It would take an intrepid novelist to invent the life of Behramji Malabari, whose 160th birth anniversary falls in 2013. My own imagination quails at the thought of creating a great Hindu reformer who was born a Parsi in Baroda, educated at an Irish mission school in Surat after the death of his father, where he was adopted by a childless Gujarati spice trader.
Behramji took his name, Malabari, from the Malabar spices in his adopted father's shop, though his love for writing and for reform was entirely his own. He began his career as a Gujarati poet, switching with dismaying results to English.
The Indian Muse in English Garb is grimly awful, as this 1876 ode to The Empress of India demonstrates: "See! how lordly Nizam glares! Holkar, Scindia and Benares, Cashmire, Jepur and their heirs/Evincing all their loyalty!/See the gallant Gaicowar, Princes of old Katyawar, And each dominant Durbar/Increasing thy hilarity!"
But his first collection of poems, the Niti Vinod written in Gujarati, foreshadowed his interests far better than his English verses: odes bewailing the curse of infant marriage, the "prayer of a Hindu widow" marked the areas where he would argue for reform.
Max Mueller wrote a gentle letter when he received a copy of the younger man's English poems: "Whether we write English verse or English prose, let us never forget that the best service we can render is to express our truest Indian or German thoughts in English…" In subsequent decades, Malabari would translate Mueller's lectures on Hinduism, attempting to justify his own argument that some of the Indian guardians of religion had misinterpreted the Vedas and the Puranas.
One hundred and sixty years after Malabari's birth, it is not his poems that should be exhumed from their well-earned grave, but his prose. When Malabari wrote Gujarat and the Gujaratis, some seven years after his volume of verse, he became part of a generation of Indians who were reversing the gaze of the traveller to the Orient.
He had trained as a journalist at The Times of India and by the time he took over as editor of The Spectator, Behramji Malabari's paper was part of the new, thriving, often robustly combative school of Indian journalism - from Hindoo Patriot and The Pioneer to The Indian Statesman and Indian Mirror, "native" Indian journalists had begun to report on their own country.
Gujarat and the Gujaratis reminds me of the very contemporary explorations of their own cities, and of the "other" India, undertaken by writers such as Aman Sethi, Sonia Faleiro and Amitava Kumar. The gap of a century shows in terms of craft: Behramji left out the fact that he had walked across large stretches of Gujarat, for instance.
He ruffled several feathers: "Something ails it now," he wrote of his "poor, primitive, peace-loving" Surat. Of Broach he writes: "The town itself is henpecked by that termagant of a river, the Narbada; the husbands are henpecked by their better halves."
Malabari published his influential Notes on Infant Marriage in 1884. His zeal for reform was successful, winning him the friendship of Florence Nightingale, among others. Writing the foreword to Malabari's biography, she remarked: "The mission which he led against infant marriage has stirred up a strong feeling of hostility in some quarters. But … the evils he has attacked will be acknowledged to be those which most endanger the physical and moral well-being of the Indian race."
A few years later, he published The Indian Eye on English Life. Malabari, who began by trying to imitate the English, and then by reporting like a tourist on his own country, would close his literary career with this absolutely confident travelogue. He turned as close and as carefully scrutinising an eye on Britian as any traveller from the West had done on India: this was the exotic Occident. England's cities were crowded, he reported, their food barbaric; everybody ate too much, walked too fast, and yet, he admired their energy and their political engagement.
The Cockneys on buses and the London bobbies were rendered for comic effect, just as travellers to India had written with patronising charm about the antics of palkiwallahs and khidmatgars. "The people seem to be as changeable and restless as the weather," Malabari writes, and elsewhere, of the English habit of eating in shops, on the streets and in the open: "Bismillah! How these Firanghis do eat!" He found points of resemblance: "How like our Diwan-i-Khas and Diwan-i-Am of old are these Houses of Parliament!" and of resentment: "Talking of 'Babu English,' I should like to know how many Englishmen speak Bengali half so well as Bengalis speak English."
After his return, Malabari was interviewed by a Bombay newspaper. "How much I wish my countrymen travelled more freely, and that they studied history, modern and ancient, with a tithe of the zeal they devote to barren rhetoric or still more barren speculation." Over a century later, much has changed in India, but versions of Malabari's complaints - and his optimistic belief in change - survive, side by side.
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