Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Bay of Pigs in 1961, there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions. Though this also drew me there, my chief reason was practical, namely linguistic. Historians who deal with the activities of ordinary people must be able to communicate with them by mouth, and Latin America was the only part of what was known as the Third World where large numbers of them spoke languages within my reach. For I was not concerned simply with a geographical region, but with a much larger unknown, that is to say the 80 per cent of men, women and children who live outside the zone inhabited until the last third of the twentieth century primarily by people with (notionally) white skin.

For the first half of my life these 80 per cent knew nothing of the world and, give or take a few thousand individuals, the world knew practically nothing about them. Nothing is more impressive to someone of my age than the extraordinary discovery, since 1970, of the First World by the peoples of the Third World or – since these terms themselves belong to the era of the Cold War – of the possibility that poor people from anywhere can change their lives for the better by moving to the rich countries. Of course, with the rarest exceptions, such as the USA since the 1960s, we do not want them to come, even when we need them. A world dedicated to the free global movement of all profit-making factors of production is also a world dedicated to stop the one form of globalization that is unquestionably desired by the poor, namely finding better-paid work in rich countries. We have come to be so familiar with the century’s inhumanity that we no longer distinguish between refugees and the Afghan and Kurd emigrants transported in coffin-ships by emigration contractors, like the Italians and Russian Jews of the 1880s, who had just discovered that they did not have to live and die in the paesi and shtetls of their birth.

For the first forty years of my life it was simply not so. Language – not the ‘national’ languages but what illiterates really spoke, the dense localized dialects or patois almost incomprehensible fifty kilometres away – isolated people from each other. Illiteracy, but even more, the absence of accessible radio and television, isolated them from what we think of as ‘news’, though not from one or two major world events. ‘Where is England?’ a Mexican farmer asked me, even in the 1970s, when I told him that was where I came from. (The first question to strangers in all societies that live by oral communication, including armies, is always ‘Where are you from?’) My explanations did not help. He had probably never thought about the Atlantic either. Finally he narrowed me down to something he had heard of: ‘Is it near Russia?’ I said, not too far. That satisfied him.

Then non-white skins were exceptionally rare in ‘Caucasian’ countries, except for the anomaly of the African- Americans in the USA. Latin American immigration was so small that before 1960 the US census counted South and Central Americans together, without distinguishing between separate countries of origin. So, apart from European settlers such as the French-Algerians (actually largely of Spanish stock) and the Jewish colonists in Palestine, were whites who lived in countries with large indigenous populations. Ordinary whites were very unlikely in the course of normal life to encounter the pluri-racial street-scene of today’s large western cities. Except for small and untypical minorities very few whites not resident overseas were likely to know, and even fewer to be on terms of friendship with, people of other skin colours. Before the 1960s they belonged primarily to two groups: Christians (assuming the label stretches to include Quakers) and communists, both committed, in different ways, to a general emancipatory and egalitarian hatred for racism. And both, but especially the Marxists, on grounds both of practical anti-imperialism and the potential of eastern revolution, had a special interest in the history of non-white humanity. That is what had brought me into the ‘colonial group’ of the Party as a student and drew me into exploring North Africa, and eventually Latin America. And our ‘colonial’ friends, in my case mostly from South Asia, were our first windows into these worlds.

Until much later I did not realize how untypical they were of their societies. Those who got to Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics were the elite of elites of the ‘native’ colonial populations, as soon became evident after decolonization. They also tended to be rather better heeled than us. They were family friends of the Nehrus, like P. N. Haksar of the LSE, who provided cover in Primrose Hill for the courtship of Indira Nehru with Feroze Gandhi and, as civil servant, was the most powerful man in independent India when I visited him in New Delhi in 1968. The man who came to meet my plane on the tarmac was my old friend from King’s Mohan Kumaramangalam, until recently a communist, then in charge of Indian Airlines, soon to be the minister perhaps closest of all to Mrs Gandhi until he died tragically in an air crash in 1973. His younger sister, Parvati, who visited Mohan in Cambridge, had now let her hair grow again, had married the General Secretary of the Communist Party and sat in Parliament. Another brother, an Etonian like his siblings but this time non-communist, had become the commander-in-chief of the Indian army. The Kumaramangalams of Madras were that sort of family. So, in a different way, were the Sarabhais of Ahmedabad, strict Jains who abstained from killing any animal however tiny, whom I came to know through Manorama, a close friend from LSE days of my first wife, who had Le Corbusier build her a house. They were one of the great Congress-supporting Gujarati business dynasties, textiles diversifying into higher technologies. Culture was probably their most visible public activity, but a Sarabhai was to be in charge of the Indian nuclear programme. For the first generation of independence, the affairs of an India of several hundred millions – public and private, government and opposition – were run by an extraordinary anglicized, modern-minded ‘Establishment’ of perhaps 100,000 people drawn from highly educated (that is, mainly wealthy) families, those who had served the Raj as well as those who had built the freedom movement. The bizarrerie of this combination came out at a Christmas dinner in the house of the doe-eyed Renu Chakravarty, by then a communist MP – the Communist Party had not yet split – and powerhouse in Calcutta. After ham and turkey, provided by Renu’s cousin, secretary of the Calcutta Club, which clearly had not abandoned the menu of the days when no Indian would have been allowed into the building except as a servant, came biryani and finally Christmas pudding, also provided by the Club and chewing pan (betel nut). They were anglicized even in the language some of them spoke at home and wrote or read most easily, for I had the impression that only the Bengalis among them, and perhaps some of the more traditional Muslim families whose radical young read the progressive poets in Urdu (admired by my old friends and comrades Victor Kiernan and Ralph Russell) lived their mental lives fully in a vernacular.

There is only so much – actually not very much – that one can learn about a society through personal friendship. Friends may be too deeply rooted in it to recognize its peculiarities, and in any case class is at least as great a segregator of experiences as distance, culture or language. When the Party put him in charge of leading the tramwaymen’s union in Calcutta, and later the juteworkers of (West) Bengal my admirable friend and comrade from King’s, the late Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, subsequently General Secretary of the Communist Party and briefly Minister of the Interior, had as much to learn about the Calcutta working class as any foreigner. What I hope I owe to such friendships, based on the anti-racist comradeship of student communism, is the separation of the sense of equality from the consciousness of skin- or hair-colour, physical appearance and culture. The global village of business, science, technology and universities of the twenty-first century is so multi-coloured that this may no longer be a problem, although I suspect it is. Before 1960 or so the sense of racial superiority among western whites was reinforced by the sheer weight of western power and achievement in all fields except some of the arts, and the sheer bodily superiority of races commonly regarded as inferior, and so psychologically resented, repressed and overcompensated, especially by white males. The Israeli Jews made no secret of their contempt for ‘the Arabs’, especially before 1987, when their intifadas had not yet broken the passive acceptance of Israeli occupation of the Palestinians’ territories. It was a strange but instructive experience to be treated as one of them on my visit to the West Bank in 1984, the only time I have found myself living under the rule of a foreign military.

The enormous advantage of communism, especially when reinforced by friendship, was that one could simply not treat a comrade other than as an equal. The patent self-confidence of the favoured few from the coloured ‘colonial’ elites who made it into pre-war British universities helped. Just as horses sense fear in their riders, so humans sense the expectation of being treated as inferiors in their respondents. Ruling classes and conquerors have always exploited this expectation of superiority. My pre-war ‘colonial’ friends did not expect to be treated as inferiors.