topics: |  travel | british-india

Amitava Kumar, in The Nation:

Ackerley's writing is strewn with wildly comic observations. Unlike Forster's
obsessive, even oppressive, adventures with sex in India, Ackerley's physical
encounters share very little of that air of "conscious racial superiority
which Anglo-Indians exhale." Forster, for instance, noted in his journal:
"What relation beyond carnality could one establish with such people? He
hadn't even the initiative to cut my throat." Ackerley is unable to occupy
this position with any seriousness. For him, a kiss doesn't carry the white
man's burden, although it might offer a quick, unanxious glimpse of cultural
difference. Here is Ackerley's account of his conversation with the young
vegetarian Narayan while they are out on a walk:

          And in the dark roadway, overshadowed by trees, he put up his face
    and kissed me on the cheek. I returned his kiss; but he at once drew
    back, crying out:
          "Not the mouth! You eat meat! You eat meat!"
          "Yes, and I will eat you in a minute," I said, and kissed him on
    the lips again, and this time he did not draw away.

This isn't a portrait of the gentler face of imperialism. Instead, Hindoo
Holiday is a witty travelogue, endearingly free of any pretense and
condescension. It presents ordinary Indians as complex interlocutors in the
colonial drama, and while they are often contradictory, they also remain
wholly individual.

Eliot Weinberger, NYRB

(from the New York Review of Books)

J. R. Ackerley came to India in 1923, a replacement secretary for a
Maharajah, recommended by E.M. Forster, who was departing from the job. The
handsome son of an extravagantly
nouveau riche fruiterer—the selfstyled “Banana King of London”—he had gone
directly from his militaristic public school into the trenches in WW I.  He
saw action at the Somme; lost his idolized brother; was wounded and taken
prisoner; and was not returned to England until months after the peace.

    He then entered Cambridge, and a homosexual world that itself now seems
as remote as the Raj. Still under the shadow of the Oscar Wilde trial and the
Sodomy Laws, more circumspect than closeted, it was a tiny universe of
brilliant upper-class men who reveled and suffered under a sharp class
distinction ...

    In 1923, Ackerley was twenty-seven, had published a few poems, had
written a play, The Prisoners of War, that was having trouble finding a
producer because of its implicit homoeroticism, and was adrift. His friend
E. M. Forster suggested a stint in India, from which Forster had recently
returned, perhaps as the secretary to the Maharajah of Chhatarpur, a minor
noble whom he called “the Prince of Muddlers, even among Indian muddlers”—and
who was also gay.

    Months of negotiation followed. The Maharajah had wanted a secretary who
was exactly like Olaf, a character in H.  Rider Haggard's The Wanderer's
Necklace, and had even written to Haggard for help. He was oddly unimpressed
by Ackerley's photograph, then impressed by his poems, offered him lifetime
employment leading to a cabinet post, dismissed the whole thing as
impossible, and finally hired him for six months. Ackerley ended up staying
less than five.

    Back in England, Ackerley slowly transformed his Indian diaries into
Hindoo Holiday, which appeared in 1932. His publisher, fearful of libel, had
insisted on cuts in the text pertaining to the Maharajah's sexual preferences
and speculations on the paternity of his heirs. Chhatarpur was jokingly
changed to Chhokrapur, which means “City of Boys.”

   V. S. Naipaul, (in The Enigma of Arrival): There was no model for me here,
in this exploration; neither Forster nor Ackerley nor Kipling could help.

    It is an indication of the place that Hindoo Holiday held on the short
shelf of enduring literary books produced by the Raj: preceded only by Emily
Eden's Up the Country in the midnineteenth century, and, of course, by Kim
and A Passage to India. Later it was followed by L. H. Myers's The Root and
the Flower (also known as The Near and the Far, a tetralogy of philosophical
novels set in the Mughal age, and thus a product of the Raj but not about it)
and Paul Scott's operatic The Raj Quartet with its nostalgic coda, Staying
On. The literature's final flowering was, appropriately, not written by an
Englishman, but by a fiercely Anglophilic Bengali, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in his
half-Proustian, half-polemical Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

    Kipling loved India, and especially the words of Anglo- India—the first
half of Kim has an exuberance of language that would not be seen again until
Joyce—but he still bore the white man's burden. Ackerley, even more than
Forster, has no agenda; both are extraordinarily tolerant, reserving their
scorn —like many travelers—only for their fellow countrymen.

    That this was due to their lives as sexual outsiders is unquestionable.
Although it seems unimaginable now—given the prudishness, until quite
recently, of modern India, with its covered and secluded women, and where
even a kiss was forbidden on a movie screen—it was sexual licentiousness that
was at the root of the Raj's horror of the land. The biggestselling book on
India before Hindoo Holiday was Katherine Mayo's 1927 Mother India, which
claimed that the

	“degeneracy” of the Indian race was due not to poverty or the
	tyrannies of its various rulers, but rather to promiscuity: The whole
	pyramid of Indians' woes, material and spiritual— poverty, sickness,
	ignorance, political minority, melancholy, ineffectiveness, not
	forgetting that subconscious conviction of inferiority which he
	forever bares and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness
	for social affronts—rests upon a rockbottom physical base. The base
	is simply, his manner of getting into the world and his sex-life
	thenceforward.

    Even worse than sex, of course, was interracial sex: it is the enigma
around which A Passage to India turns, and the revulsion of it propels the
violence of The Raj Quartet. In contrast, the one kiss in Hindoo Holiday is
merely a funny and sweet moment of no significance. The Maharajah's pursuit
of his boy actors is presented as comically as his long drives in search of
good omens, or the tutor Abdul's pursuit of better employment.  Ackerley's
descriptions of the beauties of the boys he sees are as relaxed and natural
as his descriptions of wildlife; they are entirely without the psychodrama or
the Hellenistic pretensions that were common among gay writers at the time.
This offhand and funny presentation of the potentially shocking would become
an Ackerley trademark. My Father and Myself famously begins: “I was born in
1896 and my parents were married in 1919.”

    No English writer had such uncomplicated fun in India; none could create
such comic characters without condescension; no one, until Salman Rushdie and
the current generation of Indian novelists, could write dialogue in Indian
English so well. Above all, Hindoo Holiday is as perfectly constructed as A
Passage to India, though because of its pose as a travel book and not a
novel, few seemed to have noticed.