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BOOKS Company We Kept Four hundred years of the great Indo-Anglian venture. By Ashok Malik THE EAST INDIA COMPANY Speaking to a friend a few days ago, I made a passing reference to the fact that I was reviewing a book on the East India Company. "Ah," she responded with an engaging smile, "that hotel group". Should I have been surprised? I'm not sure. After all, isn't so much of heritage no more than a part of India's collective amnesia? Aren't the days when a reference to simply "the Company" wouldn't have been lost on most educated Indians now only distant folklore? The loss of memory is mutual: it has infected, if even more perniciously, the other partner in one of history's greatest joint ventures. It is no longer possible to be both English and Anglophile. The best practitioners of Anglophilia now reside miles -- kilometres if you prefer -- away from Albion. To the contemporary classes, the past is not about pride; it is about buying a season ticket for a guilt trip. It wasn't always so. Certainly not on December 31, 1600, when the First Queen Elizabeth -- now better known as Shekhar Kapur's heroine -- put her seal on the charter of the East India Company. It is this quadricentennial Antony Wild's book seeks to commemorate. It has no agenda, being little more than a well-produced coffee-table volume on 250 years of buccaneer capitalism -- sometimes more of one than the other. It all ended amid the carnage of the Mutiny and was succeeded by the relative if deceptive calm of the Raj. The climax influenced all memory of the intercourse. So Indians have this permanent chip on the shoulder about being a ravaged "colony". In truth India, to its fortune or otherwise, was nothing of the sort. "The true British colonies of the empire," Wild writes, "were where white settlers made their home: Australia, Canada, Kenya, Rhodesia." Indians are strange people. They borrow selectively from the British: institutions, politics, education, language -- yes; sense of adventure and destiny -- no. To be Anglophilic is by definition to possess an enormous self-belief. In the early years, the East India Company was gripped by it. With all its angularities -- the Company "effectively institutionalised the corruption of its servants by allowing and regulating ... private trade" -- it was a meritocracy. To quote Wild again, "Unlike the Crown army, commissions were not bought but achieved on merit, which opened it to the ambitious sons of the middle classes." Conduct was professional. The native soldier was respected. The Company's servants brought with them "the English passion for ethnography and the accurate depiction of the differences between tribes, castes and occupations". With its paintings, jottings, journals, "The Century leading up to the company's dissolution saw the largest effort ever undertaken by one culture to depict another". Clive and his people were rapacious but there was an honour among thieves, an abiding loyalty to Company, crown and country. It was a spirited, assimilative culture free of (proto)-Victorian prudery because "the Company shrewdly banned any missionary activities on its territories until 1813". There was a sense of superiority but no desire to impose mores. In Warren Hastings' words, it was the duty of the English "to protect their (Hindus') persons from wrong and to leave their religious creed to the Being who has so long endured it and who will in his own time reform it". When this sentiment died, and the Company looked upon itself as ruler rather than patron, decline set in. To borrow Hickey's words, even if he described only a party in Calcutta, the final years of the Company were "the most sustained debauch I had seen". The alienation between the two races led to conflict and, finally, Empire. Where once there was talk of a shared culture, now there was only sneer. By the time Lutyens arrived to describe prevailing Indian architecture as the "mad riot of the tom tom", the divide was there for all to see. Wild's book has ancillary vignettes as well. He writes of the coffee houses that were, in part, the Company's gift to London: "The very nature of coffee caught a certain mood in the City; stimulating, intellectual and subversive, coffee fuelled the rise of trade and capitalism." Out of London's coffee houses emerged Lloyds Insurance and the Stock Exchange. India too set up coffee houses. They produced pseudo-intellectuals. Says something about the way they were -- and we weren't. NEW RELEASES Tales Told By An Idiot Inside Nepal Domestic Environment and Health of Women and
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