Unlighted Places

INDIA CALLED THEM (418 pp.)--Lord Beveridge--Macmillan ($4.50).

"Now India," said Kipling cynically, "is a place beyond all other where one must not take things too seriously--the midday sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much . . . drink . . . Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output and another man takes all the credit . . ."

But Lord Beveridge's book about his father and mother, who spent most of their working years in India, shows that some, at least, of the Anglo-Indians were not indifferent to the country and to their jobs. In 1857, when he was 20, Henry Beveridge went to "the dustbin of Bengal" as an administrator. In those days a man's best qualification for the Indian Civil Service consisted mainly in being able to answer such questions as: Write succinctly and in Latin biographical notices of the following personages, stating the date and place of birth of each: Theramenes, Polybius, Poseidonius, Arcesilaus, Parmenides, Eratosthenes.

Henry remained in India for 35 tortuous years. He married Annette Arkroyd, who had come to India with the naive but passionate determination to educate and emancipate the women.

An Unsafe Man. Husband & wife were equally well-read, equally opposed to pedantic thinking ("Anything clear and definite," said Henry, "is only another word for limited"), hard-working and unsentimental ("I know I value some qualities more than tenderheartedness," said Annette). In his office of district judge, Henry was a stern man, but in his general opinions he was usually unorthodox. "Every European in India is more or less in a false position," he said; "[the natives'] dislike and distrust of us are reasonable . . ."

No wonder the government regarded Henry as "an unsafe man" and consistently refused to promote him beyond a certain point. Much wonder that he was able to say, "When I sit in the garden in the cool of the evening ... I feel as if I never could go home. India has burnt itself into me and I dread the cold and wet country of my birth."

The Naughty Sun. In the backwater districts which Henry administered, servants took the place of the "water supply, sanitation, metalled roads, mechanical transport and shops of Western communities." Though "relatively humble" people, Henry and Annette lived and traveled with as many as 39 servants (senior officials carried a train of more than 100). They raised four children in a swampy wasteland teeming with wild pigs, buffalo, cobras, scorpions, fleas, flies and ("most abundantly") leeches. Fever and dysentery were everyday matters--trifles compared with the cholera which, by slow degrees, killed their beautiful youngest child.

Sin & Expiation. Henry and Annette would not have left so many letters if they had not been forced to spend half their lives apart--he, sitting in the fetid courtroom "jabbering Bengali 6 or 7 hours every day with the artful dodgers;" she, reviving her pallid children in the cool hills of Darjeeling and Mussoorie; when the children were taken to school in England both had to be separated from them. "We (excuse me dear)," wrote Henry at last, "are so old that we may not see much of our children or they of us if we wait till our retirement." "Our separations," Annette said bitterly, "are expiations enough for holding [this] country."

A New History. Both made contributions--local studies and biographies--to that vast unread library of India which hundreds of Englishmen, have written for two centuries. As the years passed, they noted that a new Indian history was growing under their eyes. The slapdash, casual rule of the old East India Company "nabobs" was being tightened into the more efficient but far more inflexible system of imperial government. India was dividing into two worlds--that of the alien ruler and that of the native ruled; and day by day it grew more difficult for men like Henry to "belong to both."

As the century drew to a close, he was comparing British hegemony to the new electric light, which "only throws into deeper shadow the unlighted places." He publicly preached that the British must get out as fast as possible; and, in 1893 he retired to England, believing that he and Annette had not many years to live. Both lived until 1929, long enough to see their elder son become one of England's top social planners. Annette Beveridge was 86 when she died, nearly stone-deaf at the last and vigorously translating Turkish biography. "Perhaps the cleverest lady and the wickedest in her opinions that I have ever met," said Bernard Shaw.

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