The Hindu Business Line : Indian tales from Australians

Much has been written about the Indians’ ‘encounters’ with Australia. Here’s the opposite, ‘Australian encounters with India,’ a collection of stories under the title Of Sadhus and Spinners, edited by Bruce Bennett, Santosh K. Sareen, Susan Cowan and Asha Kanwar ( www.harpercollins.co.in).

“I have seen a storm on the heights of Jura – such a storm as Lord Byron describes,” recounts John Lang in the opening piece, ‘The Mohammedan Mother.’ And he continues: “I have, off Terra del Fuego, the Cape of Good Hope, and the coast of Java, kept watch in thunderstorms which have drowned in their roaring the human voice, and made every one deaf and stupefied; but these storms are not to be compared with a thunderstorm at Mussoorie or Landour.”

Today Australia is full of hope, as Asia of despair, wrote Alfred Deakin in 1893. “Racially, socially, politically, and industrially, far asunder as the poles, their geographical situation, bringing them face to face, may yet bring them hand to hand, and mind to mind. They have much to teach each other,” reads his fond wish, in ‘Our nearest great country.’

A selection from Ethel Anderson’s The Little Ghosts (1959) speaks of why Indian men do not admire Englishwomen: “Their pasty faces, they assert, look anaemic and unwholesome; beside the honey-coloured and flawless skins of Indian beauties they lack brilliance. Their hair, too, seems dull and lustreless in contrast with the satin-sheened oiled and raven tresses of zenana belles. Their figures (they consider) are bad; their heads, hands, and feet are too large. They have, in short, no grace of movement, no subtlety of rhythm in dancing, no charm of expression in their colourless, washed-out eyes…”

Marine Drive is wide and flat and curved, rimmed with a sea wall, and it is Melbourne’s Marine Parade again, repeated here in India, compares Christopher Koch, in ‘Sadhus and sahibs’. Passing by a statue of Queen Victoria, on a plinth beside the Drive, the story’s protagonist O’Brien finds himself “looking up at the pudding-faced queen with a certain wistfulness. Relic of the Raj, bereft in independent India, she grilled in the terrible heat, a figure of fun, her majesty a joke…”

Prawn Fred and Filter Stake (‘presumably prawn fritters and fillet steak’) adore the menu in a Darjeeling café that Vicki Viidikas describes. “Sitting next to us was an Englishman called Crowby who had a shaved head and had been in India for some time. He laughed constantly showing us his big white horse teeth and telling us how you could live in India for two rupees a day man, if you know what I mean, and how we were paying too much for our hotel room (five rupees a day) and how to travel on the trains for free and where to buy the cheapest chillums (eight paise)…” The author wonders if Crowby had flipped out – ‘all that dope smoking, sun on his head and concern with economics.’

The Bard comes alive in ‘Meeting Mister Ghosh,’ of Haydn M. Williams, through ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’ that survives a series of shock-laden rehearsals. “In two staggering, exhausting nights, torn by the sobs of over-nervous actresses, with a Punjabi girl dragged in as a last minute substitute to don the terribly tight tights that Shushila or Aruna or someone had shrunk in shame from wearing. Ghosh coaxes his rabbits from the hat and there is applause that only just drowns out the sprinkling of catcalls from the more unrelenting of the opposition party.”

Cool read, especially if you find the heat of racial news to be overwhelming.

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