From My Notebooks In 1976: The Emergency In Bangalore

11th January 2025 |

Sunday, October 24th, 1976

To Mysore. Help the Germans down the hill, holding their bike with my brakes and engine. [I wish I could remember how we did this.] Then in wildlife reserve my first wild elephant wanders across the road. In Mysore, at govt. guest house, meet three Indians and wives. We go to Brindavan Gardens, under the dam, 10 miles out. Very impressive, but too gaudy for perfection. Afterwards to hotel for dinner. Vegetarian, chapati (poroti?) Very good. Fascinating to see mother feed her baby with her fingers. How much significance there is in the handling of food.

A working elephant at Mysore Reserve

A working elephant at Mysore Reserve

Went out to see a Hindu film. Two male stars playing out endless series of fantasy situations – sort of Indian version of “Help” Richard Lester-ish. Went home after interval.

Monday 25th, to Bangalore

Pleasant ride through flat land, along road shaded by vast trees. Karnataka most irrigated state in India. Nicely received by Jacob at Lucas’s. Then D.H Storey’s wife gets me put up by Persian students across the road.

Poverty is not as alarming as expected. Opinions of emergency fairly divided.

[The whole time I spent in India, President Indira Ghandi suspended the country’s normally functioning democracy with a Declaration of Emergency. It became a temporary dictatorship. There was talk of forced sterilisation of men. Government servants in a vast bureaucracy were made to come to work on time. There were obvious improvements, and some less obvious horrors.]

Sugar cane grower in Bangalore (says he) can’t get labour. They “don’t want to dirty their hands.” Yet labour groups work on roads. Women work in paddy fields everywhere. Old India Hands say there has been much improvement.

Slogans everywhere. [On billboards. Indira’s program was known as P.]

Let 20 point P be our charter
20 pt P is blueprint for success
Efficiency should be our watchword
Dicsipline (sic – or cis?) is the need of the hour
Consolidate 100 gains of E
Talk Less Work More
Nation’s prosperity is sum total of each citizen’s effort

I.Ghandi says: Foreign newspapers attack E because they don’t like to see India succeed against inflation where they fail.

Generally adverse criticism is put down to envy and sour grapes.

Bangalore. Since Mannar things have been getting steadily better. Gradually the last traces of backache have faded. Only in Primrose Road, when I considered PH’s letter, and wrote my replies, did I feel a sense of strain, and since then an occasional excitement at having taken an irrevocable stand.

[I went to the Lucas office in Bangalore who received me very generously. However, there was a letter from Peter Harland at the Sunday Times saying the paper didn’t want to support me any longer. I wrote back that I would continue with or without their help.]

I was impelled to clean the situation for myself. Probably the letter was unnecessarily acid, and in a business sense, unwise. But I am not in business, which is another way of saying that I don’t want to maintain transactions with society when they degenerate.

[In previous conversations with Harland (who was always sympathetic) I learned that there was a faction in the newspaper office that wanted to cut me off. Apparently, they had now succeeded.]

The situation in the Sunday Times office has for me the smell of corruption. Have I injured anyone? For all I said in the letter is talked about openly in PH’s office. But he will not be sure that I haven’t passed it on. Too bad. I shall be satisfied with any outcome.

Now I feel good, excellent, even wonderful. In this frame of mind I notice that I think of my future more in terms of the ranch option than the house. Yet Jo is closer than Carol now. I have opened a conflict in myself which seems to offer no prospect of resolution. How will it be resolved?

[At Lucas’s I was introduced to a car dealer called Gopinath, or Gopi for short – and he was short and pop-eyed to boot, but very entertaining and enthusiastic about my travels.]

Gopinath’s amusing account of Indian bathroom habits. The peasant is used to shitting away from the house in unsanitary conditions. He expresses his disgust by the violent retching noise and the mess he makes. For him, henceforth, bathrooms are dirty places to be treated with disrespect – a custom passed on from parent to child. Regardless of changing conditions (Father to son? How do women behave?).

He does not explain why it should have been disgusting in the first place – unless it’s because the night soil was removed by the lowest caste and the association therefore is untouchable. The left hand symbolises “shit.” How odd to carry with you at all times this reminder of your own excrement. Carried to its logical conclusion the left hand should be encased in a surgical glove or plunged into a pocketful of carbolic.

Discussion with Chief Reporter of Prajavani newspaper. He believes that E [The Emergency] is thoroughly bad: That press freedom is vital, but that electorate is blind and not influenced by press. Easily manipulated by corruption and demagoguery. Believes in unity (i.e. apparently opposed to devolution) but against uniformity. That Indira is seeking absolute power for its own sake. Can offer no alternative, only a return to pre-Emergency state. Talks of slums of Bangalore. First there was a rehousing scheme. Now abandoned because votes are more easily controlled in slums. What are these slums? 150 of them – say 150,000 people.

Tilluk [a new acquaintance] and I stroll around a ‘slum’ – a collection of village houses – maintained with pride and cleanliness – frequent cow-dunging. [Cow-dung is believed to have cleansing properties] Pathways lined with granite slabs. Roofs well tiled. Corporation has moved them. i.e. given land alongside and told to rebuild. But spokesmen say they got no help with money or materials. Forced to sell cows and other possessions. But new houses are being built. And labour is apparently in demand. Conditions in these communities are relatively good. As we stroll, I’m reminded of Iguatú [A village in the impoverished north of Brazil I had visited].

What’s the difference? I’d say things are better here.

Pictures from Iguatú

 


 

And now a Pontification:

Next week, it seems, we enter a new era, as Trump and Musk ascend to the presidency of the USA.

For some time now I have felt as though I were hanging on to the top of a wall by my finger tips.

Soon I shall have to let go, and I have no idea what’s below me – if anything.

Does that sound hysterical?

Especially if I add that nothing will particularly change for me personally.

There is no immediate threat to my comfort or survival.

So why this sense of doom?

It’s the same feeling, I imagine, that I share with people living in Glendale, California, who were going about their usual business this week, while their Hollywood neighbours were being burned out of house and home.

With luck the wind will turn and they’ll survive. But it’ll be a long time before they feel safe, if ever.

Americans – most of them –have delivered the world to a man who has promised to break all the rules, and drag us back into the nineteenth century, a time of great wealth for some, extreme poverty for many, when war was the way to settle differences. His promise to end the war in Ukraine will probably mean preparing the way for more European wars in the future. Meanwhile Musk is keen to see a civil war in Britain, and a neo-Fascist government in Germany. No doubt he will also be a friend to Marine Le Pen, our own neo-Fascist here in France.

There is a ray of hope. Trump is a liar. Well, that in itself is not exceptional. All politicians must, necessarily, lie in order to please a wide range of people with different expectations. But Trump’s lies are in a class of their own. In the first place he’s a bad liar, who gets caught out. And secondly, he lies to enrich himself, and that is where I see some hope – that he is lying now about what he plans to do, that his threats are just to soften up the opposition. After all this noise about changing the world, annexing Greenland, dumping Ukraine, firing his own bureaucracy, running trade wars, breaking up the European Union, maybe in the end he will be satisfied by feathering his own nest and rewarding his rich cronies. I could look forward to a day when he and JD, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito et alia, sail away in a Super Dooper Yacht, with Nigel Farage as Chief Steward and Mitch McConnell doiing the laundry. While Musk, of course,will be on his way to Mars.

But the REALLY bad news is that, one way or another, we will lose four years to deal with the climate crisis, and even more than four years if his fossil-loving friends really “drill, baby, drill.”

The heat is coming. I may even live to feel it. I guess that’s what’s below me when I fall off the wall.