Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman

Apologies for any factual inaccuracies in my review. I don't know much of the history of India.

These letters first appeared in 1937. They are one side of a correspondence between a young Cambridge graduate who works in the civil service for the British government in India and then gradually rises in the ranks to become a judge, and the English wife of an army officer.

"Cambridge. Gonville and Caius College, Senate House and University Library"
ca. 1870-85
via Wikimedia Commons

Whether they are genuine is another question, and in any case they have a certain charm along the lines of Montesquieu's Persian Letters or Voltaire's Candide. Cambridge, it seems, is this book's El Dorado, in a tongue-in-cheek way. The writing is briefly kept but pithy, and it ranges from describing the personalities in a town when the British ruled Burma, to the street life of Paris during the later interwar years.

In the judge, Aravind Nehra's, view, even before Indian Independence — which looms over the whole book but never happens, as it occurred in 1947, ten years after the book came out —, 'the centre cannot hold,' and British administration is ineffective in India.

Local traditions like folk medicine persist, despite all that British educational systems and law and medical establishments can do, in the rendering of the judge. Also, the staff that are sent out from Britain to India are disenchanted with their roles and unwilling to 'civilize' further. (They no longer have that fervour to convert the heathen that is disconcerting to read fictionally in, for example, Jane Eyre. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing it's hard to tell, but likely from a historical perspective it's a good thing.) The administrators are more eager to make a living, because civil service appointments in India are well paid, than to administer wisely.



Besides, the administrators often feel contempt for Indian nationals, not enjoying social or professional interactions with them. All sides are unwilling to accept the children of mixed marriages.

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(Nehra — or the true author — too, does not have greatly enlightened opinions about mixed marriages. That said, he would likely have been in the minority if he had been. At least the book says that, in the 1930s, the social isolation of a mixed-race child was so difficult that prospective parents would need to think twice.

In her earlier books, for example, an English novelist, Maud Diver, did speak of mixed-race marriages in colonial India in a positive light. But whatever her Wikipedia biography may say, I think that when I was reading through a lot of her books I noticed that later on, due to the weight of public opinion against it, she took back what she said.

By the 1930s, racial theories have arisen too, like the ones that Nehra mentions with reference to the United States — he says, not very nicely, that the melting pot of the US is leading to the birth of 'super-criminals.' These theories make hateful attitudes, which are perhaps a natural consequence of the inequality that was enforced between Briton and Indian, even more dangerous.)

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"Gandhi spinning. Location unknown."
'Late 1940s'
via Wikimedia Commons

As the British display apathy on their side, the Indian political establishment gains in fervour. Mahatma Gandhi brings adherents to his side, undermining British rule further. The judge — Arvind Nehra — can't seem to decide if Gandhi is a little or greatly crazy, although he is certain that the leader is a bad influence; but he concedes that Gandhi is sincere.

Young people — like Nehra's son, also named Aravind — are dazzled by the idea of Indian self-rule in general, as national political parties arise.  Whether by peaceful political means or violent armed means, they do their best to establish it.

And dislike widens along sectarian lines between Indians themselves. The book touches a little on early outbreaks of the warfare between Hindus and Muslims that has marked the history of India to this day. But the focus mostly lies elsewhere.

"Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore"
February 1, 1940
via Wikimedia Commons

Arvind Nehra's socioeconomic views are, in my view, inconsistent. Nehra dislikes taxation, and abhors government expenditures on vast buildings and inflated civil service wages, in India and later, as he visits Europe for a peace conference in the League of Nations era.

But Nehra also dislikes social welfare programmes.

"London, Demonstration Arbeitsloser"
October 1931
(London, Demonstration of the Unemployed)
German Federal Archive, via Wikimedia Commons

Because I suspect that the letters by Nehra are actually written by a British novelist, I also suspect that this novelist is a 'nimbyist' who cannot bear to apply her criticisms of Anglo-India consistently to Britain too.

Because Nehra's letters write feelingly of e.g. rice farmers who are taxed beyond their ability to pay, in then-Burma, without labelling these farmers as "improvident."

But he depicts the British pauper as a leech on the British middle class:

your better castes cannot afford to have large families any more, because they must from their incomes pay largely to support the offspring of the improvident and feeble minded, the criminal lunatics and incurably diseased, and your on-the-Dole people who find it pays just as well to do nothing as to work.

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Lastly, despite the friendly tones and the questioning nature of Nehra's observations, I think this passage makes as clear as any that, beneath the Indian Judge's Letters to an English Gentlewoman's assumption of reason and moderation, the author offers some pretty steep propositions:

How much they talk in England to-day of the horrors of War […]

No one makes any great mention of the horrors of peace, yet I am told by those who ought to know that more people have been killed in traffic accidents since the Great War than the total casualties there amounted to.

That is a horrible affair. In War at least one goes forth prepared. One has a weapon and the expectation that something may happen, and one’s affairs consequently left in good order. And if one dies, at least the death is an honourable one, and calls afterward for kind thoughts [...].

Consider those who fall in Peace. They are a small and unbelligerent people, perhaps armed with nothing but the umbrella, the shopping list, when of a sudden they are mown down from behind or before.

I don't think that 1,000,000 people die in 4 months from car accidents in France, as they did in the Battle of the Somme in World War I. Secondly, the idea that people in warfare are always armed was undermined earlier in Letters of an Indian Judge, too — unarmed men can be beset upon by armed men.

Also, I'm not sure if it's an honourable death to be shot while chorine-gassing 'the enemy'; or an honourable death to succumb in a prisoner of war camp after being purposely infected by syphilis for medical testing; or an honourable death to be shot down by anti-aircraft fire while carpet-bombing homes. I doubt whether one can think many kind thoughts of a soldier who rapes a civilian or a fellow soldier, or starves prisoners so that their teeth fall out, even after he dies.

If a veteran kills himself after decades of post-traumatic stress disorder, it is unlikely that 'one's affairs are consequently left in good order.'

And I'm sure that readers can also think of dozens, or hundreds, of additional counter-examples, as grotesque and tragic as the ones named above.

Anyway, I'm not sure if it's just that even hearing about World War II — which, of course, happened after the book was published — tends to radicalize one's opinions of war. But I have no idea how anyone could write anything so trivial.

But it underlines the point that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And that's what happened a few years after the Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman was published. Perhaps this quality of not thinking things through (except the plot; the author scatters breadcrumbs that lead up to the dénouement ingeniously) is what ultimately makes the letters a bit of a slight work.

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"An international conference that would bring about peace" (1917)
by Luther Bradley
via Wikimedia Commons

(Nehra writes that peace conferences are much talking, not much doing. Also, in one conference that he attends, he finds that the delegates claim that they are hamstrung by politics in their home countries. They feel that they cannot implement what they find is logical.) 

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Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman
by Dorothy Black
London: Futura (1979)
p. 216, pp. 200-201