Lalaji’s wife. If I could be a bird and fly around these houses, what would I see…. Kanta never to enjoy the domestic dominance of her mother-in-law, while suffering the insecurities of social life, that depend on the goodwill of others over whom she has no control; Kanta to compete for esteem with other wives yet unable to influence the outcome, for it is the officials, those invisible forces, men she’ll never meet, who will decide her husband’s future. Free to speak her mind, Kanta can have her own ideas, but this overlooks this mind’s limits. Tell Chandra’s colleagues what she really thinks? Espouse controversial thoughts? Get drunk at the Rendezvous…I hear my friend, the Schloss, laughing. In fact the limits on free thought and free talk are greater in her world; because she hasn't the safety net of the family, that bond of the emotions overriding all arguments and ideas. In public you are free to talk for as long as you don’t unsettle your interlocutor, who must believe you share the same views. Contrast with Lalaji’s wife and Shanti’s mother: though they abide by the conventions of polite intercourse each knows exactly what the other thinks; the intercourse not to hide those differences but to negotiate them to a mutually satisfactory conclusion. In Kanta’s world it is wise to pretend we are all the same. So much is illusion; the strain of life is in maintaining those illusions. Lalaji pays for their holidays and luxuries; yet Kanta loves to diss his manners and talk about their self-sufficiency. If possible she’d wouldn’t visit Chandra’s family at all; but what would happen to those hols.… Poor Kanta. Is this really a better life? I don’t think so. It is a different one, which in many ways is less satisfying. Also something a little nasty about it. No respect. Plenty of resentment. And so much is false. It is why when faced with a crisis Kanta finds she has no voice: Lalaji simply ignores her. Later, she covers up such dependence by looking down on Om and Shanta.

You have to be clever to navigate this new world. Lalaji! He knows when to dominate and when to give in. It is why all ends in happiness; we witness to a paradisal picnic scene. An Arcadia with its perfect blending of the old and new, where much of the new is (safely) decorative. Lalaji, helped by his wife and Nimmi, has arranged the perfect marriage. Whoopee! Madam Tradition, with her large arms and vast body, embraces skinny Mr Modern, smothering him with those enormous breasts. She smiles all the way to the women’s quarters.

Review: The Nature of Passion