For most of recorded memory on the subcontinent, the sensible response to life was to assume it might be confiscated without notice. The monsoon could fail. The zamindar could raise the rent. The Company (and one must always say "the Company" with a faint shudder, as of a man remembering a particularly bad oyster) could decide that your district would grow indigo rather than food. There was the Bengal famine of 1770, then the many famines of the nineteenth century, then 1943, when millions died within living memory of people who still lecture their grandchildren about finishing their rice.
When starvation is a recent family memory, finishing your rice is not table manners.
So we arrive at the gold. Indian households hold an almost geological quantity of gold, sitting in bangles, in temple vaults, in wedding trousseaus, in small velvet boxes under saris that have not been unfolded since the Emergency. An economist will call this "unproductive savings" and frown in a well-cut way. But gold, you see, is wealth that can walk. It goes on the bride's wrists into her new house. It goes in the lining of a coat across a newly drawn border at midnight. Ask anyone whose grandparents came over in 1947 with nothing but what they could wear, and you will understand why their grandchildren still wear it. Partition taught a whole generation that a house is a rumour and a bangle is a fact.
And now the comic part, as promised. That same gold, which once meant survival, has been promoted to a matter of display. It used to be a lifeboat. Today it is a chandelier. Families who have not missed a meal since the Nehru administration still buy it with the haunted look of people fleeing invaders, then wear it to a sangeet where the most dangerous thing in the room is a cousin with a microphone.
Then came the English, who perfected the art of being anxious while appearing bored, and who taught it to us with the patience of a governess and the cruelty of a prefect.
In 1835 Lord Macaulay (a man of such tremendous self-assurance that one suspects he was born already wearing a waistcoat) wrote his Minute on Education. In it he proposed to create "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." It must be said that he succeeded beyond his wildest Victorian dreams. That class still exists. It plays golf. It says "one" when it means "I." It has opinions on the correct way to hold a fish knife and has never seen a fish knife.
The British contribution to Indian fear was subtle, and here it is: they turned survival into rank. Under the Mughals and the rajas, safety came from land, lineage, or the goodwill of a man on an elephant. Under the Raj, safety came from a post. The Indian Civil Service, the "heaven-born," was a priesthood with filing cabinets, and the young Indian who passed its examinations entered a kind of secular heaven. There was a pension, a bungalow, a peon, a chair slightly higher than other chairs. The chair, I think, mattered most of all. India has always understood furniture as metaphysics.
From this comes the sacred word that still glimmers in every middle-class household like a diya in a shrine: sarkari naukri, the government job. It is the job from which one cannot be fired, in which one cannot become rich, and in which one will never be surprised. To a people who were surprised for several thousand years in succession, mostly unpleasantly, an unsurprising life looks very much like paradise. The English, meanwhile, handed us the club with its "members only" signboard, the gymkhana, the way a vowel can be lengthened as a weapon, and the deep and abiding conviction that the worst thing that can happen to a person is to be seen.
So we kept the club and swapped the members. That is decolonisation, more or less.
