First Venture Abroad: India
India
India was a wonderful experience, from my first train journey in the Calcutta Mail across India from Bombay. The impact of Calcutta, its crowds, noise, smells, beggars and the crumbling Imperial buildings, stays with me.
I flew up to the Dooars in a Second World War Dakota and slowly settled into the strange world of tea planting. Zurrantee, my garden, was in the Himalayan foothills, several miles from the Bhutan frontier. I lived in a bungalow on the banks of a river with the jungle beyond. To the north over the foothill forests you could, on a clear day, see the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas in Sikkim. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
I remember the soggy heat in the rains (sufficient for mildew to grow on one’s clothes), the bullfrogs and cicada, the scent of the frangipani trees, the beautiful dry season weather, the Indian pied cuckoos calling plaintively. There were peacocks, too, flying from tree to tree.
Thirteen servants looked after me alone, often quarrelling and hard to manage. It was an absurd arrangement but that was the way things were done in those days. They were all ex-garden workers who had misbehaved but the new Labour Laws made sacking difficult and the simplest way forward was to promote them to less arduous bungalow work, providing them with opportunities to do as little as possible. My Labrador/Great Dane bitch, Penny, kept me company.
The garden consisted of 1600 acres and as many workers plus a team of lepers brought in at peak periods. I supervised the tea plucking, the pruning of bushes in the winter and at night the work of the factory ensuring that the coal-fired furnaces were kept at an even temperature to avoid burning of the leaf.
Unrest was building up on many of the gardens. Disputes over pay and conditions were inevitably the cause but the management were not skilled at dealing with the issues. There were two incidents in our area. A group of labourers on one nearby garden rammed a large bamboo sharpened at the end through the windscreen of the manager’s pick up. It could easily have killed him but thankfully glanced off the top of his head, cutting open his scalp.
On another garden an argument was sparked off between an assistant manager and a group of men in the garden. They chased him into a ditch and beat him to death with concrete posts. I went to his funeral, the first Hindu funeral I had attended. The stricken family stood around the funeral pyre. It was raining heavily and the wood took time to catch light. The poor man’s blood began to seep through the muslin shroud.
We all wondered whether the violence would spread but tempers cooled and there were no more incidents while I was there.
There was little leisure except trips to the local planters’ club, the place of much heavy drinking. I rode my old polo pony, Danny Boy, and went for expeditions in the jungle where there were leopards, tigers and Himalaya black bears. We had two trips to Darjeeling with its magnificent backdrop of Kunchinjunga, one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. We stayed in the legendary Planters’ Club, an extraordinary relic of old India, where we threw our glasses over our shoulders at the end of a meal. (The club secretary wrote charming letters to our local club secretary about ‘your boys’ boisterous behaviour’ and would we please reimburse the club.)
The manager, Bill Milne, was a delightful elderly Englishman who had served with the Gurkhas in the war. He ran the estate in a relaxed, rather dilatory way but he was humane in his dealings with the labour force. He had been deserted by his first wife and recently married again. He met his new wife when she nursed him at a hospital in London where he was sent for an operation after he fell out of his jeep and rolled down a hill. He had had a Chinese-Nepali mistress, called Jetti. When he returned with his new wife he banished Jetti to a hut at the entrance to his compound. We used to have supper with Jetti on the balcony of her hut. The manager joined us and his servant brought down the food and served it on the family silver. He usually drank far too much and we had to lift him to the edge of the balcony to have a pee. After the meal, we carried the manager back to his bungalow, to be greeted by his wife who usually blamed us for his condition and once threw a shoe at me.
He was famous as a big game hunter. A tiger would approach and he would not stop filling his pipe until the last moment. He was the calmest of men.
While I was there the Chinese invaded a frontier area of India. Our factory was camouflaged and the memsahibs were sent down to Calcutta. But a prudent man living at the entrance to the garden flew the red hammer and sickle flag as an insurance policy in the event of being overrun by the Chinese.
I gained a fascinating insight into the culture of the labour force, recruited from the northern Indian states and the hill territories many years before. I attended for the first time a Hindu punjab (religious ceremony). Chickens and a goat were being slaughtered and their blood sprinkled over a stone phallus. I asked for an explanation to what was clearly a Hindu ceremony. ‘We are Church of Scotland!’ they answered proudly. They had kept the faith at least in some form from the distant past when the labour force had been covered by Church of Scotland missionaries.
Intoxicated though I was by India, two years was enough. I abandoned great ideas of walking back home with a mule and flew back instead.
My thoughts of India as I sailed out to Bombay were largely romantic. I was aware of the great sweep of Indian history, its triumphs and tragedies, but the sensual impact of the Continent overwhelmed me.
Up country in the tea garden, I entered another remote world which didn't seem to have shaken off the colonial shackles, particularly in the ramshackle planters club.
We were discouraged from social contact with the team of Bengali Babus who kept the garden books and Indian staff were expected to dismount from their bikes when they passed us.
Indian and Anglo-Indian management were slowly being introduced to the gardens and our response was cool. It didn’t seem right to us at the time; were we not the victors and the bringers of law and order?
Many years later back in England, our eldest daughter, Lottie, and Jan Karmali, our superb family doctor, whose father’s family originated in Gujarat, India, fell in love and were married in our village church. Jan is an Ismaili by birth but he was greatly welcome in our most traditional English community. This was in a sense a late flowering of my Indian experience.