him.
Perhaps if I knew Hindi (I had a big vocabulary but didnât know how to make phrases or sentences) he might have said more; but I donât think so. Just as (to jump ahead, to later experience and judgement) readers of novels forget as they read, so I think the mattress-maker lived and forgot. He didnât have the analytical faculty; life and the world, so to speak, constantly went in one eye and out of the other. And I feel sureit would have been the same with other old India-born people whom we failed to question about the past. India, the past, with these people, had been wiped out, just as the present, Trinidad, was being wiped out. âThere was a railway station.â There wouldnât have been much more to say.
Later, especially after the war, people went to India, and so at last we could get details of our private India. There was more to say about the railway stations: the cries, for instance, of the vendors of
bidis
and pan and cigarettes. But the people who brought back these stories had been made by their birth abroad, their education and travel; they could assess themselves, in a way the mattress-maker wouldnât have understood; and this gave them another way of looking. The mattress-makerâs way of looking was lost; I could never understand the India he had come from.
I WAS IN I NDIA when I was planning this chapter. One day I saw, in the literary pages of an important southern newspaper, a review of an autobiography of a man who in 1898 had gone out as a labourer on a five-year contract to Surinam, the Dutch territory in South America. Surinam was Dutch Guiana; Dutch Guiana was next to British Guiana; and British Guiana was culturally close to us in Trinidad. It was an extraordinary piece of luck, coming upon a book from Surinam by a contemporary of the mattress-maker, and from the same part of our private India! The same landscapes held in remote memory, the same weather, the same calendar, thesame ideas of human possibility, the same languages: a little miracle, if the book was what it said it was, a little bit of the past recovered.
The title of the book was
Jeevan Prakash
, âThe Light of Lifeâ: religious and high-flown and not a little vain: from my own point of view, a let-down. The author, Rahman Khan, had been born in 1874 in the United Provinces. He described himself as a Pathan, but that might have been only a matter of remote ancestry. Many of the Pathans of his childhood worked for Hindu merchants. There seems, from his book, to have been a composite Hindu-Muslim culture of the region; this composite culture has now vanished. Rahman, remarkably for a Muslim, knew Hindi very well, and was able to read the
Ramayana
, one of the two epics of India, a sacred text. Later in Surinam, long after his contract labour was over, he was still enough of a Hindi scholar, in his own account, to teach the
Ramayana
to Brahmins and pundits in the benighted Dutch plantations.
He had written his book in Hindi in the early 1940s in Surinam. He thought of himself as an Indian religious scholar, and he believed this gave him a certain standing in the Indian villages of Surinamâ
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew
. There would have been some local and family support for his writing; but my feeling (from my knowledge of Trinidad) is that people who reverenced him for his learning and his writing might not have always wanted to read him; for these people reverence would have been enough.
I donât think his book could have had much of a circulation.It would have had far fewer readers than Walcottâs 1949 book of poems. Surinam was a backward colony and its population was small, probably half the population of Trinidad. The Indian population of Surinam would have been only half the general population; and it wasnât a reading population. The book would almost certainly have faded away if it hadnât been
Perhaps if I knew Hindi (I had a big vocabulary but didnât know how to make phrases or sentences) he might have said more; but I donât think so. Just as (to jump ahead, to later experience and judgement) readers of novels forget as they read, so I think the mattress-maker lived and forgot. He didnât have the analytical faculty; life and the world, so to speak, constantly went in one eye and out of the other. And I feel sureit would have been the same with other old India-born people whom we failed to question about the past. India, the past, with these people, had been wiped out, just as the present, Trinidad, was being wiped out. âThere was a railway station.â There wouldnât have been much more to say.
Later, especially after the war, people went to India, and so at last we could get details of our private India. There was more to say about the railway stations: the cries, for instance, of the vendors of
bidis
and pan and cigarettes. But the people who brought back these stories had been made by their birth abroad, their education and travel; they could assess themselves, in a way the mattress-maker wouldnât have understood; and this gave them another way of looking. The mattress-makerâs way of looking was lost; I could never understand the India he had come from.
I WAS IN I NDIA when I was planning this chapter. One day I saw, in the literary pages of an important southern newspaper, a review of an autobiography of a man who in 1898 had gone out as a labourer on a five-year contract to Surinam, the Dutch territory in South America. Surinam was Dutch Guiana; Dutch Guiana was next to British Guiana; and British Guiana was culturally close to us in Trinidad. It was an extraordinary piece of luck, coming upon a book from Surinam by a contemporary of the mattress-maker, and from the same part of our private India! The same landscapes held in remote memory, the same weather, the same calendar, thesame ideas of human possibility, the same languages: a little miracle, if the book was what it said it was, a little bit of the past recovered.
The title of the book was
Jeevan Prakash
, âThe Light of Lifeâ: religious and high-flown and not a little vain: from my own point of view, a let-down. The author, Rahman Khan, had been born in 1874 in the United Provinces. He described himself as a Pathan, but that might have been only a matter of remote ancestry. Many of the Pathans of his childhood worked for Hindu merchants. There seems, from his book, to have been a composite Hindu-Muslim culture of the region; this composite culture has now vanished. Rahman, remarkably for a Muslim, knew Hindi very well, and was able to read the
Ramayana
, one of the two epics of India, a sacred text. Later in Surinam, long after his contract labour was over, he was still enough of a Hindi scholar, in his own account, to teach the
Ramayana
to Brahmins and pundits in the benighted Dutch plantations.
He had written his book in Hindi in the early 1940s in Surinam. He thought of himself as an Indian religious scholar, and he believed this gave him a certain standing in the Indian villages of Surinamâ
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew
. There would have been some local and family support for his writing; but my feeling (from my knowledge of Trinidad) is that people who reverenced him for his learning and his writing might not have always wanted to read him; for these people reverence would have been enough.
I donât think his book could have had much of a circulation.It would have had far fewer readers than Walcottâs 1949 book of poems. Surinam was a backward colony and its population was small, probably half the population of Trinidad. The Indian population of Surinam would have been only half the general population; and it wasnât a reading population. The book would almost certainly have faded away if it hadnât been
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