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all over India was to realize that, separate from the talk of India’s ancient culture (which invariably has me reaching for my
lathi)
, the Indian aesthetic sense has revived and is now capable of creating, out of materials which are international, something which is essentially Indian. (India’s ancient culture, defiantly paraded, has made the Ashoka Hotel one of New Delhi’s most ridiculous buildings, outmatched in absurdity only by the Pakistan High Commission, which defiantly asserts the Faith.)
    I have been to unpublicized villages, semi-developed and undeveloped. And where before I would have sensed only despair, now I feel that the despair lies more with the observer than the people. I have learned to see beyond the dirt and the recumbent figures on string beds, and to look for the signs of improvement and hope, however faint: the brick-topped road, covered though it might be with filth; the rice planted in rows and not scattered broadcast; the degree of ease with which the villager faces the official or the visitor. For such small things I have learned to look: over the months my eye has been adjusted.
    Yet always the obvious is overwhelming. One is a traveller and as soon as the dread of a particular district has been lessened by familiarity, it is time to move on again, through vast tracts which will never become familiar, which will sadden; and the urge to escape will return.
    Yet in so many ways the size of the country is only a physical fact. For, perhaps because of the very size, Indians appear to feel the need to categorize minutely, delimit, to reduce to manageable proportions.
    “Where do you come from?” It is the Indian question, and to people who think in terms of the village, the district, the province, the community, the caste, my answer that I am a Trinidadian is only puzzling.
    “But you look Indian.”
    “Well, I am Indian. But we have been living for several generations in Trinidad.”
    “But you look Indian.”
    Three or four times a day the dialogue occurs, and now I often abandon explanation. “I am a Mexican, really.”
    “Ah.” Great satisfaction. Pause. “What do you do?”
    “I write.”
    “Journalism or books?”
    “Books.”
    “Westerns, crime, romance? How many books do you write a year? How much do you make?”
    So now I invent: “I am a teacher.”
    “What are your qualifications?”
    “I am a B.A.”
    “Only a B.A.? What do you teach?”
    “Chemistry. And a little history.”
    “How interesting!” said the man on the Pathankot-Srinagar bus. “I am a teacher of chemistry too.”
    He was sitting across the aisle from me, and several hours remained of our journey.
    In this vast land of India it is necessary to explain yourself, to define your function and status in the universe. It is very difficult.
    If I thought in terms of race or community, this experience of India would surely have dispelled it. An Indian, I have never before been in streets where everyone is Indian, where I blend unremarkably into the crowd. This has been curiously deflating, for all my life I have expected some recognition of my difference; and it is only in India that I have recognized how necessary this stimulus is to me, how conditioned I have been by the multi-racial society of Trinidad and then by my life as an outsider in England. To be a member of a minority community has always seemed to me attractive. To be one of four hundred and thirty-nine million Indians is terrifying.
    A colonial, in the double sense of one who had grown up in a Crown colony and one who had been cut off from the metropolis, be it either England or India, I came to India expecting to find metropolitan attitudes. I had imagined that in some ways the largeness of the land would be reflected in the attitudes of the people. I have found, as I have said, thepsychology of the cell and the hive. And I have been surprised by similarities. In India, as in tiny Trinidad, I have found the feeling that the metropolis is