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By Root 1657 0

anglicized, modern-minded ‘Establishment’ of perhaps 100,000 people drawn from highly educated (that is, mainly wealthy) families, those who had served the Raj as well as those who had built the freedom movement. The bizarrerie of this combination came out at a Christmas dinner in the house of the doe-eyed Renu Chakravarty, by then a communist MP – the Communist Party had not yet split – and powerhouse in Calcutta. After ham and turkey, provided by Renu’s cousin, secretary of the Calcutta Club, which clearly had not abandoned the menu of the days when no Indian would have been allowed into the building except as a servant, came biryani and finally Christmas pudding, also provided by the Club and chewing pan (betel nut). They were anglicized even in the language some of them spoke at home and wrote or read most easily, for I had the impression that only the Bengalis among them, and perhaps some of the more traditional Muslim families whose radical young read the progressive poets in Urdu (admired by my old friends and comrades Victor Kiernan and Ralph Russell) lived their mental lives fully in a vernacular.

There is only so much – actually not very much – that one can learn about a society through personal friendship. Friends may be too deeply rooted in it to recognize its peculiarities, and in any case class is at least as great a segregator of experiences as distance, culture or language. When the Party put him in charge of leading the tramwaymen’s union in Calcutta, and later the juteworkers of (West) Bengal my admirable friend and comrade from King’s, the late Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, subsequently General Secretary of the Communist Party and briefly Minister of the Interior, had as much to learn about the Calcutta working class as any foreigner. What I hope I owe to such friendships, based on the anti-racist comradeship of student communism, is the separation of the sense of equality from the consciousness of skin- or hair-colour, physical appearance and culture. The global village of business, science, technology and universities of the twenty-first century is so multi-coloured that this may no longer be a problem, although I suspect it is. Before 1960 or so the sense of racial superiority among western whites was reinforced by the sheer weight of western power and achievement in all fields except some of the arts, and the sheer bodily superiority of races commonly regarded as inferior, and so psychologically resented, repressed and overcompensated, especially by white males. The Israeli Jews made no secret of their contempt for ‘the Arabs’, especially before 1987, when their intifadas had not yet broken the passive acceptance of Israeli occupation of the Palestinians’ territories. It was a strange but instructive experience to be treated as one of them on my visit to the West Bank in 1984, the only time I have found myself living under the rule of a foreign military.

The enormous advantage of communism, especially when reinforced by friendship, was that one could simply not treat a comrade other than as an equal. The patent self-confidence of the favoured few from the coloured ‘colonial’ elites who made it into pre-war British universities helped. Just as horses sense fear in their riders, so humans sense the expectation of being treated as inferiors in their respondents. Ruling classes and conquerors have always exploited this expectation of superiority. My pre-war ‘colonial’ friends did not expect to be treated as inferiors.

Nevertheless, until I was awarded a travelling grant from the university to go to French North Africa in 1938, I had not been to what was not yet known as the Third World since I left Egypt as a baby. I travelled in Tunisia and east-central Algeria, from sea to Sahara, but never got to western Algeria and Morocco, and I acquired a lifelong scepticism about rural statistics in such places from a lonely French administrator in the field, ready to talk to any educated visitor. (‘When the government asks me for a livestock census, I make very casual enquiries, because the flocks would vanish into