Reading recently a
book on Brigadier-General Wingate,
who was killed early this year in Burma, I was interested to note that Wingates
Chindits, who marched across Upper Burma in 1943,
were wearing not the usual clumsy and conspicuous pith helmets, but slouch hats like those worn in the Ghurka regiments. This sounds a very small
point, but it is of considerable social significance, and
twenty or even ten years ago it would have been impossible. Nearly everyone, including
nearly any doctor, would have predicted that large numbers of these men would perish of
sunstroke.
Till recently the European in India had an essentially
superstitious attitude towards heat apoplexy, or sunstroke as it is usually called. It was
supposed to be something dangerous to Europeans but not to Asiatics. When I was in Burma I
was assured that the Indian sun, even at its coolest, had a peculiar deadliness which
could only be warded off by wearing a helmet of cork or pith. Natives, their
skulls being thicker, had no need of these helmets, but for a European even a double felt
hat was not a reliable protection.
But why should the sun in Burma, even on a positively chilly day,
be deadlier than in England? Because we were nearer to the equator and the rays of the sun
were more perpendicular. This astonished me, for obviously the rays of the sun are only
perpendicular round about noon. How about the early morning, when the sun is creeping over
the horizon and the rays are parallel with the earth? It is exactly then, I was told, that
they are at their most dangerous. But how about the rainy season, when one frequently does
not see the sun for days at a time? Then of all times, the old-stagers told me, you should
cling to your topi. (The pith helmet is called a topi, which is Hindustani for
hat.) The deadly rays filter through the envelope of cloud just the same, and
on a dull day you are in danger of forgetting it. Take your topi off in the open for one
moment, even for one moment, and you may be a dead man. Some people, not content with cork
and pith, believed in the mysterious virtues of red flannel and had little patches of it
sewn into their shirts over the top vertebra. The Eurasian community, anxious to emphasize
their white ancestry, used at that time to wear topis even larger and thicker than those
of the British.
My own disbelief in all this dated from the day when my topi was
blown off my head and carried away down a stream, leaving me to march bareheaded all day
without ill effects. But I soon noticed other facts that conflicted with the prevailing
belief. To begin with some Europeans (for instance sailors working in the rigging of
ships) did habitually go bareheaded in the sun. Again, when cases of sunstroke occurred
(for they do occur), they did not seem to be traceable to any occasion when the victim had
taken his hat off. They happened to Asiatics as well as to Europeans, and were said to be
commonest among stokers on coal-burning ships, who were subjected to fierce heat but not
to sunshine. The final blow was the discovery that the topi, supposedly the only
protection against the Indian sun, is quite a recent invention. The early Europeans in
India knew nothing of it. In short, the whole thing was bunkum.
But why should the British in India have built up this
superstition about sunstroke? Because an endless emphasis on the differences between the
natives and yourself is one of the necessary props of imperialism. You can
only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you
honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can
believe that the subject race is biologically different. There were quite a number
of ways in which Europeans in India used to believe, without any evidence, that Asiatic
bodies differed from their own. Even quite considerable anatomical differences were
supposed to exist. But this nonsense about Europeans being subject to sunstroke and
Orientals not, was the most cherished superstition of all. The thin skull was the mark of
racial superiority, and the pith topi was a sort of emblem of imperialism.
That is why it seems to me a sign of the changing times that
Wingates men, British, Indians and Burmese alike, set forth in ordinary felt hats.
They suffered from dysentery, malaria, leeches, lice, snakes and Japanese, but I do not
think any cases of sunstroke were recorded. And above all, there seems to have been no
official protest and no feeling that the abandonment of the topi was a subtle blow at
white prestige.
In Mr Stanley Unwins recent pamphlet, Publishing in Peace and War, some
interesting facts are given about the quantities of paper allotted by the Government for
various purposes. Here are the present figures:
Newspapers . . . . . . . . . . . 250,000 tons
H.M. Stationery Office . . . 100,000 ,,
Periodicals (nearly) . . . . . . .50,000 ,,
Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22,000 ,,
A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons allotted to the
Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than 25,000 tons, or more than the whole
book trade put together.
I havent personally witnessed, but I can imagine, the kind
of wastage of paper that goes on in the War Office and the various ministries. I know what
happens in the B.B.C. Would you credit, for instance, that of every radio programme that
goes out on the air, even the inconceivable rubbish of cross-talk comedians, at least six
copies are typed sometimes as many as fifteen copies? For years past all this trash has been filed somewhere or other in enormous
archives. At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most hackneyed
classic is liable to be out of print, many schools are short of text-books,
new writers get no chance to start and even established writers have to expect a gap of a
year or two years between finishing a book and seeing it published. And incidentally the
export trade in English books has been largely swallowed up by America.
This part of Mr Unwins pamphlet is a depressing story. He
writes with justified anger of the contemptuous attitude towards books shown by one
government department after another. But in fact the English as a whole, though somewhat
better in this respect than the Americans, have not much reverence for books. It is in the
small countries, such as Finland and Holland, that the book consumption per head is
largest. Is it not rather humiliating to be told that a few years before the war a remote
town like Reykjavik had a better display of British books than any English town of
comparable size?