Consider this. A young Hindu boy's only objection to being kissed on the mouth by an English man is that the white man eats meat. Unbelievable as it may seem today, this is a true encounter from 1920s India, recorded in a book that is now 70 years old – JR Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday (The Viking Press, 1932). Quite expectedly then, considering its content and considering the India of today where homosexuality is still considered a perversity and is illegal to boot, in Indian bookshops Hindoo Holiday is stacked alongside tourist guides and the Kamasutra where the average Indian seldom dares to tread. With its candid approach to a subject that is largely taboo, Hindoo Holiday addresses a niche readership that is not put off by its seeming 'decadence'.
Since Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927), a vicious trashing of Indian culture and its society's excesses, and Lajpat Rai's largely justified strident counterattack in Unhappy India (1928), it has become easy to dismiss any attempt to explore or expand on the idea of India as malicious anti-national propaganda. The far-right Hindutva brigade cheerfully disrupts the screening of films about lesbian relationships, rewrites history texts and bans books providing evidence for that well acknowledged truth that Hindus once ate cows. Four months ago, in June, when burnt bodies, lying on the ground like pieces of an art installation, shared the pages of the newspaper with the repartee of nuclear threats between India and Pakistan, I picked up Hindoo Holiday. Reading about the strange yet familiar place India was, makes you wonder, what good is it, and why even bother, evoking an ultra-bowdlerised Bharatmata, a squeaky clean Mother India, who, in all likelihood, never even existed?
In 1923, Joseph Randolph Ackerley, English and 27 years old, came to India at the suggestion of his friend EM Forster, and spent a little over five months in the small principality of Chhatarpur as the "English private secretary" to the maharaja there. Hindoo Holiday was the product of the journal that he maintained during his stint in India. Its people, the maharaja with his homosexual subtext, and his retinue of a prime minister, a secretary, five Englishmen and women, the ubiquitous flunkies and some off-stage conspiring relatives, make for a cast of the usual suspects, but it is Ackerley's treatment of them that has something valuable to offer. Depending on historical and cultural contexts, a reader will take various views of and from the book. Its initial publishers found the account so scandalous, they insisted that the more risqué ponderings on the maharaja be edited out and the name of the state be fictionalised. As a result, Ackerley's Indian holiday is located in 'Chhokrapur' – translated, that would mean Ladsville, or "City of Boys". And, in India today, the book is stacked way back in the section that storekeepers think will attract only depraved and/or curious Westerners, looking for a 'quickie' while they travel through the Subcontinent.
The book finds the appellation 'funny' tagged to it by pleased readers and the knee-jerk reaction is to think that the Indians in the book are being ridiculed. Ackerley, as an Englishman, occupies a superior position: apart from the fact that he belongs to the colonising race, his personal circumstances also are much better than that of most of the characters. One knows that even the maharaja, despite his wealth and status, would have given his right arm for the Oxbridge education Ackerley carries so lightly. However, on reading through the book as opposed to merely looking at the blurbs, one funds in the patiently recorded conversations that ridicule of Indians is certainly not its aim and Indian readers suspect derision instinctively only because of their own complexes.