In India My Love, the famous French writer on India, Dominique Lapierre, recounts the experiences that led to the making of two of his top sellers—Freedom at Midnight (1975) chronicling the last years of British imperialism and India’s passage into Independence and a 1985 novel, City of Joy, based on three characters in a Calcutta slum. Yet, the book is much more than just the retelling of facts.
In capturing the transition from Lapierre the starry-eyed tourist-journalist in the early 70s to “Big Brother Dominique”, the benefactor of several lakh poor and destitute people across India, India My Love also offers more than a glimpse into the journey of the man himself.
Lapierre the explorer arrives in India from England in the year 1972, in a highly cherished Rolls Royce. His mentor, Raymond Cartier, has suggested he do a story on the country through the life of the Mahatma, “a scantily clad little man who brought one of the mightiest empires of all time to its knees”.
On arrival, Lapierre is awed, like several travellers before him, by the grandeur of erstwhile Maharajas who owned an average of “3.4 Rolls Royces” each. He starts by focussing on the rich and the spectacular in India, at times delving himself into the pleasures on offer—elephant rides in Delhi, hog sticking with the 61st Cavalry Regiment in Bengal, and enjoying the hospitality of the Sikh Maharaja of Patiala in Punjab.
Lapierre also, along with his collaborator, American writer Larry Collins, spends a great deal of time collecting “two thousand unpublished accounts and over five hundred kilograms of material” in the course of researching Freedom at Midnight, which they eventually carry back to a getaway in southeastern France where the book is written over a period of thirteen months.
The most interesting episode in Lapierre’s Mahatma trail is getting Gopal Godse, the assassinator’s brother, to enact the events of that fateful day. As Godse pulls out an imaginary gun, Lapierre notices a bystander fumbling under his belt for what could be a dagger to avenge the past. It turns out that the man is looking for a pen to get Godse’s autograph! This first trip to India ends with Lapierre presenting a mosquito collected “somewhere in North India”, to the manager of a Rolls Royce showroom in London who had refused to sell him a car to bring to India.
The second half of the book reveals a more serious Lapierre who finds himself back in India after more than ten years, along with his wife, also called Dominique. They become absorbed in the ghastly leper slums of urban Calcutta, following in the footsteps of Mother Teresa. Lapierre comes face to face with great disease and destitution as well as encounters people such as the Swiss Christian Missionary Gaston known as Gaston Dada, who have dedicated their lives to Calcutta’s poor. Meeting Gaston leads to a richly detailed Dantean episode in which Lapierre spends a night in a room infested with centipedes, lizards and cockroaches and then in the morning has to “cross a lake of excrement” before reaching the toilet.
These tribulations along with countless instances of human warmth and kindness experienced in his long association with the slums have a great effect on Lapierre, moving him to write The City of Joy which he describes as his most rewarding book.
In translation from the French, Lapierre’s style comes across as simple yet evocative, espousing love for both the “sublime and the treacherous”.
While he can be faulted for being an Orientalist in exoticising Indian culture or a reductionist in offering simplistic explanations for debilitating poverty, his descriptions of the material difference that the twenty-two organisations he runs from the royalties of his books have brought to the lives of the poor, is not just heart-rendering but also stands out in the tradition of philanthropy in India.
Interspersed with a generous collection of photographs from various episodes in Lapierre’s life in India, this fast-paced book does well to remind us of one man’s inexhaustible love for India.