Art
Malik as Hari Kumar, Susan Wooldridge as Daphne Manners,
and Tim Pigott-Smith
as Ronald Merrick
Granada
TV, 1984
|
I
have recently finished reading The Jewel
in the Crown quartet of novels by Paul Scott, which was turned into a
magnificent television series in the 1980s by Granada TV. The books are a powerful
portrait of the Brits in India becoming ever more British even as their
white-knuckled hold on the sub-continent is slowly weakened by war and inevitability.
The
core story is set in 1942 in the fictional Indian city of Mayapore and involves
a relationship between an English girl, Daphne, and an Anglo-Indian boy, Hari.
Daphne is also courted by the local police inspector, Ronald Merrick, whose
unassailable belief in the superiority of the white race runs like a toxic
stream through the whole story. One evening he tries to warn Daphne about Hari
and she gets indignant.
I
said... I personally didn’t care what colour people were, and it was obviously
only Hari’s colour, the fact he was an Indian that got people’s goat. Ronald
said, “That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It
does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.” I started getting out of the
car. He tried to stop me, and took my hand. He said, “I’ve put it badly. I
can’t help it. The whole idea revolts me.”
This
was a reminder to me of how long the fear of miscegenation continued in Western
society. Obviously segregation continued in the US South until the 1960s, but I
had imagined the British as having moved beyond that earlier. But while black GIs
were being welcomed in Great Britain during the World War II, at the same time
in India many Brits continued to treat Indians – even those who were their
social and intellectual equals – as literally untouchable.
This
fear of contact between the races was also at play in the Pacific theater during
the war years if James Michener is to be believed. His stories were the basis
for the musical South Pacific in
which good old Nellie Forbush from Little Rock, Arkansas loves the French
settler Emile de Becque but rejects his marriage proposal because he’d had a
relationship with a Polynesian woman. According to the beliefs with which she’d
been raised, this had tainted him and had put him beyond the pale (as it were)
as a potential husband. Rodgers and Hammerstein included in the musical a song called
You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught that
addressed this learned racism.
You've got to be
taught
To be Afraid
Of people whose eyes
Are oddly made
And people whose skin
Is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught.
When
the show was on tour in the Deep South in the early 1950s, some Georgia
legislators reacted by introducing a censorship bill. One of them claimed that “a
song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American
way of life.” To be Afraid
Of people whose eyes
Are oddly made
And people whose skin
Is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught.
Yet
this was an entire century after Alexander Salmon, a white Englishman, fell in
love with and married a pure-bred Tahitian woman without a qualm. It made me
realize anew just how remarkable that marriage was in its era. Of course Alexander
understood discrimination very well himself, having been raised a Jew in London
in the years when Charles Dickens was writing the grotesque character of Fagin in
Oliver Twist. And he had to take some
abuse in Tahiti from visiting Brits like Captain Henry Byam Martin, commander
of the HMS Grampus, who called Salmon “a low swindling bankrupt Jew.”
John
Brander too was familiar with discrimination because of his illegitimate
origins, yet both he and Salmon were both proud to be seen strolling arm in arm
with their Polynesian wives not only in Papeete but even in Sydney, San
Francisco, and Paris. There were many ways in which these men were remarkable,
but this absence of what we would now call racism was one of the most striking.
As Paul Scott showed so well in The Jewel
in the Crown, even 100 years later the same could not be said of many of
their fellow countrymen living in the far flung corners of the world.