How Ruskin Bond made being Anglo-Indian a way of life

Historicity of Ghosts

Back in 1986, when Ruskin Bond was 52 years old, American Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson made an astounding claim about what he called “third world literatures”, meant to denote, among others, Indian literature. Accordingly, one key aspect of this literature, which was bound to include Bond’s writings from Maplewood Cottage, Mussoorie, was that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society”.

Maplewood, a recurrent habitat for Bond, was where he began staying with his mother when he was seven, after his parents’ separation and the start of his mother’s new family, followed by his father’s premature death. He would remember his father’s demise as an act of “vanishing” without any “tangible evidence”. Bond grew up expecting his ghost to suddenly appear in the “unkempt” litchi garden. Located beside a half-burned maple tree, witness to the incessant arboreal theatre of woodpeckers and insects, Bond’s Maplewood appears to have sprung from the woods. With the correlation between his father’s death and the lifelike cavernous branches that creep into his room from large bay windows, the forest is endowed with a mysterious will to resurrect his mourned ancestors.

Far from Bond’s enchanted world, Jameson’s criticism came under attack by Indian Marxists, like the late Aijaz Ahmad. However, in an uncanny turn of fate, Bond’s life of letters has very much taken on the face of a national allegory. Very few might like to challenge the claim that India’s spiritual contours can be read from the eight decades of Bond’s mammoth literary production.

Bond, who recently turned a nonagenarian, is one of India’s most loved and longest-read authors. For as long as one can remember, he has quietly created a reservoir of hybrid Indian and Anglo-Saxon worlds that are famously “haunted”, in his own words, by “ghosts”. Bond has often joked that he creates them when he runs out of people. But even such a pun is not without its practical purposes. For, as Bond’s friend, the historian and author, Professor Ganesh Saili writes, in a recent article, “to be ninety years old and write four books in a year is not for the faint-hearted. Only the brave can diligently plough their lonesome furrow”.

Saili is to be trusted because he has been a friend to Bond for 55 years. Also, Saili has been a resident and owner of Trim Lodge located in Mullingar flat, which was once the home of the nineteenth-century East India Company official and potato entrepreneur, Captain Frederick Young, whose ghost was immortalised in Bond’s Captain Young’s Ghost. In Bond’s tale, set in a town where almost everyone is seen exchanging fables of the dead Irish captain, Young’s revenant is said to return to the hills on misty nights, with the moonlight “silvering the oaks and maples”. The white phantom steed that awaits the captain beside the old Mullingar cottage is “a homeless ghost like his master”, and, in Bond’s words, imagination begins to imitate historicity.

This innocent interchangeability of fact, fiction, and phenomena leads this columnist to consider Bond’s discipline as being one of a Zen form of literary production, which is least surprising since he is renowned among his benign neighbours as the writer who writes all day.

As Saili adds, at least as far back as the late 1960s, Bond had “already earned the reputation of being a sort of Dr Doolittle, who was willing to listen patiently to the baker’s complaint of poor yeast, or even the milkman’s tale of a bad monsoon”. And, as Bond’s fellow Doonwallahs and fierce protectors — the Ganesh Sailis and Stephen Alters — would agree, it takes a gigantic deal more than simply gossiping ghosts of the yesteryears to make possible the kind of oeuvre that Bond has actualised. Above all, it requires a will to allegorise the nation from a tiny microcosm like Mussoorie and Landour — albeit not in the Marxist sense that Jameson deployed that notion but in a deeply spiritual sense.

Beyond the Wordsworthian

In fact, it is not even flippant to discuss that last element, especially since the state of Uttarakhand has, in recent times, toyed with dark tourism in the Doon’s ‘haunted’ sites—a phenomenon that is greatly owed to Bond’s writings, besides colonial history and architectural relics.

Besides, it is concerning to see how little serious intellectual attention is paid to Bond in elite university discussions despite his inestimably large literary produce. Notable exceptions include Meena Khorana’s The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond (Greenwood, 2003); Amita Aggarwal’s The Fictional World of Ruskin Bond (Sarup and Sons, 2005); Debasis Bandyopadhyay’s Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond (Anthem, 2011) and the scholar’s academic papers. For what it is worth, this columnist’s 2014 doctoral dissertation on Bond and other Doon dwellers was left eventually unpublished out of respect for India’s resident Wordsworth.

This sparseness of critical reflections on Bond is indeed surprising given that, for almost four decades now, publishers like Penguin, Rupa, Roli, and recently Speaking Tiger have been releasing ubiquitously popular titles featuring Bond’s stories, novellas, novels, and poetry, that are voraciously lapped up by readers in lieu of the Doon Valley’s pristine dew.

Yet, Bond’s writings are by no means simply idyllic and Wordsworthian as so many commentators would hurriedly have us believe. Rather, one can mine in them hieroglyphs of his beloved and forsworn pasts that lie frozen as apparitions. Hence, Bond’s ‘timeless’ and ‘uncomplicated’ tales from the hills, as they are loosely labelled, are nodes where social, racial, gendered, sexual, and economic complexities of colonial and postcolonial times are encrusted. The afterlives of mental maps, acoustics, buildings, and characters crystallised in his stories are not ‘nostalgic’ colonial relics, but survivalist assertions by a marginalised identity.

The mutability of Bond’s hauntings transforms the personal into a public and the literary into a social space. His Doon memoirs are uncanny dramatisations of space in the guise of lost Indo-Anglo-Saxon families, and their recuperations in a haunted landscape. Buildings like Maplewood, Mulberry Cottage, the Savoy Hotel, and abandoned cottages of Pari Tibba or Camel’s Back Road, besides archetypal Anglo-Indian characters, keep resurfacing in Bond’s literary spaces of Mussoorie and Landour. They represent a fundamental resistance to the social abjection that Anglo-Indian and Indian subalterns have undergone in postcolonial India. Bond often produces this resistance by breathing life into the most trivial nonentities.

Consider how Bond’s trees, flowers, and tombstones—indeed, in that order—are palpably brought alive to redefine the meaning of the word ‘haunting’. In a recent collection of old writings I Was the Wind Last Night (2017), the Doon alternates between nocturnal aliens; conifers, oaks, walnuts, spruces or pines, whispering in “mysterious diction” on dusky hillsides; solitary rhododendrons, violets, commelinas and ferns; stone houses and “old spirit-haunted rocks”; haunted hillsides, abandoned quarries, broken walls, mango groves and old bungalows; orchestras of crickets; rain-washed cherry trees; “sun-kissed” buttercups and vines; jacarandas planted by his deceased father and the echoes of his separated mother’s laughter; cemeteries “nourished by the bones” of Anglo-Saxon colonels, collectors, magistrates or memsahibs; haunted platforms, haunted railway tracks, haunted cafés and thrift shops, haunted closets and haunted romantic trysts.

In one of his classic short stories, Whistling in the Dark, the author encounters a “rotting coffin and a few scattered bones” as the relics of a Victorian civilisation, whose cemetery walls are approaching collapse, and so are the bones of a corpse, that “fall to the grass. Dust to dust”. Far from disgust or fear, the tale evokes poignant empathy. Soon, a phantom bicyclist that the author sees around the cemetery is revealed as Michael Dutta, who died at the age of 15, in November 1950, as recorded in the burial register of the church vestry.

The play between nature’s ephemerality and the eternity of the Doon’s ghosts guarding their tombstones or gossiping about the town’s goings-on, the dahlias and salvias strewn over the graves orchestrating virtual funerals, with sombre, yet seductive chiaroscuro effects, continues in another classic short story, The Overcoat. Herein, Dutta is reconfigured as Julie, whom the author lends his woollen garment on a cold night, unaware that the girl has been dead for 40 years until he finds her buried in “a small cemetery under the deodars”. Against the “eternal snows” of the hills rising against the “pristine blue sky”, the archetypal cemetery restages itself by “the bones of forgotten empire-builders—soldiers, merchants, adventurers, their wives and children”.

Allegorical Time Warps

Behind the headstone of Julie’s tomb lies the overcoat, verily an artefact from the present, yet haunted by the wraith of a 16-year-old English girl, who caresses him with a faint kiss as he departs from the graveyard. Like the Indo-Anglo-Australian barrister John Lang (whose grave Bond once found and wrote about in In Search of John Lang), and buried generations of Bohles and Mackinnons (the Doon’s earliest brewers), Michael and Julie are Bond’s alter egos but also the suppressed others whom we, the outsiders, have overtaken for our beloved urbane masks.

Bond’s literary conjurations by the knoll at the Camel’s Back cemetery not only represent his profound kinship with posthumous Anglo-Indian characters but are also akin to sacred meditations, where, like the motion of squirrels and the twittering of insects, sun and wind play suit to the spectral mise-en-scène.

“The sunlight, penetrating the gaps in the tall trees, plays chess on the gravestones, shifting slowly and thoughtfully across the worn old stones. The wind, like a hundred violins, plays perpetually in the topmost branches of the deodars. The only living thing in sight is an eagle, wheeling high overhead,” reads Bond’s A Time for All Things.

While mostly Bond needs no excuse to walk us into these time warps, occasionally the pretext comes in the form of the fictional Major Roberts, who, within the fictional world of Bond’s Time Stops at Shamli comes to be uncannily recognised by the stock of Indian, Anglo-Indian, and Southeast Asian castaways whose refuge is the town’s solitary guest house.

In a way, the forsaken lodge mimes the famous hotel in Mussoorie that is said to be ‘haunted’ by the real-life spectre of Frances Garnett-Orme, allegedly poisoned to death in 1911 by Eva Mountstephen with hydrogen cyanide, probably through the victim’s bottle of bicarbonate. Bond, who fictionalised the episode in In a Crystal Ball: A Mussoorie Mystery (2007), floated the theory that Arthur Conan Doyle was sent news of the murder by Rudyard Kipling, and passed it on to Agatha Christie, who used the plot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921).

Combine that with the ostracised Markham, the wounded Anglo-Indian soldier from Bond’s story When Darkness Falls, who wears a false nose and is afraid to stir out of his room at the allegorical Empire Hotel. Born of a race of empire builders, Markham meets his death in an accidental fire which also consumes the wife of the hotel’s new Indian proprietor, signifying how natural elements do not discriminate between colonial and postcolonial feudal lords.

When Bond’s legendary ghosts are seen in the light of this adage, they recast Bond’s hauntings from the frivolously sensational to the deeply historical to the profoundly philosophical.

In August Fellowship

And then comes Bond’s mischievous streak of the farcical, with flashes of some of his favourite authors — Roald Dahl, P G Wodehouse, and Somerset Maugham. “Stand still for ten minutes, and they’ll build a hotel on top of you,” he writes in The Old Names Linger On, quoting an old timer on the “concrete jungle that had sprung up along Mussoorie’s Mall”.

Nevertheless, Bond’s odysseys pave a way out of congested constructions of the new millennium. Far from the madding crowd, his pastoral world refuses to metamorphose into urban silos that have lost old-school specimens of goodwill, fellowship, collegiality, and other dearly departed gestures.

Today, Bond’s name is synonymous with the names of cottages of the twin townships – Mullingar, Zephyr Lodge, Companybagh, Cloud End, Killarney, Shamrock Cottage, Scottsburn, Redsburn, Wolfsburn, Connaught Castle, Grey Castle, Hampton Court, Castle Hill, or names borrowed from Walter Scott’s novels, Kenilworth, Ivanhoe, Rokeby, Waverley, and Woodstock.

But for these, but for the Sahitya Fellowship, and but for his extraordinarily fertile literary life, we may well have seen in Bond another ‘Unknown Indian’ in the form of late author Nirad C Chaudhuri. If we must draw one great allegorical code from Bond’s writings, it would be this: that the Doon, and therefore India, is still home to a multitude of anonymous souls, many of whom became the immortal protagonists of Bond’s stories; for whom a life of arduous struggles could be led with the least possible degree of bitterness; and whatever little bitterness remained undigested could always precipitate in oodles of self-deprecating dry humour and, well…obviously ‘ghosts.’

Like Nirad Babu — and like Salman Rushdie whose much-awaited memoir Knife was recently released — Bond does not speak the truth but rather sings it on an off-centre scale. His beloved spirits will continue to name the liars amidst us. Yet, so long as we remain a society willing to confer our ‘fellowship’ on the little old Rusty from the Mussoorie hills, redemption must be just round the corner.

Works Cited

Aggarwal, Amita. The Fictional World of Ruskin Bond. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons. Bandyopadhyay, Debasis. Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond. London, New York: Anthem, 2011. Bond, Ruskin. Times Stops at Shamli and Other Stories. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. – Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. New Delhi: Penguin, 1991. – Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas. New Delhi: Penguin, 1996. – A Season of Ghosts. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000 – The Landour Cookbook: Over Hundred Years of Hillside Cooking. Edited, with Ganesh Saili. New Delhi: Lustre, 2001. – The Book of Nature. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. – Roads to Mussoorie. New Delhi: Rupa, 2005. – Collected Short Stories. New Delhi: Penguin, 2016. – I was the Wind Last Night. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2018. – Captain Young’s Ghost. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2018. – A Time for All Things. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2018.