Books: To Have & To Hold

INDIA WITHOUT FABLE—Kate L Mitchell—Knopf ($2.50).

Kate L. Mitchell, with facts at her fingertips and her heart on her sleeve, has compressed India into 289 pages of polemic research and a seven-page, let’s-do-something-about-it epilogue. She has no warm appreciation of the vagaries of the Hindu caste system, no piercing analysis of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s mystical power over the Indian masses. What she has done is to provide the U.S. public with a book that transforms the late Katherine Mayo’s blowsy Mother India into a comparatively understandable problem child.

Miss Mitchell has no quarrel with the British people, having more than a touch of their own spunk herself, but she cringes at the pious hypocrisy and old-school stupidity which British rule has clamped over India for 150 years. To her, the British Raj hasn’t changed since Kipling left the Punjab. To the Raj, India is still the cornerstone of the Empire and must be held at all costs. The timeworn clichés with which excesses and failings have been shrouded Miss Mitchell attacks with a Bryn-Mawrian vigor implemented with the background of nine years on the secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Language barriers are not as insurmountable as claims that India has “222 separate languages” indicate. Three-fourths of the people are able to understand Indo-Aryan languages based on Sanskrit.

Communal problems are exaggerated for purposes of divide-and-rule and do not take into account that “the great majority of the Indian Moslems are descendants of converts from Hinduism”; and that despite outside interference there have been widespread instances of Hindu-Moslem cooperation.

Poverty is India’s curse—”rent and taxes usually consume more than half the peasant’s income, and most of the rest goes in payments to the moneylenders who frequently charge up to 100% interest.”

Industry is stagnant, or was at least until 1940, when war production was boosted by the military necessity of supplying Britain’s Eastern armies.

Princes of India are pawns of Empire and their 562 states are “friendly fortresses in debatable territory.”

Apologists for the Raj will scream that India Without Fable is an India without proper evaluation of the contributions of the British in flood control, civil administration and education toward eventual freedom. The apologists may also have a point in criticizing Miss Mitchell’s support of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The great & good Nehru, before being jailed for the second time in World War II, contended that Indians armed with guns and freedom, would fight invading Japanese. The Raj believed armed Indians would only fight among themselves (or turn their guns on their present rulers).

The only hope of a compromise, says Miss Mitchell, is for United Nations intervention:

“It cannot but be recognized that thus far it has been China’s heroic and effective resistance which has preserved the loyalty of the Asiatic peoples to the cause of the United Nations and served to combat the Japanese slogan of Asia for the Asiatics. . . . Equally certain is the fact that active participation in the war by the Indian people would have political effects of immense military value.”

That the U.S., as the self-appointed spokesman for freedom “everywhere in the world,” has a stake in India is abundantly clear, not only from Miss Mitchell’s book but from the increasing number of U.S. soldiers, flyers and technicians in India. OWI would have done well to read India Without Fable before releasing in Delhi posters which said: “The U.S. has sent its fighting men to India as crusaders in the cause of liberty—pledged to crush those who would enslave mankind.” Miss Mitchell and the Indians alike must have groaned at that.