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PARTISAN REVIEW
Senior and Junior halves, ruling tiny, neighboring states. A queer and
apparently motiveless rivalry sprang up between the sections of the
dynasty, and the atmosphere of the Court of Dewas Senior was heavy
with spies and emissaries from the adjacent court, with spies from other
more powerful states, with British Political Agents, Agents to the Gov–
ernor General, rumored and impending visits from the Viceroy and the
Prince of Wales, and all the familiar and cruelly farcical apparatus,
rigamarole and stage machinery of colonial government-a story often
told, but one always worth listening to again. Dewas Senior was in the
middle of rebuilding and abortively Westernizing itself (the Maharajah
had read Aristotle's
Politics
with his English tutor), and had, like so
much else in Colonial India, got bogged down through lack of energy
and money; it was a chaos and a shambles when Forster arrived, and
was even worse when he left.
The New Palace ... is still building, and the parts of it that were
built ten years ago arc already falling down. You would weep at the
destruction, expense, and hideousness, and I do almost. We live amongst
rubble and mortar, and excavation whence six men carry a basket of
earth, no larger than a eat's, twenty yards once in five minutes . . .
two pianos (one a grand), a harmonium, and a dulci phone, all new and
all unplayable, their notes sticking and their frames cracked by the
dryness ... dozens of warped towel-horses are stabled there, or a new
suite of drawing-room chairs with their insides gushing out. I open
a cupboard ncar the bath and find it full of teapots, I ask for a book–
case and it bows when it sees me and lies rattling on the floor. I don't
know what to do about it all, and scarcely what to feel. It's no good
trying to make something different out of it, for it is as profoundly
Indian as an Indian temple.
The life of the Court proceeded through this mess, or perhaps it
is more precise to say that the life of the Court
was
this mess: confusion
and vulgarity and broken-downness were the conditions under which it
thrived as well as perished. For although Gilbert and Sillivan might
have written an opera describing this state, the original version surely
was in German, a burlesque in three acts by H egel, called
Th e Philosophy
of History.
It is amazing how cogent H egel's analysis of the spiritual
life of India still seems, how thorough ly a book like
The Hill of D eui
ratifies its speculations. Almost everything Forster describes offers the
reader a view of the Spirit still entangled with nature-not at one with
it, but not yet separated into self-consciousness either. And the struggle
of the Spirit to find itself, to become sensible of its existence in the
material and social reality that encompasses and, in the denseness of
India, almost strangles it, generates the two dominant modes of con-
