The Aspirations Within and the Realities Outside
The well-meaning gestures of committed teachers and their avowed idealism of serious learning through worth-reading books, which they good-naturedly imposed on their students, was one thing, but the other opposite truth was also the dearth of reading rooms and materials in our times in Darjeelingtown. To the best of my knowledge, none of the “vernacular” high schools of the town which we of the lower middle class went to had a library worth the name. Not even the segregated girls’ high schools had reading rooms and libraries, as we neatly expected of them. All of these “local” schools were managed by no less than the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic trusts, and Protestant missionary churches, and the Ram Krishna Mission, not talking about the Brahmo Samaj, and there was also the Government High School itself. But none had its own library where students could read newspapers and magazines and borrow books and reference materials on membership cards.[break]
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Perhaps because of this general rut taken for granted in the Hills as a whole, there was the District Library set up by the government (State or Central? We never knew!). It was near the Victoria Park, but it was an unwelcoming and discouraging fixture at best although it was housed in a lovely three-storied Edwardian villa. And there was the West Bengal Information Centre (Poshchim Bongal Suchana Kendra) in a gabled Victorian nook on Robertson Road, but it was merely a dreary official propaganda outpost. I have no memory of a comprehensive public library in town while it had two elite clubs, a fashionable racecourse (allegedly the highest in altitude in the world), three hospitals and an exclusive sanatorium, municipal toilets at strategic places all over town, a public bathhouse with hot water, affordable guesthouses and dharamshalas run by a few faiths and communities, at least one eat-all-you-can-for-one-Rupee subsidized vegetarian bhojanalaya hosted by the Marwari Sewa Samiti, many mandirs, numerous churches, two masjids, new gumbas and old monasteries, parks and commons and playgrounds dotting the township, a veritable world-class botanical garden and even a number immaculately maintained historical cemeteries. But not a single town or municipal library for the general populace! There were a few community associations and their public halls, true, but they only catered newspapers and popular publications to their members in their own languages.
My Own Protestant Christian Conundrums
My growing up to mid-teen years had other chokepoints, too, and one chief bottleneck was the Church of Scotland to which my family had belonged for four generations by my time since my forebears left their Lepcha homeland in Ilam, Nepal, in the late 19th century. I must hasten to add, though, and in all fairness, that the Presbyterian Church in itself was not an ultra-fundamentalist denomination in nature and construct when it was planted in Darjeeling in the 19th century. But the Scots – MacFarlane, Turnbull, Duncan and other pioneers in Darjeeling – would never imagine what their church would come to at the hands of their Hill converts.
While the Church had virtually no Bahuns, Chhetris or Bhotes in its congregation, it was the Himalayan members – mostly my own fellow Lepchas/Rongs or such Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Nepali ethnics such as Rais, Limbus, Tamangs, Gurungs, Mukhias, Pradhans and other Nepali indigenes of non-Hindu origins – who confused me and my generation. As times went on, St. Columba’s Church’s mostly Himalayan Mongoloid members became more Amish than the actual Amish and Mennonites. These locals developed such holier-than-thou Christian attitudes and practices that many shook like madmen at prayers and trembled like shamans in hymn singing. They went more berserk than the Quakers during the church services and worships, and reached what we called “spiritual orgasm” with their Biblical exclamations of “Hallelujah!” and “Jai Masih!” Two unabashedly weeping catechists and wailing preachers reportedly harangued their church attendees with warnings of Hell, its eternal fire and brimstones; they were more concerned with Afterlife while our living life itself was full of earthly ups and downs. What they did had foretastes of what the aggressive El Saddai and intimidating Jehovah’s Witnesses would bring in later on.
The forebears of the 1950s’ Nepali Christians were made literate and economically sustainable by the Scots during the British Raj. But the old folks took Jesus Christ’s teachings of hope, faith and charity combined with humility, meekness, gratitude and modesty to such sad, pessimistic and defeatist extremes that the Scots themselves were intrigued by what they had wrought in them, and were glad to hurry out of the Darjeeling Hills when the British decided to leave India by 1947.
Is it all because the ousted Nepalis from their homeland in Nepal felt that they had had their own Exodus to find their Canaan in Darjeeling? Yet they must have missed their homeland while also realizing at the same time that their old country did not miss them, nor would it welcome them back. However, even in such dilemmas, their newfound Promised Land in Darjeeling was one of non-belongingness, hopelessness and unpromising prospects even though they had embraced Christianity and its promises of deliverances of all kinds.
Consequently, even in the post-Independence years in India, the members of St Columba’s Church remained where they were in the Raj – as junior clerks, primary schoolteachers, nurses, office assistants, cooks and cleaners, kennel keepers, dog walkers, baby minders, and the like. Since they preached and practiced the Christian principles of “simple living and high thinking” – the latter meant praying to Christ at all possible times – they did not try to free themselves of the old British patronage of cradle-to-grave support and security which had simply vanished because their benefactors had deserted them. Even then, these High-on-Jesus Isais thought nothing of rising from primary schoolteachers to senior teachers and headmasters, nor educate their sons and daughters to be college lecturers and university professors. While the old menial clerks did nothing to promote themselves to senior clerks, managers and movers and shakers, they also thought nothing about their sons and daughters to enter the new administrative services of India. The overseers of old had no vision of sending their sons to engineering colleges.
Nurses had no logical imagination to have their daughters graduate as doctors. The accomplished cooks at so many British bungalows and residences and clubs could join the kitchens and dining halls of new hotels in India, yet they did not venture out of the Hills. There were no signs yet that there would be lawyers, economists, political scientists, civic leaders, senior civil servants and politicians any time soon from our Christian community whose young members, like us, had heard mere fables of old lifelong British guarantees their seniors had enjoyed in the bygone century and a half.
And thus the same old status-quo mindset remained, even in New India. Steeped in Christ’s message of love and compassion, the older-generation Christians did not like those in their flock who had been conscripted to the war in Burma and Europe; they would not like their sons to join the military and police services, either. Lack of new-world ambitions, new-age aspirations and more of the same old-world laidback inaction remained the signatures of the community.
No wonder they lived unworldly lives and denounced everything “sansarik.” No fervent Christian homes, consequently, read newspapers and magazines; such families had no radio in their homes. They shunned music as sinful, movies be damned to Hell; arts and expressions allegedly came from the Devil. Imagine their shock and horror (I did not see it, though!), therefore, when I later became a teenage idol, a popular singer, a famous guitarist, played music in Maestro Amber Gurung’s Art Academy of Music and formed my own professional Rock n’ Roll band called The Hillians and did other madcap things so unbecoming of a Christian! But these happened later, as we can see below:
In such prevailing bleak scenarios, there was only one option left: Leave and lit out for newer territories! In fact, such defections were already taking place. Our aforementioned teacher, Nirmal Chandra Pradhan, and his generation had started leaving the fold for wider and varied life experiences outside the church’s narrow perimeters. If the older generation were conformed introverts, the new ones had to be confirmed extroverts because only the world beyond the ghetto of the church and its steeples provided such challenging opportunities and timely visions sweeping India.
And while I myself defected, I truly believed that Jesus wanted the very same for me. His mission was to deliver and set me free, and I stress to this day that He did what He did! Amen!
To be continued next week
The writer is Copy Chief at The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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