Hindoo Holiday [NOOK Book]

Amitava Kumar

The Barnes & Noble Review

How old was I? So old? He had been under the impression that I was only twenty-two. Did I come from London? Of whom did my family consist? Could I speak Latin and Greek? Did I know Rider Haggard? Had I read his books? Was I religious? Did I believe that the tragedy of Jesus Christ was the greatest tragedy that had ever happened?  Was I a pragmatist? Had I read Hall Caine? Had I read Darwin, Huxley, and Marie Corelli?. . .

Of course, Ackerley hasn't read any of these writers and thinkers, and hasn't a clue what pragmatism is all about. His Highness is most disappointed, but determines that his new secretary must immediately borrow the royal copies of Herbert Spencer's First Principles and George Henry Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind:

''Is there a God or is there no God?' rapped out His Highness impatiently. 'That is the question.  That is what I want to know. Spencer says there is a God, Lewes says no. So you must read them, Mr. Ackerley, and tell me which of them is right.'

The next day Ackerley is introduced to a half dozen other English guests, as they return from a jackal hunt. The formidable Mrs. Montgomery fixes him with her lorgnette: " 'Look here, young man, I'll give you a word of advice.  Keep clear of Indian women! Do you understand me? Don't look at them! Don't notice them! They don't exist!' " Of course, some Indian women can be as formidable as Mrs. Montgomery herself. When Ackerley casually mentions the maharajah's grandfather, he is told that the former sovereign was murdered; quite naturally shocked, he asks how it happened. His Highness offhandedly replies, "My great grandmother. They quarreled and she poisoned him."  The Maharajah goes on to add that "a king could never trust his relatives, they were always scheming and giving trouble of some sort; in fact, he said gravely, he had just received a report that some of his kinsmen were plotting together in a neighboring State to destroy his son by Black Magic."

All this happens in just the first three days of Ackerley's five-month "holiday."

In due course, we learn that His Highness hopes to build a Greek villa, so that he can romp around in a toga. While a sign saying "Welcome" is now displayed in the entrance hall of the palace, there was at first "a slight misunderstanding as to its intended destination, and it was hung originally over the jail."  When Ackerley is badgered into visiting the toady Abdul's home, he is presented with a tray of repulsive sweetmeats:

They were chiefly mustard-coloured or pale grey, and looked rather like bread pellets moulded by grubby schoolboy fingers into various sizes for flipping at other schoolboys across the table. A little sugar clung to them, and a thin adhesive tissue (also edible, said Abdul) which fluttered in the slight breeze. He handed me a spoon, and with his own attempted to beat off the flies which swarmed so obstinately upon the food that they appeared to prefer death to separation from it. Personally I could not pretend to their enthusiasm, but gingerly digging with my spoon to the center of one of the piles, I selected, with a care which may have seemed rather rude, three of the smallest pellets I could find.

These, which were no larger than peas, I swallowed, and had little doubt but that in a very short space of time I should be dead of dysentery.

Instead, before long, Ackerley takes to chewing betel nut like a native, starts to flirt regularly with Narayan (in one of the restored passages he gives him a kiss), and comes to truly admire Babaji Rao. He is nonetheless taken aback by some Hindu customs -- untouchable food and people, the cruel loneliness imposed on widows, the religious obligation to drink "the five products" of the cow: urine, dung, milk, curd, butter.  When the maharajah asks, "Do people in England drink the urine of the cow or any animal?" Ackerley writes: "I said I'd never heard of any one doing so there, though I couldn't say what they did in America."  Interestingly, this passage reveals a bit of reverse censorship: the gibe at the U.S. appears in the original 1932 text but was deleted from the later revised version.

Eventually, Ackerley discovers that the apparently inseparable Narayan and Sharma aren't really quite what they seem, and that the former engages in intercourse with his 14-year-old wife several times a week and the latter may actually be the father of the maharajah's heir. Apparently, His Highness likes to watch his wife couple with this handsome boy -- by whom he himself enjoys being sodomized. Sometimes such peccadilloes trouble His Highness, who is constantly searching for truth and wisdom. At one point he asks Ackerley what he should say to God about his sins:

If you've got to say anything I should say, 'You sent us forth into the world incomplete and therefore weak. With my own life, in these circumstances, and according to my own nature, I did what I could to secure happiness. But I did not know what happiness was, or where to look for it, and it was whilst I was in search of it that I dare say I got a little muddled.

This seems to me wise advice. Ackerley then adds an apposite Indian proverb (which I long ago copied into my own commonplace book): " 'Four days of moonlight -- then darkness,' say the Hindoos, sadly contemplating life."

Hindoo Holiday was J. R. Ackerley's third book, following a youthful collection of poems and a play about World War I (in which he served in the trenches). There would be just a few others, and "each in its different way is a masterpiece," according to Christopher Isherwood.  The posthumous My Father and My Self describes Ackerley's friends, family, and homosexual love life, and especially the shocking discovery that his father was a bigamist, with a complete second family.  Tellingly, however, this scandalous autobiography -- one of Truman Capote's favorite books -- never mentions that its author spent 30 year as the influential and much esteemed literary editor of The Listener, the BBC's cultural magazine. Ackerley's other famous book is My Dog Tulip, a memoir of his besotted passion for his German shepherd.  It includes a chapter entitled "Liquids and Solids," which is about just what you think. These later memoirs, as well as Ackerley's novel We Think the World of You, are also available in paperback from New York Review Books.

While Hindoo Holiday remains a slightly campy delight, some of its cultural attitudes are embarrassingly dated, and the book can hardly be regarded -- if it ever could have been -- as an accurate depiction of typical Indian life. Nonetheless, Ackerley's holiday journal deserves an honored place in that literary subgenre of witty, opinionated travel books by sandy-haired young Englishmen. It belongs on the same shelf with such delicious armchair escapes as Alexander Kinglake's Eothen, Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia. --Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure. His feature, "Library Without Walls," appears each month in the Barnes & Noble Review.