This is the extraordinary story of Dominique Lapierre’s love affair with India, from his first 20,000 kilometre drive across the subcontinent gathering unique testimonies for his epic account of India’s independence.
India My Love Dominique Lapierre Full Cycle Publishing Pages: 192; Price: 275 |
Dominique Lapierre is an old hand. The French journalist has written about India before, such books as ‘The City of Joy’ and ‘Freedom At Midnight’. Such is his creative ability that the latter work sold more than the lakh copies. Translate simultaneously into Italian, Spanish, German and English, it turned up to be Number One on the best-seller lists.
The huge commercial success of the book he says gave him the means to keep a promise he had made in the course of the research, which was “to thank India for the hospitality she had offered him”. The promise has been kept, ‘India My Love’ tells it how. The book is in two parts. The first part deals with Maharajahs and rickshaw pullers, of interviews with Indira Gandhi and Gopal Godse (Nathuram Godse’s elder brother) and the victims of the infamous Bhopal gas disaster.
Revealing in many ways – and appealing to the West – there is reference to the seventh Maharajah of Patiala, a man with a gargantuan appetite who consumed 20 kilos of good everyday and had “at the height of his glory, 365 wives and concubines in his royal harem”. However, he says feudal India was not merely a catalogue of eccentric whims. No doubt such recollections do tickle the western render but to discover Lapierre one must focus on part two where he writes about “the unsung heroes of India” and this is truly heart-warming.
He had arrived in old Calcutta, wishing to interview Mother Teresa and was greeted by a 40-year old Englishman, James Stevens, representing the Mother. Stevens himself turned out to be a male replica of the Mother in the care for the poor and the needy, running an organisation called Udayan which was taking care of over 120 poor children suffering from various diseases. But Stevens was at the end of his tether. He was running short of finances and had to borrow money to feed his protégés, many suffering from leprosy.
Stevens had long ago decided to make India his home, having sold his business and his comfortable existence in England. When Lapierre met him, Stevens was in a quandary and Lapierre decided to help him out. Making use of hit popularity in the French media, he managed to raise some three thousand donors. The donations helped Stevens to run a leprosy colony of some six hundred lepers whose living conditions were, to say the least, atrocious. They were living in “complete segregation” with ten or twelve people crammed in a single room. Purulent and decomposed bodies were lying on mats, the stench was nauseating. They needed help desperately.
From there Stevens took Lapierre to another locality in Calcutta. It was, he who put it “the heart of horror”. 70,000 people lived there in a space barely bigger than three football fields. Says Lapierre: “We cross a mesh of hovels without water, electricity or windows alleys with open drains, it row of stinking mangers, an incredible universe teeming with rats, centipedes and cockroaches. People were living on less a than a rupee a day. And this place was a run by a 44-year old Swiss man called Gaston.
To quote Lapierre afraid: “The dirt, the malnutrition, the superstition and the complete lack of hygiene doesn’t give a minute’s respite to this foreigner.” And what about Gaston himself? Writes Lapierre: “Gaston doesn’t have a bed. He sleeps on a mat which he unrolls every night…In summer the drains overflow and the torrential monsoon rain makes the Iatrines overflow and the slum is swamped in a lake of excrement, forcing Gaston to use a scaffolding of planks laid on bricks to sleep on. To garner experience and to know what it means to live in a slum, Lapierre decided to spend one night in Gaston’s ‘bedroom’. It was to be in the company of centipedes, rats and scorpions…and all this in the City of Joy.
Summing up his experiences Lapierre writes: “Admittedly my research was long, difficult and sometimes extremely painful. From the outset I was forced to adapt to situations I had never experienced before… My life, my vision of the world and my sense of values have all changed. I am trying to detach myself from life’s trifling problems…”
After experien¬cing all this he returns to Paris taking with him about twenty crammed note¬books, hundreds of hours of recorded interviews and 2,000 photographs, as he put it “the most amazing documentation” he had ever gathered in his entire career as a writer. The result is this book. This has resulted in Lapierre financing over a dozen institutions of the kind he saw in Calcutta and elsewhere, thanks to the royalties he earned and the generosity of his readers and friends.
Reading him one realises, sometimes, the depth of frustration Lapierre suffers from. There is a reference to the other book he had written: ‘Five past Midnight in Bhopal’ in which he recalls that it took twenty six years for an Indian Court to finally sentence some of the people responsible for the Bhopal tragedy. He sharply notes that there was no American among the accused. Warren Anderson, the owner of Union Carbide at the time of the tragedy, notes Lapierre, has been living in “peaceful seclusion of his luxurious home in Connecticut. America will never consent to the extradition of this captain of industry to a Third World country while in Bhopal women continue to live with multiple cancers “and children are still born with incomplete brains and atrophied limbs and men are still victims of brutal blindness and respiratory collapse”.
Sadly, even as one continues to read this most touching work one begins to ask whether Indian media wants a French journalists to write about people and places right under its nose. Here in India our media men take every¬thing for granted. It does not have the Lapierres and Stevens, beside Gastons and Mother Teresas to tell us what our own people undergo. For Lapierre India is his love. A note says: “All of the money from the author’s royalties and from renders’ donations goes entirely to serve priority action in Bhopal Kolkata or rural Bengal. And that says a lot.
M.V. KAMATH
