Bent A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting

The Past and Present Society
'Bent': A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting

Author(s): Joselyn Zivin
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Past & Present, No. 162 (Feb., 1999), pp. 195-220
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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'BENT': A COLONIAL SUBVERSIVE AND
INDIAN BROADCASTING*
I
In the
August
heat of
1935,
a
middle-aged
man
-
very tall,
thin
and
elegantly
dressed
-
disembarks in
Bombay,
relieved to be
away
from his tedious
English shipmates
and their
gossip
about
hill stations and
promotions. Scanning
with veiled interest the
crowd of Indian men
milling
about the
gangway,
he is
resigned
that it is one of the older
ones,
in a
shoddy
derivative of his own
impeccable suit,
who will be his contact. He has come on loan
from the BBC to make Indian radio into a modern concern in
five
years
-
a
bright, shiny
service that will
whip undisciplined
and
frankly
too Indian tastes into
shape,
and
maybe
elevate some
segment
of the
hopeless
masses at the same time.
(Is
there a
slight
air of
hostility radiating
from some of their number
nearby?)
He
is no fan of the
deathly
dull and
retrograde
British
imperial
government
to be
sure,
and
plans
to thwart the officials who will
undoubtedly
feel some entitlement to broadcast since the
Raj
is
financing it; surely eliminating
this bother will
require
but a few
private
chats with those at the
very top,
fellow Etonians and the
like. The first order of business is to establish contact
immediately
with those who
really
matter in India
-
Gandhi, Jawaharlal
Nehru and the other clever
young
nationalists. Put them on the
radio,
mix in
edifying
cultural
programmes
and some Indian
music with the orchestra! If those bores on the boat hate
it,
what
does it matter?
They
are a
dying
breed
anyway.
What India and
Indian radio
really
need are more
visionaries,
and who better
than Lionel Fielden?
Less than two
years later, Jawaharlal Nehru, by
then Fielden's
friend, responded
to Fielden's terrible frustration with
interfering
*
This article was first drafted at a 1996 National Endowment for the Humanities
seminar, 'Rediscovering
the British
Empire',
directed
by
William
Roger
Louis in
Austin,
Texas. It benefited
greatly
from
readings by
the seminar
members, particularly
Roger Louis, Cary
Fraser and Louise Williams
and,
at a later
stage,
from comments
by
Richard G.
Fox,
Dane
Kennedy
and Deborah
Symonds.
The Drake
University
Center for the Humanities
provided funding
for research and translation.
196 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 162
imperialists,
Indian
critics, scanty
audiences and a
seeming
uni-
versal
disregard
of his
project.
'I am afraid
you
are a misfit in
that
job,
or in India: but then all of us
are',
Nehru wrote. 'You
blame others but does not the fault lie . . . in circumstances that
are
bigger
than
individuals,
in the
unhealthy
relation between
India and
England,
in the
topsy-turvy
world
itself?'1
Fielden embodied that
'topsy-turvy
world'. His
story
-
of
how a
'bent', iconoclastic,
anti-colonial aesthete made his
way
to
the centre of the British establishment in New Delhi and came
to be viewed as the founder of Indian
broadcasting by
his Indian
successors
-
is
surely
one that
challenges
conventional
depictions
of the 'Servants of
Empire'.
Most of these valorize the civil-
service
class,
men imbued with
'initiative, fortitude, courage
and
a
profound
sense of
duty'.2
As India's first Controller of
Broadcasting,
Fielden came in from
offstage
and disdained those
who measured their worth
by
an outdated
imperial yardstick.
A
member of a
cynical generation
of First World War
veterans,
scornful of his own
upper-class Englishness
and
'allergic
to
respectability',
Fielden was
perfectly
at home in
Bloomsbury
and
Florence,
but
nothing
short of a subversive in colonial India. Yet
it was the last that
gave
him the role of his life: his
story
illumin-
ates the intersection between the new
century's cosmopolitanism
and the
previous
one's
empire.
Indeed,
the
very
instrument of
modernity
that Fielden
brought
with him
posed great dangers
to
imperial prerogatives.
The dis-
tances that
broadcasting
could cover and the boundaries it could
transgress,
the mass
society
which it was
expected
to
cultivate,
and the novel
expertise
it demanded
(from
outsiders like
Fielden)
all violated what little was left of the
'Imperial
Idea'. This was
the claim that colonial
governance
-
by
virtue of the firm hand
1'Jawaharlal Nehru to Lionel
Fielden, Allahabad,
5
Jan. 1937',
in Lionel
Fielden,
The Natural Bent
(London, 1960),
198. Fewer than 1 in 350 in India were 'domestic
listeners' as late as
1939,
as
compared
to the 73 out of 100 households with radios in
England: figures
from G. C.
Awasthy, Broadcasting
in India
(Bombay, 1965), 259;
Asa
Briggs,
The
History of Broadcasting
in the United
Kingdom,
5 vols.
(Oxford, 1995),
ii,
235-6.
2
T. H.
Beaglehole,
'From Rulers to Servants: The ICS and the British
Demission
of Power in
India',
Mod. Asian
Studies,
ii
(1977).
Most studies deal
exclusively
with
the covenanted Indian and colonial civil
services,
and
emphasize (or assume)
a remark-
able
unanimity
with which the select adhered to the service ethos. A classic collective
biography
is
Philip
Mason
[pseud. Woodruff],
The Men Who Ruled India
(New York,
1954).
Recent
scholarship
has maintained this stance: see Clive
Dewey, Anglo-Indian
Attitudes: The Mind
of
the Indian Civil Service
(London, 1993); John Cell, Hailey:
A
Study
in British
Imperialism,
1872-1969
(Cambridge, 1992).
Lionel Fielden
(front row,
second from
right)
surrounded
by
AIR station
managers.
Ahmed Bokhari is on Fielden's
right; Zulfaqar
Bokhari is on his left.
Government of
India, Report
on the
Progress of Broadcasting
in India
(up
to the 31st March
1939) (Simla, 1939)
(By permission of
The British
Library)
of the district
officer,
a liberal code of law that
permitted
moderate
dissent, closely supervised
civic and
legislative
forums
-
was the
sole conduit to India's
appropriate political
and social
maturity.3
Broadcasting
advocates like Fielden entertained
very
different
notions of
progress; they
had ideas about how to elevate and
unify
mass
tastes,
how to liberate listeners from
parochialism,
and how to
engineer
a more
immediately
inclusive kind of
popular
politics
based on the world of information learned from the radio.
These were not
possibilities
that most
stability-minded
officers
of the British Government of India had
any
interest in
facilitating.
The fact was that
by
the 1930s Indian
public opinion
was almost
entirely nationalist,
in the sense of
being
'for Indian
self-rule',
even if it
fragmented along prescriptive, religious
and other
divides. This
hegemony explains why imperial
conservatives were
deeply leery
about associations between the radio and mass
poli-
tics. For
them,
the
implementation
of state
broadcasting,
an
expensive
and
technologically daunting project
in
underdeveloped
India,
was at best a
strategic
defence. The radio was a
potential
weapon
of
war,
and not
just
of
foreign
war
-
already Germany
and
Italy
had started
up
short-wave
propaganda
services directed
toward international audiences
-
but of the domestic war
being
fought
with the Indian national movement. In the latter
case,
the
possibility
that the
government's opponents might
control the
ether
seemed,
if not
exactly
an immediate
concern,
than a
poten-
tially catastrophic
one.4
As Fielden
put
it in an
anonymous
article
in the Times in
1937,
the Government of India was
'acting
from
duty
rather than
pleasure'
and intended to
develop broadcasting
mainly
for fear of unwelcome
interlopers. (Fielden's identity
was
hardly
a
secret,
as it was written while he was on leave in
England;
it was
exactly
the kind of stunt that Delhi officials loathed in
him.)' Yet,
characteristic of the Government's
attempts
to act as
3
The term and its
significance
are from A. P.
Thornton,
The
Imperial
Idea and its
Enemies: A
Study
in British Power
(London, 1959).
4 Constitutionally
the Government of India was not
empowered, except by
direct
authoritarian
action,
to
prohibit broadcasting by provincial
or local
governments.
Tardily recognizing
the wisdom of a
centrally
controlled state network with sufficient
provincial
stations to
discourage
local
alternatives,
the Governor-General
(Viceroy)
in Council
granted forty
lakhs of
rupees (about ?300,000,
a
very
small sum for the
task)
towards
capital expenditure
and an Office of Controller. See 1934-7 notes and
memoranda in British
Library, London,
India Office
Library
and Records
(hereafter
Brit.
Lib., IOR),
Information
Department
file
L/P&J/8/118.
'See
two-part
article
by
'a
Correspondent': 'Broadcasting
in
India', Times,
27-8
July
1937.
A COLONIAL SUBVERSIVE AND INDIAN BROADCASTING 199
if it were
initiating,
rather than
reacting to,
India's
evolving
public culture,
officials intended to control
tightly
what
might
be
broadcast while still
acting
as if the radio was evidence of
imperial
progress.
In what it deemed a
'self-denying ordinance',
the
gov-
ernment
pledged
not to use the radio for the
explicit
defence of
British
rule,
on the
grounds
that
granting equal
time to nationalist
opponents
would allow
politics
to dominate what should instead
be an educational service. The result was that Fielden came to
be
charged
with
instituting
a mass medium that could not address
'political
or industrial
controversy',
thus
eliminating virtually
every topic
that mattered in
India.6
The
job
of
managing
of such contradictions
-
not unlike
being
charged
with
publicizing
the
'benign' aspects
of
apartheid
in the
1980s
-
made the role of India's first Controller of
Broadcasting
a sensitive one. The
very
last
person
the Government of India
wanted was someone like Lionel Fielden. But the choice was
made in
London, since,
in the absence of suitable candidates in
India,
the BBC was to send one of its men on a
five-year
contract.
For the Home
Department,
the
government's political
nerve
centre,
the BBC itself was
problematic.
In a memo to his col-
leagues,
the Director of Public Information
expressed
concern
about the
'politically
rather "advanced" tone' of the BBC
staff,
and
emphasized
the need for
'a
man whose
general
attitude of
mind toward
political
and kindred
problems
is innocuous'.7 To
his
counterpart
in London he was more direct: the BBC
expert
would have to be a
supporter
of
empire,
a
'concealed
diehard'.8
If Fielden
proved
to be
exactly
the official's feared 'thorn in
the side of the Home
Department',
much was due to his fatal
personal
indiscretions and constant
flouting
of
authority.
His was
the furthest from the
'civil
service
personality', respectfully
obedient to the
hierarchy
and content to act as the human vehicle
of state
policy. Early
in his adult life Fielden had
rejected
this
ethos.
Though
he
passed
the
highly
selective civil-service exam-
ination in
London,
he was so irked
by
his
Foreign
Office inter-
viewers that he ended
by deprecating
the Balfour Declaration
and
announcing
that
England
had sold the Palestinian Arabs out
6
National Archives of
India,
New Delhi
(hereafter NAI),
Home Political
Dept,
Govt of India
[hereafter
Home
(Pol.)] 240/27,
119/1/34.
7
Memo
by
Ian
Stephens,
n.d.:
NAI,
Home
(Pol.)
119/1/34.
8 Copy
of letter from
Ian
Stephens,
Home
Dept,
to
Hugh MacGregor,
India
Office,
New
Delhi,
17
Sept.
1934: BBC Written
Archives, London,
EI/896/2.
to the
Jews.9 Yet,
even had he been a better
diplomat,
Fielden
would still have become stuck in the
quagmire
in India. He was
to find himself
trapped
on one side
by governmental obduracy,
a moribund
bureaucracy, paltry
finances and
abysmal
technolo-
gical conditions;
and on the other
by
nationalist
hazing,
communal
jealousies
and the
corruption
of Indian
public
life. In his autobio-
graphy,
he recalled his first encounter with the British
agent
who
had been in
charge
of the
fledgling Bombay headquarters. Why,
Fielden
asked,
did the man call India 'God-awful'?
'"Because",
bawled Belton . . . "think
you're coming
to
put everything ...
not a
thing,
I tell
you
... blue
eyed boy
at first . ..
frustration,
madness . . . not a
thing
done"
'.o
II
Such was
my
natural
bent,
born with me and
inescapable.
One indication that Fielden is a man worth
investigating
is the
animosity
and
suspicion
with which fellow officials referred to him
in their internal
correspondence.
Tact about one's
peers,
at least
when it came to the written
record,
held an unassailable
place
in the
code of behaviour that
governed
India's
high
achievers. That Fielden
was
betrayed
was not
only
a
sign
of his outsider
status,
but also an
indication that his
personality
was a critical factor in his fate. This
last would be elusive were it not for his colourful
autobiography,
written in 1960 in
Italy,
where he died after decades as an
expatriate.
The Natural
Bent,
like all
autobiographies,
is revisionist. Fielden
remembered his
experiences
of India and the BBC from a distance
of a
quarter century
and
applied
far too
adept
a
literary
hand
-
witness 'Belton' above
-
for it to be a true
recording.
There are
frustrating silences, particularly regarding
his
relationships
with
homosexual
(or suspected homosexual)
friends and associates." He
9 Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
68. Fielden's blithe anti-Semitism was revealed at other
points
in his
autobiography, particularly
in a comment that the
reported
numbers of
Jews
killed in the Holocaust was
probably
inaccurate and not worth
many
times that
number of
gentiles
in
any
case:
ibid.,
218.
'0
Ibid.,
167.
"11 Some of these omissions
may
be
discretionary.
Fielden is
elliptical regarding
the
nature of his
long relationship
and cohabitation with
Zulfaqar Bokhari,
who was alive
and married at the time of its
publication.
Others are more
perplexing.
Fielden
entirely
leaves out his association with the writer
J.
R.
Ackerley,
for
instance, though
Fielden
helped Ackerley
obtain a
post
in the BBC Talks
Department
and
they
remained friends
throughout
the 1940s. See Peter
Parker, Ackerley:
A
Life of J.
R.
Ackerley (London, 1989), 122,
279-80. For the
quotations
which follow section
subheadings,
see
Fielden,
Natural
Bent, 73, 155, 186,
326.
spared
himself no
unflattering remembrances,
but even these bear
the mark of
retrospective exaggeration.
The result is marvellous
self-parody; ample
evidence of what even his detractors acknow-
ledged
was his share of
'genius'.'2
None the
less,
Fielden's memoirs reveal him to have been a
kind of stock character in interwar
England:
the disaffected
upper-class cosmopolite.
He took the
phrase
with which he titled
his memoirs from
Kipling, using
it to
signify
his sexual orientation
and,
more
fully,
to evoke a
post-Victorian inconstancy,
a
rejection
of the
Whiggish logic
with which
respectable
lives were remem-
bered: 'I was
comically
unfitted to be a
soldier,
an
administrator,
a
reformer,
a civil
servant,
or a member of
any
hierarchical
organization...
I slid from one to
another,
not
quite
discontented
yet
never dedicated'. To be a
dilettante,
to have the
requisite
advantages
to be
one,
and to confess to it with a
self-abnegating
cynicism
was an
option open
to those of Fielden's
echelon, par-
ticularly
in the decades of his
young
adulthood. The
grandson
of
a
distinguished
Lancashire mill owner and reformer in
parliament,
and the son of a 'Master of
Foxhounds',
Fielden was raised on a
Surrey family
estate that he called one of the last 'isolated islands
of
respectable
feudalism'. Unfortunate
enough
to be born in
1896,
he suffered the
bullying military
enthusiasms of Eton and finished
just
in time to take his class-dictated
place
at the lead of a
gunners'
regiment
in the trenches at
Gallipoli.
His was not a
distinguished
service;
interactions with senior officers
inspired
in him 'a
patho-
logical
hatred of all Little Men in
Authority'
that did not bode
well for his future
public
service.13
Fielden's
cynicism
about the war
was,
of
course, very
fashion-
able
among
Britain's 'cultivated
dlites'
in the 1920s and 1930s.
So also was his
homosexuality (not
the least because it was
illegal),
and his
wanderlust.'4
His wartime travels
through
the
near,
12
On Fielden's
'genius',
see Leo
Amery, Secretary
of State for
India,
to Duff
Cooper,
Minister of
Information, London,
1
June
1940: Brit.
Lib., IOR, L/PO/3/3D;
Sir Frederick
Puckle,
Director-General of
Information,
Govt of
India,
to Sir Findlater
Stewart,
Permanent
Under-Secretary
of State at the India
Office,
New
Delhi,
26 Mar.
1940: Brit.
Lib., IOR,
L/I/1/785.
13
Fielden,
Natural
Bent, 335, 29,
49-50.
John
Fielden had
guided through
the
'Ten Hours'
(workday) legislation
in 1847.
14 See Noel
Annan,
Our
Age: English
Intellectuals between the World Wars
-
A
Group
Portrait
(New York, 1990), esp.
chs.
7-8, discussing
'The Cult of
Homosexuality'.
The term 'cultivated elites' is D. L. LeMahieu's and refers to 'a
(cont. on
p. 202)
Islamic world had enthralled
him."5
Made restless
by
the
discip-
lines of
military
service and
demobilization,
and settled with a
future heir's
allowance,
Fielden tolerated
only
a
very
brief
stay
at Oxford before
seeking opportunities
to set out
again.
He
spent
most of the next decade abroad in
glamorous appointments,
including
a stint
trading English
lessons for French with a retired
general
in
Algeria
and another conference
planning
for the
League
of Nations secretariat in Geneva.
Finally tiring
of this itinerant
existence,
in 1927 Fielden
returned to
England
and manoeuvred himself into a
position
at
the BBC. For someone who described himself as 'that
uneasy
misfit,
the artist without
talents', yet
well-versed in the best of
the fine arts and
literature, graced
with elevated tastes
and, per-
haps
most
importantly, impressive personal connections,
the
young
BBC was a
very congenial
institution.'6 This was
particu-
larly
the case in the Talks
Department,
where he was hired as
assistant to its chief
officer,
Hilda Matheson.
Pioneering
'the
technique,
or
art,
of the
talk',
Matheson made
broadcasting
attractive to the literati and the
'younger
dons at the
High
Tables
of Oxford
Colleges'.
She became Fielden's
mentor, instilling
in
him the
programming expert's
sense of creative entitlement. But
Matheson's
reign
at the
BBC, though influential,
was
relatively
short-lived. In the climate of Establishment
suspicion
that
pre-
vailed
by
the
early 1930s,
Matheson's
department
and her sched-
ule of
speakers regularly provoked
accusations that the
BBC's
roster of talent was
elitist
and
possibly
subversive.'7 After
Matheson
quit,
Fielden
suffered,
as the liberties of the
experi-
mental
phase
at the BBC vanished under bureaucratic
manage-
ment, political
interference and middle-brow taste. Sir
(later
Lord) John Reith,
founder and Director-General of the
BBC,
was
'presbyterian';
his
underlings
were
'broadcasting
bores'.
Worse was the introduction of the 'hellish Listener Research
(n. 14
cont.)
deliberately ambiguous,
fluid
category embracing writers, artists, musicians,
academics
and other educated
individuals',
who held themselves the
adjudicators
of cultural
accomplishment:
D. L.
LeMahieu,
A Culture
for Democracy:
Mass Communication and
the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars
(Oxford, 1988),
103.
"5
He
experienced
the 'man-made
beauty'
of
Alexandria,
the
'glittering possibilities
of
Constantinople'
and even a
shipboard
encounter with T. E. Lawrence:
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
54.
16
Ibid.,
98. On the elitist climate of the BBC in its
early years
and its later
'popularization',
see
LeMahieu,
Culture
for Democracy,
chs. 5-6.
17 Briggs, History of Broadcasting
in the United
Kingdom, ii, 124-5,
142.
Department'
which threatened to cram the schedule with 'red-
nosed comedians and the Wurlitzer
Organ'.'8
Eight years
into his radio career and tainted with the fallout of
the Matheson
era,
Fielden
jumped
at the
possibility
of
going
to
India to be its first Controller of
Broadcasting. Significantly,
he
had not been invited to
apply
for what was considered a
privileged
opportunity
on the
broadcasting
frontier. Indian
broadcasting
was
a
special
interest of
Reith's,
who had
long pressed
the Indian
government
to undertake it.
19
Probably
aware that Fielden lacked
the
diplomatic
skills for the
job,
Reith
discouraged him, pointing
out that he was a
'programme
man' rather than an
administrator.
Yet Fielden's
perseverance,
his access to the
Old-Boy network,
his
strategically deployed
charm and his
grandiose
ideas for Indian
broadcasting evidently
won over the Indian
High
Commissioner
in
London,
Sir
Bhupendranath
Mitra.20 Reith's warm and
per-
sonal
congratulatory
letter was laden with admonitions:
I don't know that
anyone
- not
excluding
the
Viceroy
- can do for
India what
you
can ... It is
your temperament
which will in due
course,
make a
triumphant
success. But do remember that it's also -
quite
as
much
-
that
very
same
temperament which,
in a minute or a
week,
can
produce
disaster.21
Fielden's motivations for
going
to India were
undoubtedly
com-
plex. Professionally,
India held out the
opportunity
to fulfil his
creative
mission,
the one deeded to him
by
Hilda Matheson: it
gave
full discretion to
programmers
to determine what constituted
quality broadcasting, along
with the
expectation
of a
grand
meas-
ure of
personal authority.
Where better to exercise this than the
empire
-
where,
as Fielden
remembered,
he could be 'a
Saviour,
speeding
to the rescue of
poor
black
people,
to whom I should
be most
frightfully
nice
(so long,
said
Reason,
as
they
are most
frightfully
subservient to
you)'.22
Yet Fielden's
cynicism
after the
fact should not
disguise
his
genuine
sense of
purpose.
Two
years
into bitter
reality
he still claimed that
broadcasting, 'skipping
as
18 Fielden,
Natural
Bent, 116, 142,
109.
19
The
Reith Diaries,
ed. Charles Stuart
(London, 1975),
330-1.
20
Considering the expectations the Home
Department
had of the BBC
designate,
it is notable that there is no evidence of
inquiries
into Fielden's character in the Delhi
files,
or those at the India Office in London.
Apparently
Mitra and Reith were trusted
with this
appointment,
as befitted their stature and
relationships
with the Indian
government.
21
'Sir John
Reith to Lionel
Fielden, London,
13
Aug. 1935',
in
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
147-8.
22
Ibid.,
146.
it does both
illiteracy
and
distance',
was 'the ideal medium for
the task ... of
instructing
and
enlightening
these vast
masses'.23
The
austere,
colourless London of the 1930s
clearly piqued
Fielden's desire to
explore
the 'exotic East'.24 Homoerotic
repres-
entations of
relationships
between white and Indian men were
ubiquitous
in his milieu and Fielden had close contact with those
who
perpetuated
them.
Through
BBC and
Bloomsbury
circles he
knew both E.
M. Forster,
who broadcast
regularly,
and
J.
R.
Ackerley,
who had also worked for Matheson. In
1932, Ackerley
had seen into
print
his
racy
Hindoo
Holiday,
a fictionalized account
of his term as
companion
to the
Maharaja
of
Chhatarpur,
which
recounted numerous
attempted
seductions of
boy
servants.25 The
influence of this
genre
is clear in Fielden's
autobiography.
When
choosing
his
personal
bearer in
Delhi,
Fielden found himself
facing
two
tottering
old men: 'Had I not
pictured
to
myself
something
so
vastly
different?
Slim, intelligent youths,
with the
eyes
of
gazelles, worshipping
me with
silent,
but so
effective,
service?'
Similarly,
Fielden's first encounter with the man who
would become his second and
intimate, Zulfaqar Bokhari,
so
closely
mirrored
Fielding's
with Aziz in Forster's A
Passage
to
India
(1924)
that one wonders if Fielden had
choreographed
it.
In both
cases,
the
young
Muslim
aspirant
entered the white
officer's house while the latter was in
post-bath
undress and
they
formed a
friendship
on the basis of the officer's ease and
good
fellowship
under such awkward circumstances.26
There is no evidence that Fielden had
any particular
interest
in Indian
politics
before he went to
India,
nor did he declare
any
'politics'
at all in
ideological
or
party
terms:
clearly
he felt himself
above them. He
did, however,
have
strong responses
to other
people's politics.
In the
1930s, they
included an attraction to the
aesthetic
vitality
of anti-liberal
experiments, particularly
Italian
fascism. He toured
Italy, Germany
and Russia after
gaining
his
appointment
to India -
ostensibly
to
acquaint
himself with their
23
'Broadcasting
in
India', Times,
27
July
1937.
24
On gay travellers, especially literary ones,
who made
pilgrimages
to Asia and the
Middle
East,
see
Joseph
A.
Boone,
'Vacation Cruises:
or,
The Homoerotics of
Orientalism', PMLA,
cx
(1995).
25
Chhatarpur was a small
principality
in central India:
Parker, Ackerley,
160.
26
Fielden, Natural Bent, 168, 183. This
story
is backed
up
in
Zulfaqar
Bokhari's
own
autobiography: Zulfaqar Bokhari, Sarguzasht (Karachi, 1991),
10. Selected trans-
lations done from the Urdu
by
Shahid
Refai,
1997.
broadcasting systems
- and left with 'a
feeling
of
impatience,
a
sense of
disappointment'
in
England:
In
Rome, Berlin, Moscow, eyes might
flash with sinister
intent, still, they
flashed
attractively
...
If,
as our
propaganda
had
it,
the
apparent vigour
of these
European
nations was
prompted only by revolvers,
were the
fishy
eyes
and listless faces of
England
so much more to be commended?27
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Fielden was
looking
for
some new material for his
jaded imagination.
The
people
he
would have wanted to know in
India,
indeed
anywhere,
were
those like him: the 'cultivated elites'. In India these included
globe-trotting
Indian
aristocrats, many
of whom were also the
leaders of the national
movement,
but also their
opponents,
such
as the
pro-Pakistan
Muslim
elites.
With rare
exception,
this
group
did not include members of the
Anglo-Indian
establishment
-
an establishment which an
upper-class contemporary
of Fielden's
called 'artificial and imitative' for the
pretensions
of its middle-
class mandarins.28 Fielden would come to resent their
impositions.
For
him,
India in the 1930s
presented
an
opportunity
to be in
the middle of a
happening:
the
happening
was the
sinking
of the
British
Raj.
III
The success of
my
mission ... the end of
my
fun.
Within months of his
arrival,
Fielden was
getting
his trousers
dusty
in Gandhi's
ashram, treating
Nehru and his sister to late-
night
scrambled
eggs,
and
sharing
bon
mots
with his 'fast
friend',
the
poet
and
political leader, Sarojini
Naidu.29 His access to this
exalted Indian National
Congress
circle was
through
his
posi-
tion
-
imagine
the
coup
of
having
the
top
media man of an
enemy government
solicit a
personal friendship
-
but was
assured
by
a shared class
background
and
polish. Unfortunately
for
Fielden,
the
friendships
did
nothing
for his
broadcasting
aspirations.
The nationalist luminaries
sympathized
with his
pre-
dicament,
even
appreciated
the
possibilities
of
radio,
but
despite
his insistence that he was
promoting progressive
'Indian' broad-
casting,
the bottom line was that he was
instituting
what
they
27
Fielden,
Natural
Bent, 142,
141.
28 The quotation is from Allan
Arthur,
scion of an esteemed
Anglo-Indian family,
in
Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes,
204.
29
Fielden, Natural
Bent, 195, 197,
181.
could
only
assume was intended to serve as a medium for
imperial
propaganda.
Gandhi wrote to Fielden that his frustrations were
'inevitable in the circumstances
surrounding
us' and
repeatedly
urged
a mutual friend to
'persuade [him]
to
give up
the
job
and
go
back to
England'.30
Fielden was not
supposed
to be
issuing
invitations to national-
ists in
any
case.
Later,
he would be
reprimanded
for
scheduling
programmes
with
literary figures
and
performers
who had
any
political
connections at
all,
or who even had
suspicious
associ-
ations. The same restrictions
applied
to those hired to work at
the All India Radio
headquarters
in Delhi and at the
provincial
stations. As
Hugh MacGregor,
the India Office Information
Officer, put
it
bluntly
to
Fielden,
the best course would be to
avoid
giving
Indians
any
influence in
broadcasting operations
at
all: 'You have of course to associate Indians with
you
in
every
way.
The
difficulty
will be so to
arrange
this association that the
real
power
and the final decisions remain with
you
and
your
successors
who, presumably,
will
always
be
Englishmen engaged
by
the
Governor-General'.31
These were rather unrealistic
expectations (MacGregor
was
replaced by
a
younger
and more
forward-looking colleague
in the
following year),
but
they
evid-
enced a
deeper
contradiction in the
logic
of colonial
broadcasting.
What kind of Indians would have
agreed
to man an institution
designed,
however
obliquely,
to sustain the
legitimacy
of
British rule?
The answer on one level is clear
-
those who wanted to build
a career in the new medium. For
this,
All India Radio
(AIR)
was
the
only option,
and there was no end of
applicants.
The rewards
of
obtaining
a
place
were
great,
even if the salaries
were, by
British
standards,
small.
They
included
prestige,
a secure
place
in
government
service
and,
for the
top ranks,
a
training
stint at
the
BBC.32
Indian
newspapers
and the AIR
magazine,
Indian
Listener, regularly reported
on the status of
positions
to be filled.
30
'Mahatma Gandhi to Lionel
Fielden, Segaon, Wardha,
3
Jan. 1937',
in Collected
Works
of
Mahatma
Gandhi,
100 vols.
(New Delhi, 1958-88), lxiv, 205;
'Mahatma
Gandhi to
Rajkumari
Amrit
Kaur, Segaon, Wardha,
21
Sept. 1936', ibid., lxiii, 301;
also 'Gandhi to
Kaur, Segaon, Wardha,
4
May 1937', ibid., lxv,
166.
31Hugh MacGregor
to Lionel
Fielden, London,
17 Feb. 1936: Brit.
Lib.,
IOR/I/1/445.
32
Govt of
India, Report
on the
in India
(up
to the
31"
March
1939) (Simla, 1939),
xii. The
report
was submitted and
written,
in the
main, by
Fielden.
In each round there were thousands of
applicants,
cut down to a
hundred or more interviews for less than ten
positions.
This vast
pool suggests that,
at this
early juncture,
almost
anyone might
have considered himself a
potential broadcasting expert.
The avid
pursuit
of a
position
with the British
government was,
in
any
case, rarely
a
sign
of
political allegiance
to
imperial
rule. The
'Indianization' of the
key
instruments of
governance,
the civil
service and the
army,
had been
preceding apace
since the First
World
War,
with the likelihood that Indians would
eventually
inherit real
power
in a
post-colonial government
evident
by
Fielden's
period. Only truly
activist nationalists shunned the
possibilities
in
government service.33
Nor could India be
neatly
divided into anti-colonial
Congress
nationalists on one
hand,
and
stooges
of British rule on the other. Most Muslims had no rever-
ence for the
imperial
connection but
preferred
British referees to
the
possibility
of an India left in the hands of a Hindu-dominated
regime.
The British
government famously played
on these divi-
sions,
and Fielden lamented the
energies
he was forced to
spend
satisfying
'model rotation'
requirements
-
the affirmative-action
quotas
of the
day
-
at the AIR
stations.34
It did not
help
in these rather delicate
personnel
matters that
Fielden was
openly
intolerant of the
nepotism
and
obsequiousness
that he felt
permeated
Indian
public
life. These were
very
old
traditions that British rule had done
nothing
but
perpetuate;
however,
Fielden could not abide them in his studios.
Insisting
against
all evidence to the
contrary
in India that
broadcasting
was
an
art,
not a
bureaucracy,
he was determined to
prohibit
'the rise
of clerks who knew
nothing
about
Programmes'.
Those he found
already employed
at the
broadcasting
offices
were,
in
turn, 'gross',
'ignorant', 'shifty',
'slow' and 'fated to be bullied'. In his
autobiog-
raphy,
if not in the
instance,
he nicknamed the
Bombay
station
engineer
and his brother
'Gog
and
Magog',
after the inhabitants
of the biblical
'anti-society'.3s
Consequently,
he set about
hiring
33
The
typical
candidate would have been a male with a
college degree
or certifica-
tion,
from a middle-class
family,
with a father in
commerce,
the
professions
or
government
service. AIR
applicants, then,
were of the same ilk as those who
aspired
to a
place
in the Indian Civil
Service, though probably
with lesser
pedigrees (and
talent)
than those who
successfully competed
for the latter. See
Beaglehole,
'From
Rulers to
Servants';
David C.
Potter, 'Manpower Shortage
and the End of Colonialism:
The Case of the Indian Civil
Service',
Mod. Asian
Studies,
vii
(1973).
34
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
182. Fielden's frustrations with this are
palpable
in Home
Department
files:
see,
for
instance, NAI,
Home
Dept (Est.) (S)
199/36.
35 Fielden,
Natural
Bent, 200,
161-2.
his own men and took to
issuing
admonitions
against
'Indian'
methods of
job-seeking.
The Indian Listener chastised
'aspiring
candidates,
not to
speak
of their fathers and
uncles, [who]
con-
tinue to write
to,
or bear down in
person upon,
the
Controller'.36
As
part
of Fielden's habit of
regularly discoursing
on the
pro-
gress
and
philosophy
of
broadcasting,
which he felt was
necessary
to educate Indian audiences to a minimum standard of
'good
listening',
he
gave
a talk from the Delhi station on
'Broadcasting
as a Career'. It is a
perfect example
of his
style
of
unapologetic
condescension. He first dismissed all technical
hopefuls:
skilled
technicians were in
good supply
and it would not do to
beg
for
training
or
apprenticeship.
With
respect
to
programme staff,
he
noted that excellence was
largely
a 'matter of taste and
opinion',
but that a
programmer
needed 'a
special type
of creative
imag-
ination'.
Unfortunately,
'this
type
of constructive
ability'
was
'especially
rare in India'. 'Don't let us
argue
about
causes',
he
added,
'but let us
agree
that
independent thought
is at a low
ebb'.37
The
reality
was not as bleak as Fielden
suggested
in his talk.
It could not but be in those
times,
he later
asserted,
that 'the
quality
of the British was
deteriorating:
the
quality
of the Indians
was improving'."3 Yet while he hired a wide range of promising
young Indians, ultimately
the
'type'
he
prized
became the
signa-
ture of his own brand of
nepotism.
His Director of
Programmes
at
Delhi,
K. S.
Mullick,
concluded that he
'proved
himself to be
a
poor judge
of
men', surrounding
himself with an 'inner circle
of
opportunists
and
sycophants masquerading
as virtuosi'. A
'caste
system' prevailed
that favoured
young
Muslims who had
been educated at the Government
College
in Lahore and had
known one another
intimately
for
years.39
The 'caste
system' grew
from Fielden's
relationships
with his
closest
professional associates, Zulfaqar
Ali
Bokhari,
and his
brother,
Ahmed Shah Bokhari. The Bokharis were
elegantly
mannered
Anglophiles
who alternated between a Persianized
'Hindustani' and the
King's English (languages eminently
suit-
able,
in Fielden's
idealization,
for the Indian
broadcaster.)
Ahmed
36
Indian
Listener,
22 Mar. 1939.
37
Fielden
thought
this broadcast of 1938 so useful that he
reproduced
it in his
Report
on the
in
India,
142-4.
38
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
176.
39 K. S.
Mullick, Tangled Tapes:
The Inside
Story of
Indian
Broadcasting (New Delhi,
1974), 105,
107.
was Professor of
English
at Government
College,
a
published
poet
and translator when Forster recommended him to
Fielden.40
Zulfaqar,
the
younger brother,
was a translator at the
Army
Headquarters
- a
post
whose colonialist
implications
he later
recalled with disinterest but not discomfort
-
when Fielden
made him Assistant Station Director at Delhi.41 Within a few
months both had been
promoted
and All India Radio was nick-
named the 'BBC': for 'Bokhari Brothers
Corporation'.
In their
urbanity
and erudition the Bokharis were
clearly
Fielden's fellow travellers
and,
if the 'real' BBC was known for
its distinctive
style
-
the cadence and accents of its
announcers,
its
6litist
literary
and musical culture
-
then the
Bokharis, along-
side
Fielden,
were architects of the Indian variant. Their influence
led to
predictable charges
of anti-Hindu sentiment in the
press
and from Indian
politicians,
but the
broadcasting organization's
chauvinism was in
actuality thoroughly
class-based: neither reli-
gious
differences nor those of
political allegiance
mattered much
against
the mandate of
good breeding.
The Bokharis
simply
believed,
as did
Fielden,
that
broadcasting
should
convey
what
they
knew to be the most elevated of aesthetic forms: an Islam-
influenced
Hindustani; Bengali poetry
in
Tagore's tradition;
translations of
English classics, including
the
Shakespeare
and
Marlowe that Ahmed had
taught;
and broadcasts
by Forster,
Eliot, Stephen Spender
and other
contemporary
British
authors.42
The internal culture of All India Radio was
steeped
with
Fielden's and the Bokharis'
professional
and sartorial
style.
Nirad
Chaudhuri,
later a famous critic of the Indian
politics
of his
generation,
remembered the
headquarters replete
with
young
men
uniformly
outfitted in Austin Reed
suits, 'handsome,
well-
dressed, well-groomed
and urbane ... not
particularly
clever but
40
Impressions
about Ahmed Bokhari's
'Englishness'
and other facets of his
person-
ality
and career are
gleaned
from interviews and tributes in Anwar
Dil (ed.),
On this
Earth
Together:
Ahmed S. Bokhari at the
UN,
1950-1958
(San Diego, 1994).
41
Zulfaqar Bokhari refers to his
post
with the
Army
and his own
preoccupation
with
adopting
an
Anglo lifestyle
-
including enrolling
his
very
'native' wife in a
missionary
school to learn
English
and
English ways
-
in his
autobiography: Bokhari,
Sarguzasht.
42 On the Bokharis'
language policy,
see David
Lelyveld,
'The Fate of Hindustani:
Colonial
Knowledge
and the
Project
of a National
Language',
in C.
Breckenridge
and
P. van der Veer
(eds.),
Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament:
Perspectives
on
South Asia
(Philadelphia, 1993).
attractive'.43
The climate of hero
worship
fed
speculations
about
Fielden and
Zulfaqar's relationship;
less-favoured AIR staff
resented
Zulfaqar's
meteoric rise and
privileged
access to the
chief. Rumours
seeped
into the Delhi
press,
staffed
by cognos-
centi who
undoubtedly
knew the AIR chiefs
socially."
When
Zulfaqar
left India to
join
Fielden at the BBC in
1940,
the
Congress
nationalist Hindustan Times fired
parting
shots based on
widely
held
suspicions
about the nature of their
partnership:
'The
All India Radio itself has been built from
'very
slender'
material,
the
only
obvious
theory
of its construction
being that,
in the
eyes
of its
creators, queerness
is
equivalent
to brilliance'. Both Fielden
and
Zulfaqar
were tall and slim
-
and
'queer',
at least for
sophisticated readers,
was blatant
enough.45
Indian critics lambasted
government broadcasting
and Fielden's
position
as
part
of a broader
campaign against
the
continuing
dominance of
Englishmen
in official
positions.
Mohan Lal
Saxena,
a member in the
Legislative Assembly, plagued
the
Viceroy's
representative
with
questions
about
why
British
experts
were
running
Indian radio at
taxpayers' expense.
Saxena 'revealed'
that Fielden was
unqualified
and redundant at the
BBC,
but that
because he was
'influentially connected',
he had been
given
a
place
in
India,
the
'dumping ground
for British refuse'.46 The
Criminal
Intelligence Department helpfully
shared with Fielden
a
packet
of
intercepted
letters from influential Indians
circulating
criticisms and
gossip
about him. Fielden decried the
practice
of
opening private
mail and returned the
letters,
'but the
poison
did
43Nirad
C.
Chaudhuri, Thy Hand,
Great
Anarch! India,
1921-1952
(London,
1990),
749.
44In
Mullick's
words,
the
'intensely personal relationship'
between Fielden and
Zulfaqar
'went far
beyond
the norms of official
behaviour,
as between the head of an
organization
and a local
functionary': Mullick, Tangled Tapes,
111. Lahore
Programmes' Director,
H. R.
Luthra,
remembered that the
relationship
'evoked some
adverse comment in
higher
official
circles,
in
newspapers occasionally,
and in
private
gossip':
H. R.
Luthra,
Indian
Broadcasting (New Delhi, 1986),
157.
45
'Mere Gossip by Super',
Hindustan
Times,
26 Feb. 1940.
According
to the
OED,
xii, 1014,
the word
'queer' signifying
'homosexual' was in
regular literary usage by
the late
1930s;
it
certainly
would have
signified
this to
'Super'
and his elite readers.
46
Questions
and
commentary reproduced
in Mohan Lal
Saxena,
'The All-India
Radio',
Mod. Rev.
[Calcutta] (Oct. 1937),
447. The
legislator's major grievance
concerned the 'nomination' of British recruits to the Indian Civil Service who had
not
passed
the
competitive
examination.
By
1936 Indians
vastly outperformed
and
outnumbered British candidates in the exams held in London and Allahabad.
Potter,
'Manpower Shortage
and the End of
Colonialism',
64-5.
its
work'.
He understood that the broad
public
would never see
him as
anything
but a collaborator.
47
Yet these attacks
by
no means
represent
the whole of the
impression
that Fielden left on his Indian
colleagues.
'Fielden
was interested in Indian culture and was
broadly sympathetic
to
India,
much more than the usual run of
Englishmen
in
high
official
positions
at that
time',
recalled Lahore
Programmes'
Director,
H. R.
Luthra.48
What Luthra and others
probably
most
appreciated
was Fielden's
preference
for Indian friends and col-
leagues,
a
preference
which could also be seen as
British-baiting.
Mehra
Masani,
whose work for
government
radio
evidently
did
not interfere with her nationalist commitments
-
her brother
was a
'prominent left-wing politician'
- characterized Fielden's
friends as
'people
who were
certainly
a bad lot from the British
point
of view. But of
course,
this made him
exceedingly popular
with his Indian staff'.49 So did his
mockery
of the British estab-
lishment. An oft-recounted
story
tells how Fielden 'tricked' the
Viceroy,
Lord
Linlithgow,
into
changing
the radio network's
name from the
very
official 'Indian State
Broadcasting System'
to Fielden's chosen
designation
of All India
Radio,
with its
catchy
acronym. Anticipating
that the
unsympathetic Viceroy
would
deny
him this
prerogative,
Fielden
reportedly manipulated
the
conversation between them so that it seemed as if
Linlithgow
had
come
up
with the new name
himself.so
Fielden no doubt
encouraged
the wide circulation of such
anecdotes to show that he
was,
with his Indian
co-workers,
a
conspirator against
the colonial
humbugs;
his maxims about
broadcasting
were meant to broaden the
conspiracy
to include
the entire
listening public.
Mullick listed
among
Fielden's
golden
rules not
only '[b]e
fair and frank in
your dealings
with broadcas-
ters',
but
'[t]ake
the listener into confidence'." This last Fielden
followed with a
vengeance
in his first
years
in
India, particularly
in the editorial
pages
of the Indian Listener. Here he and his staff
wrote
frankly
about the contradictions of
government
broad-
casting: 'Broadcasting
must . . . above all other
things,
be
impar-
47 Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
179-80.
48
Luthra, Indian
Broadcasting,
150.
49 Quoted
in Zareer
Masani,
Indian Tales
of
the
Raj (Berkeley, 1987),
48.
50
Fielden's version of the
story
is
reproduced
in
virtually every
memoir and
history
of Indian
broadcasting: Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
193. The
point
of
my retelling
the
story
is its
popularity among
Indian
broadcasters,
not its basis in fact.
"S
Mullick, Tangled Tapes,
110.
tial;
it must also be ...
agile,
elastic and
adaptable
... But a
Government
Department
in
any country
in the world can be
neither'. 52
In
programming matters, however,
Fielden was less
unilaterally
India-centred. While he
brought
innovative methods and an
appar-
ently open
mind to Indian aesthetic
forms,
he would not shed his
chauvinist standards. It
was,
after
all,
the violation of these in the
transition to a more
'popular'
BBC that had sent him
packing
in the
first
place.
Fielden's ambivalence was most evident in his attitude
toward Indian music. On the one
hand,
he committed himself to a
full
understanding
of its
styles
and
performance,
essential for the
task of
adapting
Indian music to the new medium.
Here,
he took on
real
challenges:
he and his staff had to cultivate artists
wary
of the
broadcasting
studios and deal with the
public's
association of some
musical traditions with courtesans and other
marginal figures.
On
the other
hand,
he never considered the music outside his own
Western classical frame of reference. He
complained
about the lack
of
complex harmony
in traditional forms
-
putting
Indian music
'very
much in the same
position
as
European
music 400
years ago'
-
and about what he saw as the
indiscipline
of Indian musicians and
their stubborn reluctance to learn orchestration.53
Whether the scorn and
suspicion
with which Indian critics
greeted
his
enterprise
were 'inevitable' and
'circumstantial',
as
Gandhi and Nehru
suggested,
or were the result of Fielden's
hubris,
is not
finally
a
very productive
debate. Fielden was able
to
acknowledge
both in his
autobiography.
He became 'as Indian
officials were
apt
to do
-
an intolerant little dictator'. In
explana-
tion he offered his own contribution to the
philosophy
of
authority
in India. Like
Kipling,
he was at once
cognizant
of the
power
of
Indian collective sentiment and unable to avoid
essentializing
it:
Rule India with a rod of iron and an tremendous
swagger
and India liked
it: love India
genuinely
and
humbly
and India loved
you:
but
put
on
pinstripe
trousers and write
judicially
and
impartially
on files and India
knifed
you
-
rightly. Or, pretend
like me to be
awfully
nice and broad-
minded,
and India made
you
know in the
end,
with some
discomfort,
that
you
were
sitting
on a
lonely
fence.
54
52
'On the Air', Indian Listener
(7 Jan. 1937).
53
Report
on the
in
India,
21-3. See also David
Lelyveld,
'Upon
the Subdominant:
Administering
Music on All-India
Radio',
in Carol A.
Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity:
Public Culture in a South Asian World
(Minneapolis, 1995),
52-5.
54 Fielden,
Natural
Bent, 193,
155.
IV
I now
began
to skirmish with
Authority.
Fraught
interactions in the Indian
public sphere
were
nothing
compared
to the
consequences
for Fielden in the British official
one. Here his
social, political,
sexual and racial
transgressions
were
unforgivable; but,
of
course,
Fielden was no
unsuspecting
victim. He set the tone for mutual
contempt outright by rejecting
Anglo-Indian society
in its
entirety, opting
not to live in official
housing (though
his
rooms, by
all
accounts,
well-befitted an
Etonian), staying away
from
Simla, declining membership
in
European
clubs and
habitually refusing bridge
and dinner invita-
tions. This
posture,
like his enthusiasm for the nationalist
poli-
ticos,
was not
quite original;
the heroes of the artful
imperial
novels of the
day
- Orwell's Burmese
Days,
Forster's
Passage
to
India
-
were men on the
margins escaping
the
stultifying
confines
of colonial
society
well
past
its
prime.
Nor was Fielden's a
particu-
larly principled
defiance. Like Nehru and others of their class
standing,
Fielden
quite comfortably
socialized with the
truly
aristocratic of the
Anglo-Indian
set. He dined
privately
with the
Viceroy
and
Lady Willingdon
on numerous
occasions,
for
example.
It was
simply
that those lower down in the British ranks
provided
no social or artistic
capital.
It was one
thing
to be known
to 'sit
upon
the floor and talk to
prostitutes
or
stay
at Wardha
with Mr.
Gandhi',
but
quite
another to be locked
up
in
stuffy
drawing
rooms with 'the
younger
sons of
Clapham
and
Surbiton,
plus
their suburban
wives'."
In
quintessential
Fielden
fashion,
however,
he insisted on due
deference, demanding
an elevation
to the front of the official 'order of
precedence'.56
He snubbed
the snobs
-
an
unpardonable
offence.
This is not to make
light
of real conflicts over Fielden's broad-
casting agenda
and his
opposition
to
government policy,
nor to
suggest
that there were clear lines
demarcating
his social and
professional predicaments. Broadcasting
concerns were
intensely
personal
for him and the
government's
defensive stance toward
radio
compromised
him
deeply.
While the BBC was
providing
opportunities
for
political
debate and news in
Britain,
an AIR
listener would have heard no
acknowledgement
that there were
any political parties
at all in India. It was not
enough
that Fielden
55 Ibid., 154,
177.
56
Luthra, Indian
Broadcasting,
147.
and his
colleagues
were allowed to
develop
cultural
programming.
Outside the matrix of
politics,
cultural
programming
seemed to
advance little
beyond
the familiar
imperial
rhetoric about India
as a land of diverse
'peoples'
with ancient
religious,
musical and
philosophical
traditions. As far as Fielden was
concerned,
AIR
would not be a
truly
modern
broadcasting
concern until the
prohibitions
were
lifted; anything
less than
modernity
was a
shameful failure.
Fielden
persistently
used liberal claims for a free information
system against
his conservative
supervisors. Only
if the broad-
casting system
served as a forum for
political
debate could it
maintain its
integrity,
he
argued,
both in the ethical sense of
making
a
positive
contribution to the life of the
nation,
and in
the structural sense of
discouraging competitors; otherwise,
it
would
always
be viewed as a forum for official
propaganda.57
With his Indian
colleagues,
Fielden
sought
to
challenge
the ban
on
politics
in cases whose
legitimacy
the
government
would be
hard
pressed
to
deny.
An
important opportunity
arose with the
implementation
of reforms that devolved
significant
administrat-
ive
powers (not including
the
right
or means to overthrow colonial
rule,
of
course)
to elected Indian ministries in the
provinces.
The
elections,
to be held in
1937,
were
by
democratic standards far-
cical:
carefully
selected voters
comprised
somewhere between 11
and 14
per
cent of the
population."8
The
symbolic importance
was far
greater.
Indians would
go
to the ballot boxes and declare
their
loyalties
to their
chosen,
not
government-appointed,
leaders.
Though popular political
sentiment was
undoubtedly
what
Fielden wanted to
broadcast,
he
argued
instead
that,
as a
govern-
ment sanctioned
activity
of concern to the Indian
public,
the
elections demanded AIR
coverage.
For the
government,
the
prob-
lem was that the Indian National
Congress
was
expected
to win
in the
majority
of
provinces (as
it
did).
Faced with
providing
their enemies an
exceptionally well-microphoned podium,
India's
high
command
preferred
to
jettison
a chance to demonstrate
government good
faith. Fielden
doggedly pushed
the
issue,
and
was
put
down
haughtily.59
57
Lionel Fielden to
Hugh MacGregor,
New
Delhi,
7
Apr.
1937: Brit.
Lib., IOR,
L/I/1/445.
58D.
A.
Low, 'Emergencies
and Elections in
India',
in his
Eclipse of Empire
(Cambridge, 1991),
154.
59 Copy
of a demi-official letter No. S.
4544/36-Poll,
dated 5th
August 1936,
from
the Govt of
India,
Home
Dept,
to Lionel
Fielden, Esq.,
Controller of
Broadcasting,
appended
to an internal note
by
H. G. Hallett:
NAI,
Home
(Pol.)
52/10/36. The
(cont.
on
p. 215)
Such acts of 'insubordination' alienated the diehards and
goaded
them into closer surveillance. In late
1936,
a list of
speakers
who had been invited to the
Calcutta, Bombay
and Delhi
studios was circulated in the Home
Department.
It included
Congress members, notably Sarojini Naidu,
as well as
recognized
Communists, socialists,
trade unionists and an accused
Bengali
terrorist. It was no excuse at all that
they
were to broadcast on
cultural and educational
topics
about which
they
were
experts:
Naidu,
after
all,
was a
poet;
others were academics and
authors;
there was even a
major
industrialist. The
Intelligence
Bureau
believed the list should
prompt
the conclusive
repeal
of Fielden's
'unfettered
discretion' to make
up
programmes.60
Conservatives
could not
accept
what Fielden knew to be
self-evident,
that the
vast
majority
of the most talented and
accomplished
Indians
were,
in one
way
or
another,
affiliated with anti-colonial
politics.
Lists of
programmes during
Fielden's tenure
provide
evidence
of his forced
capitulation. English-language
talks featured official
and semi-official British
agents
in
India, including
Miss Norah
Hill on 'Round India with the Red
Cross',
Professor Percival
Spear
on
'Forgotten Delhi',
and
Lady Grigg
on 'Some Problems
of the Central
Advisory
Board of Education'. Indian
language
programmes judiciously
alternated between
religious
interests: a
Bengali talk,
'From the
Vedas';
a debate between two Muslims
on the
question
'Should Cars be used Instead of Bullock Carts?'
Ironically,
the
cosmopolitanism
inherent in the medium obtruded
none the less. BBC
Empire
Service
programmes
were detailed in
the Indian
Listener,
but so too were schedules from
Italian,
French
and German
wavelengths
as late as 1938. Listeners were not
allowed broadcast discussions of Indian
politics,
but were
informed when to tune in to Hitler Youth
programmes,
such as
the one entitled 'We Wish the Master a Golden Table'.61 It did
not matter in the end whether such
programmes
were
officially
sanctioned,
as the
government
discovered
during
the Second
World War:
despite
elaborate and unrealizable
plans
for
'jam-
ming' foreign signals,
the radio
always
outwitted its
regulators.
Fielden disdained the Government's
parochialism,
but
by
his
own account
kept
himself in check. 'Whatever
my political
beliefs
(n. 59
cont.)
language
indicates that it
may
be a formal
reprimand.
60
NAI,
Home
(Pol.) 52/9/36,
list submitted
by Intelligence
Bureau to the Home
Dept, Sept.
1936.
61
Indian
Listener, (1936-9). Foreign listings disappeared
in October 1938.
were,
I could not use All-India Radio to further them. That
would have been
treason'.62 None
the
less,
Fielden did
everything
else he was not
supposed
to do in
grand style.
When refused
by
his direct
superiors,
Fielden took his claims to the
Viceroy's
office
until at last it refused to see him. He was candid about
government
policy
with nationalist
newspapers
and did not care when he was
reprimanded,
even
severely
with a 'letter of censure'. He inter-
preted increasingly
well-co-ordinated
inquiries
as a
witch-hunt,
and
responded
as a combatant. 'What business is it of
yours,
if I
do
my job properly?',
he recalled himself
retorting
when
interrog-
ated
by
officials about his
homosexuality
and the
gossip
in the
scandal sheets. The head of the Criminal
Intelligence Department
called him 'neurotic' and
'queer'
when he
presented
evidence
that his mail was
being opened,
and warned him that India was
no
place
for 'left intellectuals'. Fielden
believed,
based on official
documents he was shown
by
his
staff,
that a
special
committee
had been established to have him declared of unsound mind.63
That there was a concerted effort to
'get
him' is
partially
borne
out
by
a still-extant file at the
BBC,
which contains
compilations
of
particularly damning excerpts
from his
letters.64
V
Good-bye
forever to the
non-glamorous
East.
Artistic license in the
telling
of Fielden's
story
would have him
banished from India in
disgrace,
but in fact the end is anti-
climactic. Fielden
stayed
out his
five-year contract,
the last of it
punctuated
with a
long
home leave and recurrent illness
-
tuber-
culosis,
Fielden
claimed,
and a nervous breakdown or two.
Perhaps
Fielden had
posed, finally,
no real threat. How else to
explain why
the
Viceroy
named him
'Companion
of the Indian
Empire',
an honour
given yearly
to
outstanding
officials and
civilians for their service to India? Or
perhaps
it was a matter of
everyone saving face;
the water was tested beforehand to ensure
that
designees
would not refuse the award and
Fielden, appar-
62
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
214.
63
Ibid., 187, 189,
191.
64
This file, BBC
EI/896/3,
also contains a note that confidential materials have
been removed.
ently,
could not resist the lure of the
Viceregal silverplate.65 By
1940 in
any
case British rule in India had
bigger problems
than
radio
renegades,
and
negotiations
for a
post-war
settlement with
the nationalists were
already underway.
Back in
England,
Fielden
and
Zulfaqar
Bokhari took
up positions
at the BBC's Hindustani
short-wave
service,
itself a
product
of the war. If their
personal
motivations were to sustain an inter-racial and homosexual
romance
doubly
reviled in
India,
then the move
only partially
worked.
Though they
lived
together
for the
duration,
their
repu-
tations from India followed
them,
and Fielden's stint at the BBC
was a short one. He
quit
after six months in the midst of a
departmental
feud and
yet
another nervous
breakdown.66
Grudges against
the BBC and the Government of India
certainly
contributed to Fielden's
subsequent
brief career as a
propagandist
for Indian
independence;
his 'former official
position'
vested
his
opinion
with a
'spurious importance',
wrote an
enraged
offi-
cial in India when Fielden's
anti-imperialist tract, Beggar My
Neighbour, appeared
in
1943.67
Fielden was recruited
by
the
Labour leader and
'champion
of lost
causes',
Fenner
Brockway,
who asked him to
stump
on behalf of the 'Indian Freedom
Campaign'.
It was a role Fielden found
embarrassing
and
undigni-
fied.
Lecturing
in Grantham and
Stoke-on-Trent, being put up
in commercial travellers' hotels
-
rather than with 'the
working
class,
which
might
have been
amusing'
-
he felt himself
'falling
rapidly
in the social scale'.68
Salvaging
what he could from
this,
Fielden based
Beggar My
Neighbour
on the
speeches
he delivered for
Brockway.69
As a
political analyst,
Fielden was
hardly original.
His
arguments
for
immediate
independence
were that Britain was in no
position
to
claim
legitimacy
to
rule,
that the war had little to do with India
and
everything
to do with the
fight
for
mastery
between
equally
65 Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
232.
I
am
grateful
to Mark
Jacobsen
for
sharing descrip-
tions of the Honours from
Viceroy Reading's
1923
papers, IOR,
MSS Eur E238/25.
66 The Government of India no doubt recommended Fielden for the Hindustani
Service as a
payback
to the BBC for
sending
him out to them. The BBC refused to
appoint
Fielden as head of the service. Fielden commented that he had 'not realized
that I was so hated':
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
216. In
turn,
the Government of India
asked the India Office to
keep Zulfaqar away
from official circles while he was on
leave in Delhi: Brit.
Lib., IOR, L/I/1/784.
67 Note
by
G. C.
Ryan, Intelligence Bureau,
11 Dec. 1943:
NAI,
Home
(Pol.)
49/7/43.
68
Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
227.
69
Lionel
Fielden, Beggar My Neighbour (London, 1943).
power-hungry opponents,
and that Indian leaders would have to
work out the communal issue
among
themselves. Like most other
western
commentators,
Fielden
entangled
discussions of India's
political destiny
with
commentary
on its
spiritual
essence and the
condition of its alien masses.
Here,
he was
squarely Gandhian,
condemning
the toxins of western materialism and
demanding
a
return to the rudiments on behalf of the rural
majority,
with
whom he had little contact in India in
any
case. In this his
allegiance
was to Gandhi
himself,
under whose
spell
he had fallen.
His other
allegiances
were evident as well: Fielden dedicated the
book to
Zulfaqar
and included a
chapter
on the
just expectations
of the Muslim
minority,
who
'preserve
in their blood the
pride
of a
conquering
race'. If the intent of the book was to needle his
old
colleagues,
it worked. The Government of India
promptly
banned it as 'unadulterated
pro-Congress
and
pro-Gandhi propa-
ganda'.
An Indian National
Congress
bulletin declared it 'The
Book of the
Year!"'7
The most
damning commentary
on
Beggar My Neighbour
came
from
George Orwell,
whose recent work
arranging programmes
for the BBC Indian Service
(nominally
under
Zulfaqar)
had borne
a
strong
resemblance to Fielden's duties at his
ignominious
colo-
nial
post. Deeply compromised by
the
censoring
of his
literary
talks and war
commentaries,
Orwell's
scathing
review in his
friend
Cyril Connolly's journal, Horizon,
was
likely
an exercise
in
distancing
himself from his BBC
experience." Despite
their
joint
conviction about India's
rightful
claims to
independence,
Orwell excoriated
Fielden, arguing
that Fielden's
position
on
India
approached
fascism because of Fielden's cultural essen-
tialism
-
his concurrence with Gandhi that India would be better
off
protecting
itself
from,
rather than
embracing,
the modern
world
-
and what Orwell read as a
suggestion
that India
might
negotiate
a
peace
with
Japan.
Fielden's
anti-materialism,
his
avocation of
'spiritualism'
to 'ensure that
[the Indian]
will
always
remain a
coolie',
as Orwell described
it,
did not 'come well from
79
Note by
G. C.
Ryan, Intelligence Bureau,
11 Dec.
1943; Congress
Bulletin 'Ninth
August',
no.
8,
24 Nov. 1943: both in
NAI,
Home
(Pol.)
49/7/43.
71 Orwell's
biographer interprets
the attack on Fielden as
primarily
intended for
Zulfaqar:
Michael
Sheldon,
Orwell: The Authorized
Biography (New York, 1991),
349.
Orwell would not have worked
directly
with Fielden at the BBC. On Orwell's BBC
work,
see
ibid.,
ch.
18;
also C.
Fleay
and M. L.
Sanders, 'Looking
into the
Abyss:
George
Orwell at the
BBC', Ji Contemporary Hist.,
xxiv
(1989);
Orwell: The War
Broadcasts,
ed. W.
J.
West
(London, 1985).
someone who is in a comfortable and
privileged position'.
Fielden
was a
hypocrite
and an
easy
mark for
political manipulators
-
the self-anointed western
'intellectual',
bitter from
being
'in the
position
of a
young
man
living
on an allowance from a father that
he hates'.72
Certainly
Fielden's Indian career would have rewarded him
more had Orwell's characterization of him as a naive convert to
others' causes been correct. Had he
simply
believed with his
colonial
peers
in the altruism of British
governance or, conversely,
with his famous friends in the
unalloyed justness
of Indian nation-
alism,
he would not have
sat,
as he
put it,
on the
'lonely
fence'.
Gandhi had said as much at their first
meeting,
Fielden conceded
in
Beggar My Neighbour,
when he warned that unless Fielden was
to choose one side or the other 'both will throw stones'.73 But in
their iconoclasm and
contempt
for
simplistic prescriptions,
Fielden and Orwell were kindred.
Having gained
his
options by
embracing
the
experimental
1920s and
cynical 1930s,
Fielden had
no inclination to mute the chaos of the twentieth
century.
This
was most
apparent
in his
consuming passion,
his
singular
aesthetic
enterprise:
the radio was for a time its handmaiden. Fielden had
chosen
among
the
politics,
cultures and arts
arrayed
in the cosmo-
polis
before
him, orchestrating
an often
contradictory synthesis
-
continental
scepticism
and Hindu
mysticism,
modernist verse and
Mughal courtly music, anti-imperial
calls-to-arms and
Raj
cere-
monial
-
with which
he,
as
despot,
had meant to colonize Indian
broadcasting.
Considering
the
scope
of his
vision,
it is no wonder that Fielden
called the AIR that he left behind 'the
biggest flop
of all
time'.74
This is unmerited. One need
only
read his
comprehensive Report
on the
in India
(1939) (still
the best
broadcasting history
of the
period)
to realize how much he
accomplished. Though broadcasting
audiences remained limited
through
the
1940s, post-colonial
Indian radio would not have
taken off without Fielden's
groundwork.
Under his
leadership,
AIR
successfully
established more than a dozen new stations and
substantially
overcame numerous
technical,
bureaucratic and
72
George Orwell,
'Gandhi in
Mayfair', Horizon,
viii
(Sept. 1943),
216. Fielden was
given equal space
to rebut two months later: Lionel
Fielden, 'Toothpaste
in
Bloomsbury:
A
Reply
to
George Orwell', Horizon,
viii
(Nov. 1943).
"
Fielden, Beggar My Neighbour,
54.
74 Fielden,
Natural
Bent,
204.
social obstacles. Mehra
Masani,
then
Deputy
Director of
AIR,
recalled
giving
Lord Reith a tour of
Broadcasting
House in the
1950s: to his
admiring
remarks she
responded, '[i]t
was Lionel
Fielden who did that'."5 Masani was
just
one of the Fielden
proteg6s
who
perpetuated
his
protocols
in the
upper
ranks of
state
broadcasting
in India and Pakistan.
Zulfaqar
Bokhari was
the best known of them. As Radio Pakistan's first Director-
General,
he
inspired
his own
personality
cult.76
Ahmed Bokhari
left
broadcasting
after his stint as head of AIR
following
Fielden's
departure,
but
appeared
in similar
guise
as the head
publicist
for
the United Nations a decade
later;
a
job
whose
primary responsi-
bility,
as he
evidently interpreted it,
entailed numerous interviews
with the New York
press
in which he featured as a multinational
savant
(Fielden, uncharitably,
said after Ahmed's death that he
wished he had left him an
English professor)."
As for
Fielden,
he seemed to retreat with the
empire
he had
so
ambivalently
served.
Exiling
himself to
Tuscany
at the war's
end,
he
occupied
himself
restoring crumbling
villas and
lamenting
the
post-war
order. He loathed its Cold War
patriotisms,
its
technocracy,
its
easy
answers to social
questions.
On a final
trip
to India in
1956,
he found his friend Nehru as
imperious
as his
predecessors,
his 'court' as bloated and
politics
as
corrupt
as
usual.
Broadcasting
had become
nothing
but the tool of such
regimes
and of
vulgar homogeneity. By
the time that Fielden
wrote his
autobiography
a few
years later,
he had renounced it
entirely:
'The essential leaven of individual
variety
. . .
may
be
swept away by
mass
emotions,
conditioned and controlled
by
the
technical
power
of communications'."
During
his last
years,
bed-
ridden from an
accident,
he must have
thought
often of those
tumultuous and vital decades between the wars. Then there had
been an
empire
of
possibilities,
a brief interlude before he believed
for certain that
they
were to be
squandered by
the
unimaginative
who ruled the world.
Drake
University Joselyn
Zivin
75 Quoted in
Masani,
Indian Tales
of
the
Raj,
50.
76
Reminiscences by Bokhari's Radio Pakistan
colleagues
were collected in the
weekly magazine
of the Lahore
English-language newspaper, Dawn,
16
Apr.
1997.
My
thanks to
Andy
McCord for
directing
me to this source.
77
'Lionel Fielden
[to
Anwar
Dil],
8 Feb.
1968', reproduced
in Dil
(ed.),
On this
Earth
Together,
249.
78
Fielden, Natural
Bent, 325,
334.

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'Bent': A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting

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