By Glenn C Kharkongor
Shillong is known for its literary figures: A.L. Basham, Verrier Elwin, and while Rabindranath Tagore never lived here, he wrote a poem on Shillong on one of his visits. So it’s not very surprising that this hill station has many lovers of books, and one of the dwindling pleasures of visiting an old home is to survey their shelf of books.
I was told that the late J.M.Jala, an IAS officer who served from 1959-88, and was also chief secretary of Meghalaya,had left a library of diverse volumes. I was interested in knowing what kinds of books? Instead of sending me a list, a sackful of books appeared at my doorstep one day; these being, I was told, just a sample. The rest were in cardboard boxes in the garage, because his old house is being replaced with a modern structure.
Opening the large bag, the first book to catch my attention was the bulkyTribal History of Eastern India, complete with red dust jacket and 37 sepia plates, published first in 1872 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and written by E.T. Dalton, a soldier anthropologist. The two sides of Dalton were exemplified in the two books he wrote, the other being an account of the mutiny in Chota Nagpur that took place in 1857. Unfortunately many of Dalton’s manuscripts were lost during the Mutiny (or The First war of Independence, depending in which country you live on), otherwise we might have had a richer account of the eastern tribals. Predating P.R.T. Gurdon, this may be one of the earliest accounts of the Khasis.
There were several volumes of writings by Shakespeare, Somerset Maugham, and even Indian classics such as the Ramayana. He apparently liked Khushwant Singh’s novels and so he must have lots to read during his peripatetic tours.
There were some light reading among the serious tomes. Songbirds edited by Lynn Hughes (1981) is a slim but beautifully illustrated collection of poems and prose culled from the classical literature. These inspirational gems feature lessons from nature. I found only one novel, The Original Sin, described by the blurb as “as pulsing with romance, danger and suspense…sex, scandal and dirty secrets. From the rubber stamp on the frontispiece page we may conclude that it had been purchased in Delhi, and perhaps taken along as reading for the journey, and maybe to a boring meeting, for there is an entry slip to KrishiBhavan in the book.
There are several books on political science including Islam in Modern History, by W.H. Smith (1957) and The Legacy of Asia and Western Man by Alan Watts (1937). The latter has passages underlined in red pencil, marking comments that praise the wisdom of the East. There is a History of the Garos, by Levisond N.Sangma (1965). Jala studied economics, so the books on economics are legion, including a boxed set of Gunnar Myrdal’s classic works on economics.
Jala apparently was a student of psychology insofar as it pertained to organizational behavior. The Psychology of a Suppressed People by J. C. Heinrich (1937) is an interesting study of the neuroses and reactions of a people laboring under the yoke of foreign rule. It describes the effects of rulership on the colonial masters and missionary superiors, noting that many British officers and missionaries suffered from the psychological burden of supervising a culturally different race. According to one study quoted in the book, one-fourth of missionaries suffered from nervous breakdowns, resulting in them being sent back.
The Art of Remaking Men, by Paul Campbell (1971) with a foreword by Rajmohan Gandhi is a treatise on leadership using the principles of moral-rearmament (MRA). Older readers will remember Himmat, the MRA magazine, as one of the very few to defy the censorship of the Emergency.
A handful of classics caught my breath. First and foremost, an early print, 88 years old, of the Ahom Buranji,which historians know as the court records of the Ahom kings originally written on the bark of the sachi tree in the 16thcentury. This manuscript was translated by Golap Chandra Barua in 1930. Second, The Epic Lore of the Garos, brought into print by DewansinghShangmaRongmuthu in 1967, a timeless story of the hero figures, Dikki and Bandi.
Then there is a sumptuous hard bound 2nd edition of PRT Gurdon’s The Khasis, published in 1914 and complete with all the colour plates. The spine is weak, the pages flecked with silverfish burrows, but the intact glossy pages retain the vivid colours of Mrs.Truniger’s paintings, ten of them, apart from the black and white photos, diagrams and maps.
Jala’s initials, JM, stood for John Milton, considered the greatest of English authors. It turns out that his younger namesake, a few centuries downstream in history, was aptly named. One of the older John Milton’s quotes, “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit” seemed to have been the touchstone of the younger John Milton’s life.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A man is known by the books he reads…” Having never met the late chief secretary, one is left with by the books he left behind to judge his character and worldview. From this assessment, one must conclude that he was a thoughtful and reflective person, his thinking and behavior influenced and inspired by his books. He evidently had a wide range of intellectual interests from anthropology, psychology, political science and sociology, all of these informing and adding to his astuteness as a top bureaucrat.
He was interested in nature, being an outdoorsman himself. Few may know that he was an accomplished horse rider and was perhaps the only gentleman officer from the Northeast whose name is found in the Equestrian Roll of Honourat the IAS Academy at Mussoorie, being the medal winner of his batch.
The books are numbered in pencil on the first page and the smaller numbers are in older books, so he must have numbered the books in sequence as he acquired them. Evidently he treasured his books, keeping track of his literary acquisitions, underlining as he perused the key passages.
Surely he is a role model for young professionals, most of whom have not discovered the joys and edification of books.
(The author is a former vice chancellor of Martin Luther Christian University)
