When approaching New Delhi from the West, i.e. from Haryana, one’s vehicle used to jump when hitting the fat layer of asphalt that the Union Territory of Delhi could afford, but which Haryana could not. I do not remember a similar bump upon approaching from Delhi from Meerut. What signalled closeness to the capital was the cloud of smog hanging over the city on most days except during the monsoon.

There were plenty of cheap buses available at the main bus stand in Meerut covering the 65-70 km distance to the Kashmiri Gate Bus Stand in Delhi. The buses passed through Modinagar. This industrial enclave had many chimneys, but they did not belch out black smoke as much as one could have feared. In Ghaziabad, the busses passed the Mohan Meakin breweries, which produced alcoholic drinks, including Old Monk rum. During the harvesting season, long queues of boogies loaded with freshly harvested sugarcane were waiting for the cane to be weighed, and the all-important receipts to be obtained.

The traffic out of Meerut towards the north was less intensive once it had passed the Begum Phool, i.e. the Queen’s Bridge, over the open drain known as Kali Nadi that formed the heart of the city. The sides of this drain were steep enough to allow the sewage to flow in the direction of the university. In 2023, I inquired from a Meerut gentleman, whom I met in Muzaffarnagar, whether the drain was still uncovered. He affirmed that it was, and indicated that this drain was a part of what could be considered the Meerut brand.

Photo: The Kali Nadi drain under the Queen’s Bridge, 2023. Meerut would not quite be Meerut without this open drain.

A little further ahead on the Roorkee Road, there was a petrol pump at which the Delhi gentry would often stop on their way to the hills. At the attached Refreshment Centre, effusively stirred omelettes were available. This place now figures on Google Maps under the name Omelette of Caltex Fame Refreshment Centre.

Photo: Customers at the Refreshment Centre on Roorkee Road in the mid-1970s. Note the bell-bottom pants. 

The telephonic connections in and out of Meerut were bad. My parents tried to call me from Denmark, but they never succeeded. Hearsay had it that the District Magistrate had a phone from where calls could be made, but this option was not for everyone. One could also try to make one’s influence felt in order to make a so-called “lightning call” from the telephone office. But, for all practical purposes, long-distance calls were out of the question. One could try, but the calls rarely “matured.” Telegrams and letters were the reliable modes of communication.

In my previous story, I drew attention to the magazine Everyman’s, which was the main organ of the JP movement. People’s Action. Journal of Sarvodaya Revolution was a kindred publication also advocating the total transformation of society. People’s Action was published by the Sarva Seva Sangh from the Gandhi Peace Foundation located on Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg in New Delhi. Thus, it was the official organ of the Gandhian movement in Delhi, if not in the whole of India.

The Gandhi Peace Foundation embodied some of the same contradictions as the JP movement itself. Historically, it was close to the Congress party, but it was ideologically drawn in the direction of the JP movement, and, thus, could find itself at odds with Indira Gandhi and the Congress. In the March 1974 issue of People’s Action (vol. 8, no. 3, p. 3), the journal on the one hand glorified the Gujarat student movement, which was the precursor of the JP movement, and on the other hand bemoaned the likely outcome of the movement, i.e. that student leaders would join one or the other party so that “they could carry on their crusade from inside the power structure itself.”

The Gujarat student movement had started with an in-house demand for a reduction of steeply hiked mess charges. From this rather narrow beginning, it was now making forceful demands for the resignation of the state government. Was this in accordance with Gandhian principles or had JP gone wrong?

The person to answer this question was the saintly figure of Vinoba Bhave, who was a few years older than JP but had had longer innings as a follower of Gandhi. Vinoba Bhave was to set things straight – but his utterances were as difficult to interpret as the oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece.

On the one hand, he shied away from sponsoring a militant non-violent movement. On the other, he argued that JP’s line was right because: “(1) J.P. is a gentleman, (2) He would do only what is good and in a disinterested manner, (3) He would correct himself if he is in error, (4) Nothing is going to come out of it. Problems go on and on while men may come and go” (People’s Action June 1974, p. 10). When the government imposed the Emergency, the two Gandhian leaders had parted ways.

Though it was in the heart of Delhi, the Gandhi Peace Foundation had a rural ambience. Its sylvan atmosphere, however, was marred by the soot and the visible residues arising from the chimneys of the nearby Indraprastha Power Station. The only other place where I have seen similar centimetre-long unburnt residues raining down over entire neighbourhoods was in Kathauli in Muzaffarnagar district, where the Triveni sugar mill was located.

Even so, I visited the Gandhi Peace Foundation a few times for meetings with, among others, Rita Roy and Babulal Sharma, who both worked there. Rita Roy has introduced Mahatma Gandhi not only to foreign visitors like me but also to children in India. Rita and her friend Prema, originally from Kerala, were adventurous and cajoled me to invite them to Meerut to show them the narrow bylanes of the old city of Meerut. They were Delhi people, but they were keen to see more of Meerut than the Refreshment Centre at Roorkee Road.

Photo: Meerut Clock Tower – Ghanta Ghar

The Ghanta Ghar, or Clock Tower, was the natural entry point to the old city. Kotla was one of the neighbourhoods, or mohallas, close to the Clock Tower. As I developed an interest in the legal profession, I occasionally visited Mr. S.M. Kazim, a Shia lawyer, who lived in Kotla with his family. They had a spacious compound, where they would offer incredibly hot and spicy kababs.

Around New Year 1975-76, my parents came to visit me in India. My father had a law degree. He did not practice as a lawyer, but I took my parents to meet the Kazim family. When we were sitting in the courtyard, a small child of the family looked at us with some amazement, and asked: “Are they hippies?” That was about the strangest type of people that the child could think of, and, yet, it was not a bad guess after all.

From Kotla, it was a thirty minutes’ walk down to Hapur Adda from where I could catch a cycle-rickshaw or a tonga (a horse carriage) to the university. This walk is not likely to figure in the Lonely Planet, but, luckily, I was never bothered or molested by anybody.

Professor Brij Raj Chauhan instructed us to do a small survey of the Muslim elite of the city. Having taken an interest in the legal profession, I chose to focus on Muslim lawyers. My MA paper was entitled “Preliminary Survey of a Minority Elite: The Background, Links and Function of Muslim Lawyers in Meerut.” I am not sure that this paper has stood the test of time, but it goes to show, that – Emergency or not – students were encouraged to do fieldwork in the bylanes of a riot-prone city.

A Lucknowi experience

During their visit to Meerut, my parents stayed at the university Guest House.

My parents at the University Guest House

My mother, Inge, noted in an essay she wrote about their visit that there was no “winter culture” in Meerut. They managed to get a heater for their room in the Guest House, but she remarked that in the hostel, where I stayed, there was no heating arrangement at all. 

Apart from Meerut and Delhi, they visited Rishikesh, Agra, Jaipur, and Hyderabad. In Agra, we stayed at the Holiday Inn, where I ordered Tandoori Chicken. Seeing that it was not as red as I had learnt to expect, I complained to the waiter. He explained to me that for the sake of the customers, it was the policy of the hotel not to use artificial food colouring.

That said, he invited us to visit him and his family in Lucknow.

As we were not going to Lucknow, we declined his invitation. However, during the break for Holi, I took the train to Lucknow to visit him. Umesh received me at the platform and took me to a jeep waiting outside the station. To my surprise, the jeep was saluted by policemen along the route whether the traffic lights showed green, red, or yellow. It turned out that Umesh’s father, Mr. Mathur, was the DIG, PAC, UP. This meant that he was the second-highest ranking officer of the provincial armed constabulary in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

From what I knew of caste and class in India, I would not expect that the son of such a high-ranking and powerful officer would be waiting on guests at the table as a steward earning a starting monthly salary of about Rs. 125. But that was the case! I had to revise my preconceptions. The Mathurs were well-connected, the family and their in-laws counting other IPS and IAS officers, as well as a Chief Justice of a High Court. They belonged to what historians rightly term “the service gentry.”

In Lucknow, Umesh showed me the Chota Imambara, the Bhool Bhulaiya, and other buildings from the time of the Lucknow Nawabs. The rule of the Nawabs ended in 1856, but their mainly Shia culture lived on. The city, however, was also a site of clashes between Shias and Sunnis. A minor clash occurred during my visit. I did discuss religion with the family. Mathur argued that the Holi festival showed that Hinduism was a religion full of joy and that ancient India was wealthy. Muslims, on the other hand, were preoccupied with rituals of mourning.

At the time, I would not support this interpretation, but today I would not be averse to a reading of the history of religion that underscored such major differences between faiths. As for the police sepoys, they were, in fact, allowed to act out their joy during Holi through dance and music. A contingent among them shared cauldrons of sugarcane juice. One of the cauldrons contained a sugarcane-bhang concoction.

One of the evenings, we watched a performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The play was attended by other members of the ‘polite’ society in Lucknow. Together, they were part of the steel frame that held together the Indian state. They were the iron fist in the velvet glove.

Photo: The Mathur family at an outing in Lucknow. Umesh at the right

Some forty-two years later, Umesh invited me to Ahmedabad, where he was managing a chain of restaurants owned by a Parsi entrepreneur. One day in his office, he told me that he owed me Rs. 314. I had given him this amount of money when I left India in the summer of 1976, and requested him to hand it over to someone in Delhi to whom I owed this amount. However, Umesh went straight to work in Agra and never managed to pay the concerned person. For my part, I forgot all about it. But he did not forget, and in 2018 he paid back the money.

According to India Today, Meerut University, which is now named Chaudhary Charan Singh University, admitted no foreign students between 2019 and 2023. By that account, the university was more international when I was there than it is nowadays.  And I was not the only foreigner on campus. Apart from me, the Swedish anthropologist Stefan Molund was also affiliated with the Department of Sociology.

Stefan was part of a project on urban anthropology under Prof. Ulf Hannerz at Stockholm University in Sweden. This enabled him to study the Koris of Kanpur, which was later published as a book under the title First We Are People. The Koris had been industrial labourers for around three generations. They were a caste, but they were also a class. Among others, Stefan discussed urban studies with Satish Saberwal, who was one of the few anthropologists in India who had studied upward mobility in urban settings.

Saberwal came to Meerut to give a seminar at least once, but Stefan and I also visited him and his family at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he was on the faculty of the Centre for Historical Studies. Saberwal was a serious scholar. He would talk for hours on matters of sociological and historical concern, but when the time was up, he would abruptly return to his desk. His American wife, Edie, would then take over the conversation. He was, as TN Madan has written, “someone whose engagement with his scholarly pursuits and professional duties was absolutely focussed.”

Saberwal was interested in the differing trajectories of global history, particularly comparative studies of India and the West. He even tried to add Chinese history to his scholarly portfolio. Theoretically, he was concerned about the central role of rules and law as preconditions for the “enlargement of scales.” Village norms might suffice for a village, but in the larger urban settings, village norms would often work at cross-purpose.

In the book that he edited in memory of Saberwal, the sociologist N. Jayaram noted that he was “a stickler for norms and punctuality.” As a Hostel Warden, Saberwal had to negotiate such norms and rules on the campus itself. In this regard, my wife, Kate, and I remember one incident that Saberwal recounted to us at a later date. Hostel rooms on campus were double-seated, but one student from Denmark wanted a single room. Saberwal did consider that this request could possibly be met, but then the student supported the request by placing a 50 rupee note, or a 100 rupee note, on the table, and pushing it in the direction of Saberwal. Saberwal asked the Danish student whether the note was meant for him to which the student replied in the affirmative. This unnamed student had not done his or her homework. Trying to bribe Saberwal was a mistake.

Denmark is at the top in Transparency International’s corruption perception index. In 2023, Denmark was the least corrupt country in the world with a score of 90 out of 100, while India ranked number 93 with a score of 39 out of 100. The behaviour of the Danish student would seem to be out of sync with these rankings and also run counter to Saberwal’s theories.

However, I am not sure that is the case. Like this Danish student, other Danes abroad may pick up local norms and feel free to transfer them to Denmark.

Moreover, Danish institutions, such as banks, have been repeatedly used by criminals abroad for money laundering to their mutual benefit. As Transparency International notes in an article called Trouble at the Top: “Some of the most notorious grand corruption scandals in recent history have involved money laundering through banks in EU countries such as Denmark (90), Germany (78) and Sweden (82).” These countries have a clean civil service which is why they score high on the index, but this makes them vulnerable.

The article also notes that “top-scoring countries also tend to have well-functioning justice systems, stronger rule of law and political stability. Ironically, all of this has made these seemingly ‘clean’ countries attractive to corrupt officials from around the world when choosing where to launder and invest their ill-gotten gains for safekeeping.”

Within Denmark, too, some people find ways to bleed the state and exploit the mutual trust that has kept corruption at bay. In my view, it is a matter of time before the twain shall meet and the indexes converge.

Towards the end of my student days in Meerut, I considered whether to enrol in JNU for an M.Phil. I eventually decided not to do so and returned to Denmark in late summer 1976. After my return to Denmark, I duly received my MA degree by post. As a less welcome reminder from India, I also suffered a bout of hepatitis, which I must have contacted while in India.