The Raj began in 1818 when the Rajput states of central and northern India and much else of the country came under British "protection," an occupation that ended only in 1948. Many accounts exist of Anglo-Indian life during this period, a time characterized by earnest sincerity and intolerable bigotry alike. Rudyard Kipling's account is on the whole favorable, while E.M. Forster's in "A Passage to India" is so condemnatory that it can be said to have hastened even British acceptance of the end of the Raj itself. The whole gorgeous, hideous panorama is laid out in greatest detail in Paul Scott's "Raj Quartet."
Now, in "Out of India," Michael Foss gives us his bleak but affectionate account of the first years of his life and the last years of the Raj. He grew up in India in what was left of Anglo-Indian society and was in a position to view its massive inequalities.
Foss shows how "a son of a poor gardener became an army officer and an Irish skivvy transformed herself into the officer's lady -- became 'sahib' and 'memsahib.' " These two, his parents, both decent, well-intentioned folk, became their roles, for "how easy it was, in the peculiar relationship between English and Indian, for promise to outrun performance and for small everyday events to fall into misunderstanding, indignity and foolishness."
Father, berating an underling, would begin to enunciate in a voice much too loud, with heavy emphasis, then Mother would grow impatient, looking away with a haughty stare, refusing to meet some plausible but unconvincing Indian eye. "So there they stood: my righteous father faced by what he thought was impudence but was more likely to be the panic of incomprehension; and the victim of his coldness hopelessly tangled in the historical thickets of racial dominance and subservience."
The boy himself knew that, like all the British of the Raj, he was part of two worlds. "I and my kind lived on India, not in it." There was the cocoon of the Raj and then there was the other world. "After the last drinks were cleared away, and the Indian beater had dimmed the lights, emptied the ashtrays, plumped the cushions . . . he returned into the limbo of the servant's quarters in the shadowland of Indian India."
This was "a place for our averted eyes, almost secret -- if not a dirty secret, at least a slightly disreputable tale, hardly mentioned in decent company." The two worlds moved in parallel, close but never meeting. "Our rules for living were not their rules."
Though the parents unhappily lived out their roles, the child had no role to play and could consequently see things as they were. "Listening to them I, a boy of the Raj, grew into something more than an English boy. I became a participator, however remote, in a stranger, larger humanity."
He reconstructs for us how this occurred. Surrounded by servants, he begins to pay closer attention to them, particularly Sami, their head beater. "By what right, I began to wonder, did I give this man orders, sending him here and there like a pawn on a board? The 'chokra,' a likely youth in his late teens, dropped his eyes when he came upon us, and the sweeper . . . in the house was an untouchable, a carter of ordure. But to see him outside in the ground, slowly whisking a broom of twigs though the dust, I now saw him as an Indian, a fellow human, possessor of an autonomous life."
It was just such a revelation that may have started this boy toward this honest and touching memoir. Foss has written much literature for children and he retains an understanding of what it feels like to be a child -- particularly what it felt like to be a child under the Raj.
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