The letter I received on 11 May 1971 from the North India Manager of Air India may carry no historical importance, yet to me it felt like a gesture of respect toward the new literary awakening of Dogri. It carried an invitation: to fly to London as Air India's guest aboard the "Inaugural Flight" of India's first Boeing 747, the Samrat Ashok. That a Dogri writer's name should appear on a select list of two, two and a half hundred special guests was owing, perhaps, to the Union Minister for Civil Aviation, Dr. Karan Singh, and his awareness of this literary stirring in Dogri.
Even with the invitation in hand, I hesitated a good deal over so long and so unfamiliar a journey. It was Shri Balraj Puri who set my hesitation to rest. In the matter of the passport, Shri Puri in Jammu, and Bansilal Gupta together with Air India's Shri Dogra in Delhi, were of immense help.
On the morning of 24 May, at half past eight, I took a taxi from the Birla Mandir in Delhi and made for Palam airport, my mind running ahead to a host of imagined faces and to the outlines of the Jumbo Jet and of London as I had pictured them. The Jumbo Jet from Bombay touched down at Palam around ten; it seemed as though the whole of Palam had surged forward to look at it, for the Jumbo Jet was a new kind of bird for Palam too. For our pocket expenses on this journey, guests like me were given a grand total of three pounds in foreign exchange, against fifty-six or fifty-seven Indian rupees. Three one-pound notes — and that was all!
On these journeys abroad one need carry no bedding. I had my briefcase and a small leather attaché case, holding a sweater, three pairs of pyjamas and shirts, and an achkan.
Some three hundred and fifty passengers boarded the Jumbo Jet Samrat Ashok; the crew, too, must have numbered forty or fifty. Within, the three passengers who shared my company in the middle row of four seats were the celebrated Kashmiri painter Ghulam Rasool Santosh; the young Gujarati painter Ishwar Sagar, who had been honoured at the 1971 International Art Exhibition held in Delhi; and "Krishi Pandit" Shri P. L. Batra of Rohtak in Haryana.
Inside the Jumbo Jet, the walls on either side were beautifully adorned with paintings — glimpses of the life of Lord Krishna rendered in the Dogra-Pahari (Kangra-Basohli) style. In our own compartment of the aircraft, directly ahead, hung a Pahari-style painting some six feet by four: a Pahari king seated in his court, drawing on a hookah, listening to the songs of beautiful hill women.
All the strangeness of the Jumbo Jet slowly fell away, and in its place a new imagined intoxication went on tinting me in its own hue. I felt I was watching a performance in the colourful court-gathering of the Sheesh Mahal of King Sansar Chand Katoch, that great patron of Pahari painting. By putting on headphones, passengers could choose music from any of seven audio channels; and in the in-flight brochure, a photograph of the famous Jammu santoor player Shri Shivkumar Sharma deepened the delicate atmosphere of this Dogra-Pahari art within our flying Sheesh Mahal. In just this way my journey aboard the Jumbo Jet passed in a singular air of familiarity. Owing to my experience of translating Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, I kept to a strict vegetarian diet throughout the trip. The hospitality Air India lavished upon its guests over those nearly four thousand kilometres was perfectly of a piece with that imagined Sheesh Mahal. Bound by my dietary limits, I remained a spectator of it. The young and lovely air hostesses and the deft stewards went about the exacting work of meeting the passengers' every request for food and drink, all of it with smiles and the sweet words of courtesy. These attendants make a most important contribution to air travel. Beauty, courtesy, efficiency — how necessary all three are in an air hostess.
Air India's guests were offered, as free gifts, famous European wines. Many a passenger took this for a golden chance to test his own capacity, and two or four of the eager ended up kissing the floor in the contest — to the considerable annoyance and embarrassment of the rest.
Flying at five or six hundred miles an hour, at an altitude of thirty-five to forty thousand feet, the Samrat Ashok landed at Kuwait airport, the journey half done. Here the entire flight crew of the Jumbo Jet was changed, and a fresh crew took its place.
Kuwait! A city of gold in the deserts of the Middle East! A land of oil! — where even a single blade of green grass is a rare blessing. After Kuwait the plane came down at Rome airport in Italy. By London time it was then nine at night, and it was raining hard. I remembered Prof. Lakshminarayan's warning that the clouds of London are not to be trusted, and that the moment it rains the cold comes on. I had on only my ordinary clothes — pyjama, shirt, waistcoat — yet I felt no particular chill. Seeing London airport, Delhi's Palam seemed to me very plain indeed.
It took about half an hour to reach the Air India passenger coaches outside the London airport. The checking of passports and health certificates was done in minutes.
The hotel Air India had arranged for our stay stood about two furlongs from London's Heathrow airport. This hotel, the Sky Way, is among London's 'A'-class hotels. Each passenger had a separate room; mine was number 3001 — the last room in the north wing of the second floor — fitted with every convenience: television, radio, telephone. The television ran until half past twelve at night; hot and cold water flowed from the taps around the clock. The guests' dinner on the night of the 24th was held in this same hotel. I joined it only to observe at first hand the unseen pictures of hotel life, and to catch a glimpse of the etiquette of that way of living. The 'luxury' of 'Western life' has its own order, its own display, its own upkeep — and as for the cleanliness, what is there to say!
Back in room 3001 after dinner, as I settled into the easy chair, several decades of my country's history — 1757, 1857, 1919, 1942, 1947 — went flapping through my mind like mysterious birds across the silence of that night. I was standing on the soil of those foreign imperialists who for nearly two hundred years had wrung my vast country dry. A line of 'Madhukar's' came to me:
'And slowly the country slid down between its jaws.'
The red curtains, the red carpet, the red bedspread of my room began to seem like fragments of that unhappy history. In the comforts and luxuries of the room I started to see the traces of that same imperial plunder, those countless robberies. How much hatred these colonisers had bred in the name of race and colour and creed, against the coloured peoples of the colonies they had bled white for centuries.
And yet — the young Englishmen and Englishwomen I saw at work behind the hotel counter the next day, the older Englishwomen serving food and drink in the refreshment room, the young English porters carrying the guests' luggage up to their rooms from the waiting lounge — not one of them bore the least trace of that hatred in face or manner. There was no sign there of imperial, overbearing arrogance. They were all working people, who perhaps did not even fully know the imperial, exploitative designs of their own country. Living in the hotel four days, that first reaction in my mind subsided a good deal. Twenty-four years had passed since the British quit India, and in that time my country had striven hard to mend and better its sickly condition. It was the fruit of that very striving that I — made part of this royal journey of the Jumbo Jet — was now lodged in an international hotel in London, the capital of those same Britishers. Today I carried no inferiority of any kind in my heart.
On Tuesday, 25 May, we had a programme to tour the capital. After breakfast at the hotel we came out at nine sharp and took our seats in deluxe passenger coaches. Up front, beside the driver, sat our lady guide, microphone in hand. The coach was like a moving room of glass, giving a view on every side. A fine drizzle was falling slowly just then, and the guide said, "It is in weather like this that London shows itself in its true mood." The part of London where our hotel stood is called Middlesex, some fifteen or sixteen miles from the West End.
In this first glimpse of the great world-city, what struck me most was the sheer dynamism of life upon that soil. The stream of colourful motor cars on the roads had no end, and the speed was fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour. Some eager Sanskrit scholar once derived the word motor as "mrudi tarati iti" — that which swims upon the earth — and it suits the motor cars of London to perfection. Such an endless race of countless motors and buses, and nowhere the blare of a horn. Not a trace of the traffic policeman doing his drill at the crossings: all the traffic was bound to automatic lights, red and amber and green. The only traffic instruction I read, posted in many places, was 'Give Way' — and how effective that single instruction was. The driving there is fast, certainly, but bound in discipline. And what a moving ideal of life that is: speed and discipline together!
In this outer settlement of London, the houses we saw along the road all seemed to be in good taste. Two-storeyed, for the most part; their roofs sloping, and often of a dark red. A television aerial on every one. Each house joined with its neighbours into a settled pattern, and yet each was a complete unit in itself, with its own shape, its own beauty. The houses were not mere buildings but a long, colourful picture-gallery.
Along the route our coach took, the crosses of churches could always be made out, far off, above the neighbourhoods. In one of them I saw a cemetery — a very beautiful, clean place laid out with flower-beds. To keep the memory of the dead is a weakness shared by all of human life. The road we travelled was named Talgarth Road, and it kept that name a long way; there was none of the Delhi-like confusion of a fresh name at every turn. Among the old-style houses, here and there the signs of the new age — multi-storeyed skyscrapers — seemed to look down like giants, with disapproving eyes, upon those innocent, gentle settlements. Could there be poverty anywhere in this city of Indra? I cannot say from where that thought flew into my mind in the moving bus. In any case, the part of London we were passing seemed a settlement of affluence. The people walking the pavements along the roads were very few — almost exceptions. We had set out at nine; and along the way, through the glass of many a tall building, we saw people bent diligently to their work in the commercial offices. Work begins here at nine o'clock exactly, the guide told us — and I felt that here work truly does begin. I thought of my own country. A great mop of hair on the head; long sideburns and thick shadows of hair over the ears, sometimes a moustache to match — this was the common fashion among the young men of London. Reading the sign of the Lincoln Hotel, the two-century-old, ever-shifting history of relations between Britain and America turned over in my mind. The Americans had fought the British a bitter war to win their freedom. Times changed, and relations changed. In Britain's bid to join the European Common Market, it met for ten years the continual obstruction of France, Germany, and the other member countries, who reckoned Britain a dependent of America — its stooge, its sycophant. On the night of 26 May, on the television in my room at the Sky Way hotel, I watched a most interesting interview between a TV reporter and the British Prime Minister, Mr. Heath, on his meeting in this very matter with the French President, Pompidou. Mr. Edward Heath was very pleased that Mr. Pompidou had assured him of Britain's inclusion in the Common Market — for which Britain had had to bow low to France and Germany, and to France above all. At any rate, we had now reached the West End. We opened our tour of London's monuments with the historic buildings of the British Parliament on the banks of the Thames. Here, atop the 323-foot Victoria Tower, the national flag of that land was flying. How proud a country is of its national flag! We Indians have yet to come by such respect and pride for our own. The building was closed to visitors, Parliament being in session, and we saw its beauty only from the outside. Delhi's Parliament House is far more massive and imposing than this; but this building has an eventful, ancient history, while the history of our own Parliament House has only just begun to be made.
Near the Parliament building stands the place of anointing for the coronation of England's kings and queens — Westminster Abbey. With the guide's help we had a good look through the interior of this great historic abbey. The church was built by King Edward the Confessor in 1050, and later kings strove continually to add to its beauty and its importance. The oak chair on which the final rite of a new monarch's coronation is performed was made in 1300 for Edward I; set within its four legs lies the historic stone of the Scottish kings, which the English hold most lucky — the Stone of Scone. The people of Scotland dream of carrying that stone home again. After this church, passing among the beautiful, plain but sturdy buildings, the banking houses and trading centres of central London, we came by Victoria Street to the front of Buckingham Palace, the residence of the present Queen of Britain, Elizabeth II. Hard by, on the other side, are Whitehall and the official residence of the Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street. Near Buckingham Palace, to the east, we saw that corner of London's famous Hyde Park where political gatherings are held and colourful speeches made.
London's population, the guide told us, is a crore; yet in a city of such dense numbers we saw, in many places, beautiful green parks. Piccadilly is the 'Connaught Place' of London — and however many times we saw it, coming and going, its colour and its 'mood' felt different every time.
Trafalgar Square is a most beautiful place in London — its fountains, its countless pigeons, and at the centre, on a platform guarded by four huge metal lions, the 184-foot round column on whose summit stands the stone figure of Admiral Nelson.
To the north of the square is London's National Gallery, and beside it the National Portrait Gallery. This stretch from Piccadilly Circus to Trafalgar Square, which feels like the very heart of London, is also called Theatreland. On the western side of the square is the Royal Academy, and to the north-east, Bush House, home of the BBC studios. The next building, adjoining Bush House, is that of the Indian High Commission, where at that time Shri Appa Pant was High Commissioner. The High Commissioner received the guests of the Jumbo Jet twice in a single day. At one meeting he spoke at length of the economic and political relations between India and Britain, and his tone was decidedly hopeful. After tea on the 25th, a cultural evening was arranged for the Jumbo Jet's guests at the High Commission, with a programme of Kathak dance and Western music. That programme, for some reason, felt to me rather shallow and lifeless — more bodily motion among the dancers than depth or delicacy of art. A South Indian artist, Usha Iyer, gave four or five pieces of Western music. The Kashmiri painter Santosh was seated beside me; when I asked him about her, he said, "She is a very famous artist of English music." Dark-complexioned Usha Iyer sang with great assurance.
On that same 25 May we saw two more of London's famous places. One was the 1,350-year-old, exceedingly famous St. Paul's Cathedral — in the guide's words, one of the most famous landmarks in the Capital. A church of the Saxons, and later of the Normans, had stood on this very spot, but was burnt down in a fire in the seventh century; the present cathedral was ready in 1710. The celebrated architect Sir Christopher Wren drew its plan and raised the building under his own supervision. It is the largest church of the Protestant Christians in London; the top of its dome stands 365 feet above the ground. In one part of it lie the tombs of the famous English commanders Nelson and Wellington. The Thames flows past the building. The architecture and ornament of this church are most impressive. Right by its main door the managers had hung an appeal for thirty lakh pounds toward the church's 'renovation'. Would that the temples and gurdwaras of every faith in the world were as clean, as beautiful, as finely kept, and as much homes of the arts, as this church!
After this we saw another of London's historic places, the Tower of London. For nearly a thousand years history has been made in the Tower of London, the guide said. Guard, in ancient times, of London's eastern side, this thousand-year-old fort on the western bank of the Thames is a most thrilling place — the Red Fort of London! Many famous and infamous people were executed in it. Germany's Rudolf Hess was held prisoner in this fort from 1942 to 1969. In one electrically lit basement of the old fortress, the crown jewels of England's kings are kept in special glass cases; and among them I saw too the famous Kohinoor of India — set in the crown of the Queen Mother. I bought an illustrated book on the Tower of London, whose opening words were: The Tower of London has been called 'The Cradle of the English race', for it was here that England had her first beginning as a Nation. It is the oldest palace, fortress and prison in Europe.
Thus the day of 25 May went in seeing the historic places of London. London is truly a royal city. What cleanliness, what order, what buildings, what affluence, what life! And yet, in fact, on this trip we could see only this outward beauty of London — we got no occasion, no chance, to look into the inner reality of its life. On the 26th we once more went over this part of London on foot. I saw only two old men begging — seated, with a written appeal-slip for help laid beside them. Couple upon couple of young men and women walked arm in arm, coming and going, or stood and sat here and there, as though heedless of the rest of the world; and the rest of the world was as indifferent to them. The police officers called 'Bobbies' are a most important part of London's beautiful order. Coming out of the Indian High Commission and passing through Piccadilly Circus, when I got separated from both my companions, it was a Bobby who helped me in that unknown ocean. In these days there is a heavy press of foreign tourists in this part of London, and to give them every kind of information, and to help them, is the duty of these young sentinels. Their deep blue uniform and their particular blue hat are their whole identity.
At the shops — everywhere in the showcases outside, samples of the goods are set out with the prices written. There is no trouble of bargaining here, no haggling.
On the evening of 25 May, the Regional Director of Air India hosted a cocktail and dinner at the Sky Way hotel. Our dinner on the 26th was at a very famous London hotel, the "Talk of the Town" — in the West End's Piccadilly Circus, where Air India's booking office is. Here we saw a glimpse of the life of London's affluent class. The dance and cabaret — some thirty or forty white women and three or four men, moving as if by electricity, the stage scenes shifting, that dance with its almost acrobatic postures performed in coloured lights upon the platform — sat very heavily upon my eastern sensibilities. A wholly cheap, artless show!
Alone in my hotel room at night, I began to run again across the screen of my mind the pictures, still and moving, of London's life that these two days had shown me.
In the churches the hue of religious pride was not felt so deeply as that of history and of opulence. These cathedrals, abbeys, and churches are most beautiful examples of English architecture. London is famous the world over for its art galleries. The English have kept up the pride of their history. Shut upon this small island, how many daring deeds this race has done — for good and for ill alike — and with what care they have preserved their centuries-old traditions!
At a quarter past nine on the morning of Thursday, 27 May, the coaches set out for the town of Oxford and for Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon. Oxford lies some forty or forty-five miles north-west of London, and Shakespeare's birthplace some thirty miles beyond Oxford. Today's journey was important for these two places; and it was a memorable journey for me besides, for this was the day we got the chance to escape the bustle of London and see the rural life and countryside of England. We had set out in the morning amid a light drizzle. A soft film of mist would settle on the windows, and we had often to wipe it with our palms and handkerchiefs to clear a little space and see the view outside. Fifteen minutes out from the Sky Way hotel, the spires and turrets of Windsor Castle were seen playing hide-and-seek among the clouds on a high hill to the north. In truth we did not spot them ourselves; the guide travelling with us pointed them out. The whole country about our route was the valley of the Thames. Fields on either hand — large fields, in which the dense crop of wheat had commonly grown to about a foot or a foot and a quarter. Haryana's agricultural expert Shri Batra sat beside me; this, he said, must be fodder for the cattle, for otherwise wheat ripens here only in June, March and April being very cold months. Wheat, and wheat everywhere, with square yellow fields of mustard between, and a potato field here and there.
After about ten minutes our bus passed a place thick with clusters of trees on both sides. A voice came from the microphone of the guide in the front seats: "Here in olden days, highwaymen would hide and rob the people at pistol point." But today an endless race of colourful cars could be seen running ceaselessly along this country road.
A little beyond this place I was put in mind of the bends on the Patni slope above Kud, in Jammu. There were no deodars there, and no ranges of hills as at Kud; and yet something about it brought Kud suddenly to mind.
We reached Oxford at half past ten in the morning. We each drank a cup of coffee at a hotel called the Randolph, and then, halting here, went to see the buildings of Oxford University and its oldest college, Christ Church. Going inside, I found the place wholly unlike the colleges I had seen. Students came and went, young men and women both, but none showed the least curiosity about us — we, who were all Indian tourists. The college building is some four hundred years old. The guide led us toward the dining hall, where cups and plates were being laid for the lunch of about a hundred and fifty students. On the walls of the hall hung some sixty large oil portraits — of scholars and teachers bound to that college. At twelve o'clock we passed near a church within the college. Its doors were shut just then; prayers were going on within. I was eager to know how many of the college's young men and women had joined that service in the church!
At Oxford we also saw the university's famous Sheldonian Theatre. The convocation, at which degrees are conferred, is held in this small but historic hall. How important it was, this old-style hall, with seats for only four or five hundred. The manager explained everything about it to us in great detail. To enter, every visitor had to buy a slip of admission for three pence. Our lunch was arranged at a hotel in Oxford, after which we wandered some two hours and saw many a place of the city, old and new. We saw an inn three or four hundred years old, where even today the air recalls that ancient tradition. We went into an open market of ready-made garments, where clothing of every kind was to be had for women, men, children, and the old — separate sections, separate counters, a saleswoman in each section, and the prices written plainly and fixed. There I bought four pairs of socks — for one pound.
Around three we set out to see the birthplace of England's immortal poet-playwright, Shakespeare. Villages kept coming at short intervals along the way — plain villages, whose names even our guide did not know, but every house in them solidly built, of the same two-storeyed kind we had been seeing in the towns and cities all along. I did not see one house without a television aerial on its roof. Television, in that country, is no mark of affluence but a necessary part of life — a potent means of entertainment, of education, of communication!
On the way to Stratford the guide also showed us, from afar, that village named Bladon on the banks of the Thames where, by his own wish, the British Prime Minister Churchill lies buried. The middling bushes along the road were laden with white blossom. "These are 'May Flowers'," said the guide — nature's pleasing adornment in this spring season. At four in the evening we reached that land of pride. A calm river named the Avon flows past the upper end of the town. Standing before Shakespeare's house, it did not feel a foreign place at all, for Shakespeare was to us no foreign or unfamiliar writer. This ancient house of his stands right at the edge of the road, only a pavement between. All the houses around are new; this alone, four hundred years old, stands in the midst. Even that day, at that hour, there were some two or three hundred tourists there. Indian tourists were only some fifty or sixty. Of all the Jumbo Jet's Indian guests, only this many had come to see these places; the rest were to be found, for the most part, at night in the cocktail and dinner-dance programmes of the 'A'-class hotels.
In this birth-town of Shakespeare we saw two or three more preserved old houses, bound to some of his near relations. A trust looks after all these historic monuments. Inside Shakespeare's house the stamp of that poverty was plain, in whose lap that seeker of the world had passed his childhood and his boyhood. In Stratford there is a theatre worthy of the playwright's glory — the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This theatre-hall is on the first floor of a building right on the banks of the Avon, with a restaurant on the ground floor, where we took our evening tea. I had a wish to see the hall, but learned that a performance of Shakespeare's Henry V was then going on within. Coming out, I read this theatre's programme on a board:
- Merchant of Venice (From March 30, 1971)
- Twelfth Night (From April 8)
- Henry V (From April 28)
- The Duchess of Malfi (From July 15)
- Timon of Athens (August)
- Othello (September)
(112th Shakespeare Season, March to December 1971)
What an immortal playwright Shakespeare was! We Indian students call Kalidasa the Shakespeare of India — but how many Kalidasa theatres has our country? The number and the range of Shakespeare's plays! Ah, what is there to compare? The world cannot read its fill of those plays. We too are thinking of rendering them into Dogri. Even Shakuntala had not come into Dogri up to that time; though an adaptation of Macbeth has indeed been published, by a Sanskrit professor — Prof. Satyapal.
We returned from Stratford at six in the evening.
There was a programme to tour England on 28 May as well. On this day we saw the famous places named Hampton Court, Maidenhead, and Windsor Castle. Hampton Court is the palaces of the Tudor kings, kept up even today with great care. What the grandeur of royal opulence is, it is as though some chapters of ancient history shone there in letters of gold! And Windsor Castle, set on a hill above the Thames, is a vast and most imposing fortification — the royal residence of the King and Queen of London. Save for that round tower where the Queen lives, tourists may see every other part of the 'castle'.
The 'Royal Apartments' are that part of the castle which was once the royal residence of these kings. The palace is a matchless confluence of the English arts — sculpture, painting, the cosmetic art, carving, furniture, furnishings! Every room has been kept in its original ornament, as though, the very next moment, those people were about to walk in. This is the king's drawing room; this the king's state bedchamber; this his dressing room; this his sitting room. So too, separately adorned, the chambers of the queens. Every room decked with specimens of painting. Durbar hall, banquet hall, dance hall, reception hall — the guide went on explaining. Reaching a great hall, he said: this is the Waterloo Chamber. George IV had ordered it specially decorated, to hold a banquet in celebration of the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; a banquet for a hundred and fifty guests can be laid in it. Pointing to the pink carpet spread upon the floor of that pink hall, the guide said:
"This magnificent carpet — which has no equal in all of Europe — was made for Queen Victoria in the jail of a city named Agra, in India." I cannot say whether the other Indian guests with me felt glad or sorry to hear it; but after that, no wish was left in my mind to see anything else in Windsor Castle.
This reminder of our slavery and our helplessness had made those old wounds green again.
In this four-day programme, the places shown us for three of the days were all bound up with royal opulence and the history of kings and emperors. Only 27 May was the exception — the day of Oxford and of Shakespeare! On the night of the 28th the guests had again an invitation to a cocktail, dinner-dance, and show, at a French hotel — La Dolce Notte — in London's West End. The air of this French hotel was decidedly other than that of the English ones: a delicate atmosphere, soft lights, soft music.
And the next day, 29 May, seated in an Indian Boeing 737, we set off for India, by way of Geneva, Paris, and Iran. By eight or nine on the morning of 30 May we were back at Palam in Delhi.