The Tiger at Home

I’ve been thinking a bit about that old mini-series/cycle of novels, “The Jewel in the Crown“/The Raj Quartet.

I’ve been thinking about them in part because of a silly question someone asked me — if there were a film made about my life, whom would I want cast as me?

That was a tough one, because I don’t know all that many brown-skinned male leads. But finally I came to the conclusion that if there were someone like the young Art Malik when he played Hari Kumar, he’d fit into the role.

Anyway, I got to thinking about the ending of that great long tele-serial, where there’s a commentary about how it’s the people like Hari Kumar who really are the losers of independence, that they are neither properly English nor Indian, and there isn’t a place for them. He is left as an Englishman alone in the middle of a country he doesn’t know, writing elegies for his former public school life in a small newspaper, unable to get good jobs as he isn’t Indian enough, and heartbroken by what has happened to his love, Daphne.

Anyway, I thought about how much this reflects reality. And my conclusion is … not so much.

First things first, Hari Kumar was 17 in 1938. I know darned well where he would have spent the war — this was the time of England alone against the Nazis. Kumar would have been drafted into the army and, with his background, he almost certainly would have become an officer. (Even back in India, he would have heard about his old school friends joining the service, and would have felt an obligation to pitch in.) So none of the events in the books would have happened, because he would either have distinguished himself in service (as he is rather heroic), or he would have been killed or maimed in action.

Leaving that aside, however — had the events of the book taken place anyway, what would have happened next is that sometime in, say, 1948, Kumar would have woken up and said, “F*ck this sh*t, I don’t belong here. I’m leaving.” And he would have scraped together his pennies for a third-class berth back to England, which he would have every right to do as a British subject until 1969 (when Britain limited immigration from its former Empire). If he was going to live a scrabbled hand-to-mouth existence, he might as well live where people speak his language.

What he would have found is an England ruled by a socialist government where jobs were scarce. Alas — you get what you vote for. Sucks for the majority over the long run, but doesn’t necessarily suck for him — university places would have become fully funded. He could have gone back to school.

What he also would have found is that he would have slipped right back into the place he was in, before the war. With his gentleman-like manners and his plummy accent, people would be very anxious to give him a leg-up — it helps them demonstrate to themselves that they’re ‘not racist’. Women — especially upper-class women (like Daphne Manners) — would be intrigued by him — viz., he’s obviously from their class, but he’s so exotic.

He would probably have ended his days as a journalist or actor with an English wife and two kids, with a story or two to tell about his messed-up war years and an untold story of his lost love. Maybe he would have written a novel or two about it.

His existence would be more like Vikram Seth’s uncle in Two Lives — that of an educated man and an immigrant to England. Actually, strike that, he’d have been even more settled than that, for English sensibilities and an upper-class accent (RP) were his. Probably would have ended up working for the BBC.

What would not have happened is that Hari Kumar would have ended up marooned with no family in a country he didn’t know, with no way back to the England he grew up in and loved. I mean, come on, England was recruiting guest-workers from Jamaica and Pakistan — people whose English was rudimentary at best. She certainly had room for a public-school-educated gent like Harry.

The ending to that “The Jewel in the Crown” series is just a variation on the ‘tragic mulatto’ of American musicals and films — and it’s just as false. What do these people do with themselves? Why, they get by, just the same as you and me. They integrate into the larger society. They intermarry. Actually, I find it interesting just how little that last bit is mentioned by these sorts of works.

Take the real life of Art Malik, for instance. Sure, he’ll give an interview to AlJazeera-English and play bad guys in True Lies. But what has he done? He’s had a solid career as an actor (including a role in a James Bond movie, “The Living Daylights”), married, and raised a family. His wife was a classmate of his at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (which he attended on scholarship), a lady named “Gina Rowe”, and their daughters are “Keira” and “Jessica”.

Or if a Kumar type decided not to fit into the mold of a conventional Englishman (though I think he would), there’s always the path taken by another Indian, Farrokh Bulsara, the son of a Parsi who was working for the Colonial Office, born just after the Second World War when his father was working in Zanzibar. Young Farrokh ended his days as Freddie Mercury.

Honestly, I think these stories do people a disservice, making them think that their options are more limited than they really are. Some of this has to do with spoilt upper-middle-class twenty-something whiners, I suspect — generally these complaints come from people who have had all the advantages. Take this missive from Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie of Rugby School and King’s College Cambridge. From the way Rushdie writes in that article, you’d never know that he was a product of a public school and Cambridge, that he has married an American and two Englishwomen, leaving the last wife (his editor and collaborator in London) for a twenty-something Bollywood actress and model (who has now just left him — karma’s a bitch, ain’t it? Should’ve stuck to the writers.).

Yes, there is a lot of petty racism in this world. It sucks — people suck. But the great thing is that one can get by it and do just as well as one’s white friends and colleagues. That is our reality. (It goes the other way, too. A college pal of mine from Indiana, second generation at Princeton, looks and sounds not unlike Jimmy Stewart, etc., etc., has married an Indian doctoral student in anthropology whom he met in the dorms here at Harvard. Are they also destined to live tragic lives?)

This cultural discourse about tragic culturally-mixed people, Macaulay’s Indians, who are at home neither here nor there, just isn’t true. The lives of the very writers and actors who take part in it show just how much of a lie it really is.

I wish that more of our books and films reflected that reality.

Update: Actually, this one seems to. Funny, one goes to the primetime soaps to find what our very high-brow stuff doesn’t show us. ;-)