Plain tales
Benny Green
Raj: A Scrapbook of British India Charles Allen (Andre Deutsch £5.95)
The owl of Minerva, so the saying goes, flies at dusk, so it is understandable that only now, in the twilight of empire, are the British beginning to comprehend the full implications of their great imperial escapade, and the Indian episode in particular. To say that the effect on writers has been salutary would be putting it far too mildly. Three times in the last five years the Booker prize has been awarded to works exploring the theme of the British in India, and if we add to that trio the imperial retrospectives of Jan Morris and the very best book of all to come out of the wrapping-up of our Indian estates, Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, we may justifiably hope that the quantity of readable and stimulating works on the subject will eventually become very much greater than it is now.
One of the most interesting manifestations of the exhumation of the Raj was the BBC Radio Four documentary series in 1974, Plain Tales from the Raj, whose title, a neat amalgam of the prosaic and the Kiplingesque, perfectly defined the style of the whole work. Survivors from the Raj were simply invited to talk into tape recorders, which is of course a method of literary compilation utterly deadly unless great cunning and care is taken with the editing and arranging of the raw material. The outcome was an unqualified triumph, and those who followed through the matter-of-fact accounts of day-to-day life in India at the time must surely have wondered, as I did, why nobody thought to use the camera as well as the microphone in order to make the job complete.
Sadly, that was never done, but now we have the next best thing. After the runaway success of the radio series, Plain Tales from the Raj appeared as a book, and once again overcame the terrible handicaps of its birth pangs by being one of the most readable books of 1975. Now comes the pictorial appendage, a scrapbook which crushes all opposition with its opening endpapers; on the left-hand side is a page of small ads from The Pioneer dated 19 February, 1877; fac ing it are further revelations from The Civil and Military Gazette for 28 May, 1886. In what commodities was the Raj bartering a hundred years ago? In photographs of H.M.
The Khan of Khelat, in a handsome irongrey pair of Burmah ponies, in a bungalow at Lucknow, in Dr Scott's Bilious and Liver Pills, in a roomy and comfortable Barouche. We read that rooms are available at Hillier's Boarding House, Lahore, and that the pseudonymous G.S. is saying 'Darling, your
letter safely received, write fully as proav ised, nothing to fear from my quarter, I will not write to you without your permission'. By the time the reader arrives at the far end of his journey, and finds himself advised for his health's sake to take Wilkinson's Sarsaparilla, he feels he understands what the Raj was, and how it lived, a little more fullY than he did before.
The photographs which peer out from the pages are often extraordinary, dispersing the fog of passing time even as the camera shutter clicks. A group at a fancy dress party aboard ship in 1925; a baby boy being carried in a white-curtained palanquin bY two native attendants; tea on the lawn, Madras, 1905; the Dundee High School old boys' reunion dinner at Peliti's Restaurant, Calcutta, 1928. Above all the uncaptioned photograph on page 18, showing a British officer in full ceremonial rig adjusting the frogging on his chest while a tiny, Christopher Robinish onlooker gawps up at him. To describe the volume as an appendage of Plain Tales From the Raj might make it sound like a mere afterthought; in fact it is an indispensable visual analogue to the first book, a series of remarkable photographs, drawings and sketches of an exiled race in action.
Evidence that the hand designing this book is the same one which so deftly orchestrated the vast quantity of factual evidence in Plain Tales is found in the reproduced letters to and from home; the seductive advertisements in the Indian newspapers, like the one for Lipton's Yellow Label Tea, showing the butler serving tea under the immemorial elms while the vicar takes up his cup; the menu at one of the many Jubilee dinners of 1897; a sketch showing the tyro how to assess the soundness and age of horses; a page from the account book of so Indian cook-housekeeper; the seating plan for a Government House dinner; a list of sporting fixtures for Rawalpindi Week, 1930; an advertisement proclaiming the advantages of a life in retirement at Chel', tenham Spa; a dance card for the Bachelors Ball at the Allahabad Club, 1928. Looking into these pathetic fragments of evidence, the reader begins to hear again the prosaic and yet infinitely dramatic drone of the voices from the original radio series.
In the face of this kind of opposition, mere prose has little chance to impreSs itself, but the brief introductions to the vat' ious sections possess the style of a writer supremely confident of his control over his material. These short essays are enter' taming, informative, and spiced with jUst enough nostalgic regret to colour the words without lapsing into sentimentality. MI. Allen knows as well as anyone that life for the Raj was by no means the idyll which posterity sometimes fondly imagines; his descriptions of life among the Other Ranks of the British Army, for example, would receive the full approbation of Kipling rather than that of Lord Curzon. This must have been a difficult book to compile. Mf Allen has executed his task to perfection.
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