Fellow Feeling
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: None.
Description: Human problems seem to be much the same wherever you journey. The story is about India and about American Indians, who have a lot in common with us Scots.
_____________________________________________________________________
My first trip outside the British Isles was to NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View a small town about forty miles south of San Francisco. We had spent the previous night in New York where I lost my driving licence so my first stop was the vehicle licensing office in Palo Alto. About an hour later I left with a temporary licence having passed a written test, had my eyes tested, a photograph taken and driven an examiner out on the roads to prove my competence.
The road test was the first time I benefitted from being Scottish. The examiner had been based in East Anglia flying bombers over Germany in the Second World War. He spent the entire test reminiscing, letting me do pretty much as I wanted. When we got back he handed me my pass certificate with a grin.
“I should really have busted you for doing forty in a twenty limit residential zone but the best driver we had for getting us into Norwich for R&R was a Scottish lass. She drove like a madman too!”
Years later I got lost trying to find Hartford from Kennedy Airport. We called in to a coffee shop to get directions. The waiter could only speak three words of English: latte, espresso and cappuccino. Up popped a Yoker man from the next booth to put us on the right road.
Armed with my Californian driver licence I went to the weather briefing at San Francisco Airport and got back to Ames in time for lunch. My boss was a three meals a day plus supper sort of man so I gave him the weather briefing over the hash browns. When I reached the serving hatch the old lady behind the counter got tears in her eyes when she heard my accent.
She had been a GI bride and had not been back to Scotland since her mother died about twenty years before. I spent the next evening with her and her youngest son chewing the fat about Scotland and the Scots. I also got special service in the canteen for the whole seven weeks I was there.
Most places in the world you run into a fellow Scot but there are benighted spots where a Scot is about as rare as a Martian. Oklahoma in the United States and Bangalore in India are two such places. Even there you find that, as Burns noted, all men are brothers.
Honest Injun
I had worked all day Sunday on my own in the depths of the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) so I awarded myself Monday off. Nothing but fair-weather cumulus was forecast for the next few days so our mission to study severe thunderstorms was on hold – sort of no rain stops play. It gets fiercely hot in Oklahoma by the middle of May so I got up early and motored down the dirt road that is the iconic Route 66. It swings south from Chicago and forms the main street of Norman, Oklahoma on its way to Los Angeles.
I was going to Anadarko. It was called ‘Indian City’ in those days but I can only plead historical accuracy for failing to recognise it as ‘The Native American Cultural Centre and Museum.’
Monday is the day when two thirds of the population go back to work and the other third who have kept them amused over the weekend have a well-earned rest. Anadarko was quiet: one large American lady with her whinging five year old in tow and me. She coped with his constant whining by whining louder and longer. It was less than entertaining to start with and quickly palled.
The kid had fingered every exhibit in the foyer when we were joined by an old man who appeared from a back room behind the reception desk. He was not tall but he stood very straight. Although he was dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots and a faded plaid shirt, there was no mistaking that he was a Native American.
“Hi y’all,” he greeted us.
When he came forward into the light I could see that his skin was the colour and texture of an Arbroath Smoky and a grey pony-tail hung down behind his straw Stetson.
“You folks will have to excuse me. My granddaughter is the proper guide but she’s sick to her stomach today.”
“We expected to see a real Indian,” Mum said, sounding aggrieved.
“I’m a full-blooded Kiowa, Ma’am, but the proper Indians are only here on the weekends.” He waved his hand to photographs around the walls showing energetic young people with feather headdresses and beaded costumes cavorting about a totem pole.
After she had shrilled the news to her son he formed a gun from his fist and started yelling ‘bang, bang’. I caught a glint in the eye of the old man. Thinking it might be a prelude to summary scalping I was in two minds whether to stop him or help him by holding the brat.
We paid our fee and went out into the village made up of replicas of Native dwellings on the slope below the museum building. The most obvious homes were three tepees standing about twelve metres high with material covering poles meeting at the top just like you see in Westerns. It looked as if two were covered in painted canvas but the third was made of skins, real or fake I could not tell. They formed three sides of a square with the totem pole in the middle; the fourth side had a grandstand.
Mother and child headed for these at a trot but the old man held me back when I would have followed them.
“Yesterday we did not live in these.” He waved an arthritic hand at the tepees and it was clear that his ‘yesterday’ covered hundreds if not thousands of years.
“Look at them! Until the Spanish came we had no horses. We could not have moved these things from place to place before the horses came.”
He led me past the innovative dwellings and took me to an enclosure where there were a number of little domed structures perhaps three metres in diameter but no more than a metre tall. He opened one to show that it was constructed of thin laths of a bendy wood like willow. They were pushed into the ground in a circle with the other ends tied together. A skin was thrown over the top.
Outside he showed me a sort of triangular sledge made of two branches tied at the top and separated in the middle by webbing. The poles extended about a metre beyond the webbed part. My guide lifted a short cross-piece to show me how it could be used as a yoke so that the whole sledge could be dragged along.
“Yesterday this is how we lived.”
Children, the elderly and the sick were loaded with the skins and rods onto the sledges and towed by the men to the next location where they would build the whole village in less than an hour. Every year his people had started at the Gulf of Mexico at the end of winter following the herds of buffalo to the Canadian border then turning, tramping back in the autumn to winter once more on the Gulf.
“We used every part of the buffalo. The meat fed us, the bones were used for weapons and tools, the skin clothed us and even the fat was traded for grain and cloth.”
The pronounced Okie accent in which he had greeted us had gone and he was now talking in a distinctly educated voice. He admitted to being an emeritus professor in Oklahoma University in Norman where his absent grand-daughter was a post-graduate student. He was fascinated when I told him that the people in the Highlands used ‘yesterday’ to describe long ages past just as he did.
I told him that I had spent the previous day in the bowels of NSSL correcting the proof of a scientific paper, checking the five hundred millibar chart and glancing at the radar screens from time to time.
“When I was a young man I was a volunteer fireman. We were called out to deal with the aftermath of tornadoes. You do fine work at NSSL – you cannot stop the twisters but the early warnings you give save many lives.”
He gave up his post after he was given the task of collecting body parts from the wreckage caused by an extreme storm.
On Sundays all the other laboratory workers wanted the time off to attend church so I took the duty watch. Of course, if the forecast was bad everyone would be at his or her post. He chuckled when I told him that Norman was the only town I knew where there were more churches than bars.
“God used to be an Englishman,” he laughed, “but about the middle of the twentieth century he became American. I suppose they use you on Sundays because you are from a godless nation!”
We had walked a little further to a russet adobe building without doors or windows. There was a ladder at the side that led to the roof where another ladder in a hole let us enter the house.
“This is where the buffalo fat finished up along with the meat, hides and bone that we did not need for ourselves. The Indians who lived here grew corn and cotton so they had to stay in one place. Pueblo, or village, Indians, they were called. They traded soap, candles, paper, grain and woven garments with us.”
“You are describing a very sophisticated society,” I ventured.
I saw the twinkle in his eye again but this time I recognised it as amusement.
“It was not only sophisticated, it was sustainable. We are no better than other men but, with the weapons available, we could not reduce the size of the buffalo herds. More were lost to starvation and drought than were killed by my people, the Plains Indians.”
We sat down on a rawhide charpoy in the Pueblo house and he offered me a White Owl cigar.
“You can’t feel much affection for the Europeans who flooded west carrying rifles.”
“Oh, the rifle was just the final nail in our coffin. The horse started the descent into oblivion. Suddenly we became faster than the buffalo so we started herding them to tire them out and make them easier to kill. Sometimes whole herds would be forced over a cliff with the result that most of the meat spoiled. Then the rifles came and slaughtered thousands so that the tongues could be sent back east as a delicacy.”
Then I told him of my people scratching a living on isolated fertile fields at the heads of fjords from the beginning of time and how we had been forced out to make way for sheep and deer. I told him how our isolation made it possible for the owners of the land to treat us so inhumanely. I wondered if his people could have done more to resist.
“We lived together, not always peaceably, but we settled our differences by tradition. It never crossed our minds that there was a reason to join together in a larger community. I am a Kiowa and I respect other tribes but I have no urge to cooperate with them. We did not need to change our ways nor did we need them to change theirs: there was room on the prairie for all of us and buffalo enough for everyone.”
We strolled back to the building housing the little museum in companionable silence.
“Change is part of existence – it is an inevitable consequence of living. The real problem is that it seldom happens gradually but all at once and often catastrophically.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking about the Highland Clearances. They destroyed a civilisation that was only just viable. Many of the people brutally thrown out of their homes made a success of the move to new locations. The alternative to the change to sheep was probably slow starvation.
Perhaps if the crofters had not been moved they would simply have died out fifty or a hundred years later. It did not seem strange that the insight should come thousands of miles from home from a Native American: his people, like mine, had endured much. At least we were able to get away while we were fit to establish ourselves in strange new places. The Native Americans had nowhere to go; they had to stay on where they were once masters and make the best of their changed circumstances.
“It took us a long time to adjust to the change and it took the American government a long time to recognise that we had been badly treated.”
I refused a second cigar and he chuckled as he got one drawing to his satisfaction.
“We got our rights none too soon and just when we needed them. When Oklahoma Territory was opened to settlers the Native people were given the poorest land. Thirty years later they discovered that the reason the soil was so poor was because it was no more than a shallow crust over a lake of oil. By that time it was not politic to move the Indians so, even now, most of the millionaires in Oklahoma are Native Americans.”
Freedom Fighter
Winston Churchill was born in Bangalore, a city high on the Deccan in southern India. It has a very pleasant climate and is now home to much of India’s high technology. I was there to tell them what we wanted to learn from the tests they were going to fly with an aircraft we were lending them. Our pilot and ground-crew were especially busy because we had to change an engine that had failed on the flight out.
I looked around the Indian Aviation Research Institute and talked to their scientists but I was not as busy as I would have liked. The Director had given up a full professorship in the United States to work for half the wages in his home country. In Bangalore this was a princely salary that allowed him to hire servants to look after the house and gardens.
To get me out of their hair while the aircraft was fixed, they provided a car with driver to take me to Mysore. At that time there was a rajah living in a rather seedy-looking palace in the middle of town. It had flags flying to show he was in residence and fiercely moustachioed lancers riding the thinnest ponies I have ever seen guarding the gates.
They made no demur when I strolled past them into the palace forecourt. I was stopped after I had wandered for a few minutes by an elderly gentleman wearing a magnificent turban. He only halted my progress to enquire, in Oxbridge English, if I required any assistance. He took me through many of the rooms in the palace assuring me that the rajah, who had a migraine, would be devastated to have missed me.
My new friend then cancelled his next few appointments and took me across the valley to the magnificent palace of the begum, the rajah’s mother. She now lived in Paris and the Cote d’Azur but the white marble palace was kept in pristine condition for her occasional trips home. I recently noticed in a holiday brochure that it is now a luxury hotel and I wondered if the paying guests have to leave their shoes at the door as I did.
My old gentleman was related to the rajah and was his chancellor of the exchequer. According to him, things were pretty tough with income well below expenditure. His main task seemed to be realising assets stored in the vaults from the times when there was money to spare. A few rubies auctioned by Sotheby’s helped to keep the wolf from the door.
He instructed my driver to take me to Seringapatam on the way back to Bangalore. We went first to Daria Daulat, the summer palace of Tipu Sultan on a prominence overlooking the town. It was not a big building and was nothing much more than a cube with a covered balcony all the way round. Under the shelter of this roof the most magnificent frescoes had been preserved. There was some damage from vines and mould but the colours were still vibrant.
They showed Tipu and his court in wonderfully rich clothing meeting the French General Lally with his troops in their blue uniforms. They all seemed to be pretty happy with the negotiations in contrast to the next wall where a rather ragged bunch of red-uniformed British troops was looking apprehensively at Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, leading them astride a sorry nag.
Round another corner, the next wall depicting the battle raging around the town. Seringapatam is almost entirely surrounded by water and must have been a formidable obstacle. Wellesley triumphed by taking the objective before Lally arrived. Tipu was killed and his sons made peace with the East India Company under Robert Clive.
This battle proved to be decisive. French influence was limited to the coast around Pondicherry and the British went on to control almost all of the sub-continent. By the end of the day I found myself wishing that they had spent more on roads.
Driving outside the towns in India is a unique experience. The roads are un-surfaced and there is no clear boundary between the road and the surrounding fields. Well-spaced trees give an impression of a limit and provide some refuge for pedestrians but the traffic weaves in and out amongst the foliage at will. People on foot, animals, either herded or pulling carts, motor cars, vans and lorries drive where they will. Motorbikes flash in and out in the same annoying way that flies do, making a similar buzzing sound.
A typical situation would begin with a cow lying in the middle of the road forcing passers-by to walk around it. A flock of sheep or a donkey cart will veer into the trees to get past and my car will dice with a ten-wheel truck for space on the nearest field. Apart from the cow, no one stops. There are no traffic jams, just traffic spreads. Once the obstacle is behind us the vehicles edge back onto the centre of the road where they play chicken with traffic coming the other way. The lorry is still alongside us although we have had to slow to fifteen miles an hour to avoid pulling away.
A couple of days after my visit to Seringapatam, I was taken to lunch by a Wing Commander in the Indian Air Force. Our pilot was meant to join us but he had diarrhoea verging on dysentery so we left him with the Sikh flight lieutenant who was to fly our aircraft. He was going to feed our man curds – live yoghurt – and teach him yoga. At least it would take his mind off his troubles between dashes to the loo.
I asked the Wing Commander how he felt about his country being ruled by foreigners for centuries.
“The Mogul Empire was dead and India was falling apart. Greedy local potentates fought each other and might was the only right. We needed the structure provided by a European power to keep us from total collapse into anarchy. We are grateful that it was the English who won rather than the French, Dutch or Portuguese.”
I pointed out that I was a Scot and that we had not colonised anyone.
“You and the Irish caused more problems than the English! They seduced native girls but you and the Irish married them and acknowledged your children who had a hard time adjusting when we became independent.”
We were sitting smoking in the garden of the restaurant when I asked him if he felt Indians had been adequately prepared to run their own affairs when the British left.
“We had no experience of ruling. We had many very able civil servants but we lacked political leaders. The people who are best able to win freedom proved to be poor at exercising it. Mostly, though, it comes down to money.
“We have no state pensions so families must have enough children so that one or two will survive to look after the parents when they grow old. Our health care needs funding so that fewer infants die. Then if people survive they must be found work. Our airfield runways are kept clean by large squads of men pushing brooms from one end to the other. A machine could do the job quicker, better and cheaper but it would have to be paid for in hard currency and the sweepers would starve.
“I love my country; I believe that the people are hard-working, clever and fundamentally good and decent. We deserve better rulers.”
He had to go back to his office and I strolled back to my hotel thinking that there were similarities between India after the collapse of the Mogul Empire and Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century. Alan Breck Stewart had a coat with silver buttons but he took money crofters could ill afford to keep their chieftains in exile in France. If the surplus had been put back into improving the land things might have been different.
Ebenezer clung to his bargain in an unfinished house at the centre of a neglected estate rather than let David Balfour have his rightful inheritance. Greed and lawlessness just like India after the Moguls. Perhaps the union of the parliaments saved Scotland and perhaps we should learn from the Indian experience by training statesmen to take control if a Ghandi ever arises in a Scottish glen.
On the way home I stayed the night in the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai before it was attacked by terrorists. Everything about the hotel was opulent and the staff outnumbered the guests by about two to one. On the way to the airport the next morning, I passed a city composed of cardboard boxes and corrugated iron within the city.
Poverty is as much a sign of enslavement as a torque or shackles.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Human problems seem to be much the same wherever you journey. The story is about India and about American Indians, who have a lot in common with us Scots.
_____________________________________________________________________
My first trip outside the British Isles was to NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View a small town about forty miles south of San Francisco. We had spent the previous night in New York where I lost my driving licence so my first stop was the vehicle licensing office in Palo Alto. About an hour later I left with a temporary licence having passed a written test, had my eyes tested, a photograph taken and driven an examiner out on the roads to prove my competence.
The road test was the first time I benefitted from being Scottish. The examiner had been based in East Anglia flying bombers over Germany in the Second World War. He spent the entire test reminiscing, letting me do pretty much as I wanted. When we got back he handed me my pass certificate with a grin.
“I should really have busted you for doing forty in a twenty limit residential zone but the best driver we had for getting us into Norwich for R&R was a Scottish lass. She drove like a madman too!”
Years later I got lost trying to find Hartford from Kennedy Airport. We called in to a coffee shop to get directions. The waiter could only speak three words of English: latte, espresso and cappuccino. Up popped a Yoker man from the next booth to put us on the right road.
Armed with my Californian driver licence I went to the weather briefing at San Francisco Airport and got back to Ames in time for lunch. My boss was a three meals a day plus supper sort of man so I gave him the weather briefing over the hash browns. When I reached the serving hatch the old lady behind the counter got tears in her eyes when she heard my accent.
She had been a GI bride and had not been back to Scotland since her mother died about twenty years before. I spent the next evening with her and her youngest son chewing the fat about Scotland and the Scots. I also got special service in the canteen for the whole seven weeks I was there.
Most places in the world you run into a fellow Scot but there are benighted spots where a Scot is about as rare as a Martian. Oklahoma in the United States and Bangalore in India are two such places. Even there you find that, as Burns noted, all men are brothers.
Honest Injun
I had worked all day Sunday on my own in the depths of the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) so I awarded myself Monday off. Nothing but fair-weather cumulus was forecast for the next few days so our mission to study severe thunderstorms was on hold – sort of no rain stops play. It gets fiercely hot in Oklahoma by the middle of May so I got up early and motored down the dirt road that is the iconic Route 66. It swings south from Chicago and forms the main street of Norman, Oklahoma on its way to Los Angeles.
I was going to Anadarko. It was called ‘Indian City’ in those days but I can only plead historical accuracy for failing to recognise it as ‘The Native American Cultural Centre and Museum.’
Monday is the day when two thirds of the population go back to work and the other third who have kept them amused over the weekend have a well-earned rest. Anadarko was quiet: one large American lady with her whinging five year old in tow and me. She coped with his constant whining by whining louder and longer. It was less than entertaining to start with and quickly palled.
The kid had fingered every exhibit in the foyer when we were joined by an old man who appeared from a back room behind the reception desk. He was not tall but he stood very straight. Although he was dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots and a faded plaid shirt, there was no mistaking that he was a Native American.
“Hi y’all,” he greeted us.
When he came forward into the light I could see that his skin was the colour and texture of an Arbroath Smoky and a grey pony-tail hung down behind his straw Stetson.
“You folks will have to excuse me. My granddaughter is the proper guide but she’s sick to her stomach today.”
“We expected to see a real Indian,” Mum said, sounding aggrieved.
“I’m a full-blooded Kiowa, Ma’am, but the proper Indians are only here on the weekends.” He waved his hand to photographs around the walls showing energetic young people with feather headdresses and beaded costumes cavorting about a totem pole.
After she had shrilled the news to her son he formed a gun from his fist and started yelling ‘bang, bang’. I caught a glint in the eye of the old man. Thinking it might be a prelude to summary scalping I was in two minds whether to stop him or help him by holding the brat.
We paid our fee and went out into the village made up of replicas of Native dwellings on the slope below the museum building. The most obvious homes were three tepees standing about twelve metres high with material covering poles meeting at the top just like you see in Westerns. It looked as if two were covered in painted canvas but the third was made of skins, real or fake I could not tell. They formed three sides of a square with the totem pole in the middle; the fourth side had a grandstand.
Mother and child headed for these at a trot but the old man held me back when I would have followed them.
“Yesterday we did not live in these.” He waved an arthritic hand at the tepees and it was clear that his ‘yesterday’ covered hundreds if not thousands of years.
“Look at them! Until the Spanish came we had no horses. We could not have moved these things from place to place before the horses came.”
He led me past the innovative dwellings and took me to an enclosure where there were a number of little domed structures perhaps three metres in diameter but no more than a metre tall. He opened one to show that it was constructed of thin laths of a bendy wood like willow. They were pushed into the ground in a circle with the other ends tied together. A skin was thrown over the top.
Outside he showed me a sort of triangular sledge made of two branches tied at the top and separated in the middle by webbing. The poles extended about a metre beyond the webbed part. My guide lifted a short cross-piece to show me how it could be used as a yoke so that the whole sledge could be dragged along.
“Yesterday this is how we lived.”
Children, the elderly and the sick were loaded with the skins and rods onto the sledges and towed by the men to the next location where they would build the whole village in less than an hour. Every year his people had started at the Gulf of Mexico at the end of winter following the herds of buffalo to the Canadian border then turning, tramping back in the autumn to winter once more on the Gulf.
“We used every part of the buffalo. The meat fed us, the bones were used for weapons and tools, the skin clothed us and even the fat was traded for grain and cloth.”
The pronounced Okie accent in which he had greeted us had gone and he was now talking in a distinctly educated voice. He admitted to being an emeritus professor in Oklahoma University in Norman where his absent grand-daughter was a post-graduate student. He was fascinated when I told him that the people in the Highlands used ‘yesterday’ to describe long ages past just as he did.
I told him that I had spent the previous day in the bowels of NSSL correcting the proof of a scientific paper, checking the five hundred millibar chart and glancing at the radar screens from time to time.
“When I was a young man I was a volunteer fireman. We were called out to deal with the aftermath of tornadoes. You do fine work at NSSL – you cannot stop the twisters but the early warnings you give save many lives.”
He gave up his post after he was given the task of collecting body parts from the wreckage caused by an extreme storm.
On Sundays all the other laboratory workers wanted the time off to attend church so I took the duty watch. Of course, if the forecast was bad everyone would be at his or her post. He chuckled when I told him that Norman was the only town I knew where there were more churches than bars.
“God used to be an Englishman,” he laughed, “but about the middle of the twentieth century he became American. I suppose they use you on Sundays because you are from a godless nation!”
We had walked a little further to a russet adobe building without doors or windows. There was a ladder at the side that led to the roof where another ladder in a hole let us enter the house.
“This is where the buffalo fat finished up along with the meat, hides and bone that we did not need for ourselves. The Indians who lived here grew corn and cotton so they had to stay in one place. Pueblo, or village, Indians, they were called. They traded soap, candles, paper, grain and woven garments with us.”
“You are describing a very sophisticated society,” I ventured.
I saw the twinkle in his eye again but this time I recognised it as amusement.
“It was not only sophisticated, it was sustainable. We are no better than other men but, with the weapons available, we could not reduce the size of the buffalo herds. More were lost to starvation and drought than were killed by my people, the Plains Indians.”
We sat down on a rawhide charpoy in the Pueblo house and he offered me a White Owl cigar.
“You can’t feel much affection for the Europeans who flooded west carrying rifles.”
“Oh, the rifle was just the final nail in our coffin. The horse started the descent into oblivion. Suddenly we became faster than the buffalo so we started herding them to tire them out and make them easier to kill. Sometimes whole herds would be forced over a cliff with the result that most of the meat spoiled. Then the rifles came and slaughtered thousands so that the tongues could be sent back east as a delicacy.”
Then I told him of my people scratching a living on isolated fertile fields at the heads of fjords from the beginning of time and how we had been forced out to make way for sheep and deer. I told him how our isolation made it possible for the owners of the land to treat us so inhumanely. I wondered if his people could have done more to resist.
“We lived together, not always peaceably, but we settled our differences by tradition. It never crossed our minds that there was a reason to join together in a larger community. I am a Kiowa and I respect other tribes but I have no urge to cooperate with them. We did not need to change our ways nor did we need them to change theirs: there was room on the prairie for all of us and buffalo enough for everyone.”
We strolled back to the building housing the little museum in companionable silence.
“Change is part of existence – it is an inevitable consequence of living. The real problem is that it seldom happens gradually but all at once and often catastrophically.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking about the Highland Clearances. They destroyed a civilisation that was only just viable. Many of the people brutally thrown out of their homes made a success of the move to new locations. The alternative to the change to sheep was probably slow starvation.
Perhaps if the crofters had not been moved they would simply have died out fifty or a hundred years later. It did not seem strange that the insight should come thousands of miles from home from a Native American: his people, like mine, had endured much. At least we were able to get away while we were fit to establish ourselves in strange new places. The Native Americans had nowhere to go; they had to stay on where they were once masters and make the best of their changed circumstances.
“It took us a long time to adjust to the change and it took the American government a long time to recognise that we had been badly treated.”
I refused a second cigar and he chuckled as he got one drawing to his satisfaction.
“We got our rights none too soon and just when we needed them. When Oklahoma Territory was opened to settlers the Native people were given the poorest land. Thirty years later they discovered that the reason the soil was so poor was because it was no more than a shallow crust over a lake of oil. By that time it was not politic to move the Indians so, even now, most of the millionaires in Oklahoma are Native Americans.”
Freedom Fighter
Winston Churchill was born in Bangalore, a city high on the Deccan in southern India. It has a very pleasant climate and is now home to much of India’s high technology. I was there to tell them what we wanted to learn from the tests they were going to fly with an aircraft we were lending them. Our pilot and ground-crew were especially busy because we had to change an engine that had failed on the flight out.
I looked around the Indian Aviation Research Institute and talked to their scientists but I was not as busy as I would have liked. The Director had given up a full professorship in the United States to work for half the wages in his home country. In Bangalore this was a princely salary that allowed him to hire servants to look after the house and gardens.
To get me out of their hair while the aircraft was fixed, they provided a car with driver to take me to Mysore. At that time there was a rajah living in a rather seedy-looking palace in the middle of town. It had flags flying to show he was in residence and fiercely moustachioed lancers riding the thinnest ponies I have ever seen guarding the gates.
They made no demur when I strolled past them into the palace forecourt. I was stopped after I had wandered for a few minutes by an elderly gentleman wearing a magnificent turban. He only halted my progress to enquire, in Oxbridge English, if I required any assistance. He took me through many of the rooms in the palace assuring me that the rajah, who had a migraine, would be devastated to have missed me.
My new friend then cancelled his next few appointments and took me across the valley to the magnificent palace of the begum, the rajah’s mother. She now lived in Paris and the Cote d’Azur but the white marble palace was kept in pristine condition for her occasional trips home. I recently noticed in a holiday brochure that it is now a luxury hotel and I wondered if the paying guests have to leave their shoes at the door as I did.
My old gentleman was related to the rajah and was his chancellor of the exchequer. According to him, things were pretty tough with income well below expenditure. His main task seemed to be realising assets stored in the vaults from the times when there was money to spare. A few rubies auctioned by Sotheby’s helped to keep the wolf from the door.
He instructed my driver to take me to Seringapatam on the way back to Bangalore. We went first to Daria Daulat, the summer palace of Tipu Sultan on a prominence overlooking the town. It was not a big building and was nothing much more than a cube with a covered balcony all the way round. Under the shelter of this roof the most magnificent frescoes had been preserved. There was some damage from vines and mould but the colours were still vibrant.
They showed Tipu and his court in wonderfully rich clothing meeting the French General Lally with his troops in their blue uniforms. They all seemed to be pretty happy with the negotiations in contrast to the next wall where a rather ragged bunch of red-uniformed British troops was looking apprehensively at Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, leading them astride a sorry nag.
Round another corner, the next wall depicting the battle raging around the town. Seringapatam is almost entirely surrounded by water and must have been a formidable obstacle. Wellesley triumphed by taking the objective before Lally arrived. Tipu was killed and his sons made peace with the East India Company under Robert Clive.
This battle proved to be decisive. French influence was limited to the coast around Pondicherry and the British went on to control almost all of the sub-continent. By the end of the day I found myself wishing that they had spent more on roads.
Driving outside the towns in India is a unique experience. The roads are un-surfaced and there is no clear boundary between the road and the surrounding fields. Well-spaced trees give an impression of a limit and provide some refuge for pedestrians but the traffic weaves in and out amongst the foliage at will. People on foot, animals, either herded or pulling carts, motor cars, vans and lorries drive where they will. Motorbikes flash in and out in the same annoying way that flies do, making a similar buzzing sound.
A typical situation would begin with a cow lying in the middle of the road forcing passers-by to walk around it. A flock of sheep or a donkey cart will veer into the trees to get past and my car will dice with a ten-wheel truck for space on the nearest field. Apart from the cow, no one stops. There are no traffic jams, just traffic spreads. Once the obstacle is behind us the vehicles edge back onto the centre of the road where they play chicken with traffic coming the other way. The lorry is still alongside us although we have had to slow to fifteen miles an hour to avoid pulling away.
A couple of days after my visit to Seringapatam, I was taken to lunch by a Wing Commander in the Indian Air Force. Our pilot was meant to join us but he had diarrhoea verging on dysentery so we left him with the Sikh flight lieutenant who was to fly our aircraft. He was going to feed our man curds – live yoghurt – and teach him yoga. At least it would take his mind off his troubles between dashes to the loo.
I asked the Wing Commander how he felt about his country being ruled by foreigners for centuries.
“The Mogul Empire was dead and India was falling apart. Greedy local potentates fought each other and might was the only right. We needed the structure provided by a European power to keep us from total collapse into anarchy. We are grateful that it was the English who won rather than the French, Dutch or Portuguese.”
I pointed out that I was a Scot and that we had not colonised anyone.
“You and the Irish caused more problems than the English! They seduced native girls but you and the Irish married them and acknowledged your children who had a hard time adjusting when we became independent.”
We were sitting smoking in the garden of the restaurant when I asked him if he felt Indians had been adequately prepared to run their own affairs when the British left.
“We had no experience of ruling. We had many very able civil servants but we lacked political leaders. The people who are best able to win freedom proved to be poor at exercising it. Mostly, though, it comes down to money.
“We have no state pensions so families must have enough children so that one or two will survive to look after the parents when they grow old. Our health care needs funding so that fewer infants die. Then if people survive they must be found work. Our airfield runways are kept clean by large squads of men pushing brooms from one end to the other. A machine could do the job quicker, better and cheaper but it would have to be paid for in hard currency and the sweepers would starve.
“I love my country; I believe that the people are hard-working, clever and fundamentally good and decent. We deserve better rulers.”
He had to go back to his office and I strolled back to my hotel thinking that there were similarities between India after the collapse of the Mogul Empire and Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century. Alan Breck Stewart had a coat with silver buttons but he took money crofters could ill afford to keep their chieftains in exile in France. If the surplus had been put back into improving the land things might have been different.
Ebenezer clung to his bargain in an unfinished house at the centre of a neglected estate rather than let David Balfour have his rightful inheritance. Greed and lawlessness just like India after the Moguls. Perhaps the union of the parliaments saved Scotland and perhaps we should learn from the Indian experience by training statesmen to take control if a Ghandi ever arises in a Scottish glen.
On the way home I stayed the night in the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai before it was attacked by terrorists. Everything about the hotel was opulent and the staff outnumbered the guests by about two to one. On the way to the airport the next morning, I passed a city composed of cardboard boxes and corrugated iron within the city.
Poverty is as much a sign of enslavement as a torque or shackles.
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned five novels and many short stories. His two latest novels, The Island and Pilgrimage of Grace, are McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned five novels and many short stories. His two latest novels, The Island and Pilgrimage of Grace, are McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.