Home truths, from abroad

Journalist Ian Jack's essays from the eighties and nineties show how much India has changed -- and hasn't

British journalist Ian Jack's reporting on India contained in this diversely absorbing collection of articles spans 1977 and 2011, mostly the eighties and the nineties. Does this fact make the book dated? Hardly, because, though India may have changed in some ways since he wrote his pieces, in many other ways it hasn't. The realities and quirks that define India and Indians seem to have a timeless quality about them, and Mofussil Junction captures them beautifully, holding up a kind of mirror to a country that's both changing and not changing. It's a recall that helps us rediscover ourselves.

The blindings at Bhagalpur, for example. The reality of those infamous police atrocities in 1979, when about 30 young men, alleged dacoits, in the Bihar town had their eyes burnt by acid and gouged out by bicycle spokes hasn't changed. That was the police's way then of toughening its attitude towards crime and punishment. That remains the police way even now. Yes, there was national outrage over Bhagalpur. Politicians said they felt shame. But the authorities insisted the allegations were baseless. There were paltry offers of compensation and a few policemen were suspended. Then the ripples died, as they always do.

Or, the train accident in June 1981, when seven bogies of a local passenger train in Bihar plunged into the Bagmati River as it crossed a bridge, hurtling at least a thousand people to their death. A squabble soon broke over what caused the incident, with railway officials saying a strong gale had blown the train off the tracks, and state authorities blaming the driver for braking suddenly to save a cow and a cowherd he had spotted on the track. As bloated bodies surfaced over the next few days, the whole exercise became one of simply avoiding responsibility; and, as the train service resumed days later, the bogies were again swarming with passengers who rode on the roof, or hung from handle bars, or stood on the engine's buffer beam, and went past bodies laid out on the river bank as if nothing had happened. That's how it is even now - the blame game, the nonchalance, the reluctance to learn from lessons.

There are other telling reports in Mofussil Junction that highlight the unchanging nature of Indian reality - attitudes, beliefs, sentiments, touchiness, and an overwhelming unconcern to questions of life and death. When he went to meet the owner of a steamer company, after one of its ferry boats had overturned in the Ganges killing around 400 people, and asked about what happened to the murder charge that had been pinned on him, he got a straightforward answer: nothing. The man, a Rajput, coolly added the case would never come to court, and explained: "In Bihar, caste is the key to everything. The chief minister is a Rajput. He is known to me. Case finish."

But Mr Jack's journalistic journeys across India, since he first arrived in India in 1976, took him to other experiences as well, to people and places and episodes that make Mofussil Junction a revealing read. It evokes fond, and not so fond, memories of events past and forgotten and captures the "strangeness" of India through observations that are perceptive, sympathetic and unbiased. A sense of discovery pervades as he takes us to Motihari, in Bihar, down winding roads through sugarcane fields, in search of George Orwell's birthplace in a house where Orwell's father lived as an assistant sub-deputy opium agent.

There's a wonderful profile of the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who often talked of "changing countries like lovers" and latterly found India very painful. Nirad C Chaudhuri, who wrote his monumental autobiographical work, Thy Hand, Great Anarch, over five years, stretched out on the floor, in longhand and with a fountain pen, comes alive in his Oxford home. "Step inside his house and you risk perpetual bombardment by heavy cultural artillery: salvos of grand opera on the gramophone, followed by readings from Ronsard and Pascal," writes Mr Jack. "It can be a numbing as well as a stimulating experience." He weaves an intimate portrait of G D Birla, who had an arithmetical approach to people, subtracting what he didn't like in them and adding in what he did, and thought Morarji Desai's son, Kanti Lal, was stupid while Sanjay Gandhi was both wicked and stupid.

If vignettes like these make Mofussil Junction an attractive read, Mr Jack shows a passion for research that makes it doubly worthy. His piece on Serampur, on the Hooghly north of Kolkata, is perhaps one of the book's best parts, where he recreates the life and times of William Carey, the Baptist missionary who, during the early days of the British empire, opened schools "to promote curiosity and inquisitiveness among the rising generation", gave Bengali readers the first taste of new European literary form, and founded Samachar Darpan, the first Western-style newspaper to be published in an Oriental language. Mr Jack's account beautifully blends the past and the present and once again reflects a tolerant and understanding mind that's evident throughout his book and elevates its tone.

MOFUSSIL JUNCTION
Ian Jack
Penguin/Viking; 322 page; Rs 599