A Hindu at Oxford

BY VED MEHTA

WHEN I was a boy, one of my father’s clerks who had served both English and Indian officers told me that the only way an Indian could “escape the black skin" was by getting an Oxford education. He went on to say that the British colonial servants were not typical Englishmen, and that the only way one could ever hope to know the real Englishman was by seeing him on his own soil. To him the best place on English soil was Oxford. He instilled in me the desire to see England, and Oxford in particular, which was not fulfilled until the autumn of 1956 when, after I had finished my first degree in America, an Oxford education was put within my reach by a scholarship at Balliol College.

My first real taste of Oxford came at the Balliol freshmen’s dinner; “Balliol has a thirteenthcentury foundation,” our master enlightened us, “and is the oldest college at Oxford.” We were to disregard similar claims by Merton and University Colleges, which were obviously spurious. After we had drunk a toast to the Queen, the undergraduate on my left explained that he had come to Balliol because within the last hundred years it had been the college of great men. Did I know, for instance, that Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sir Lewis Namier, Professor Arnold Toynbee (and heaven knows who else) were all Balliol men? While I was still pondering the galaxy of men to whose company I was to be elevated by mere attendance at their college, my friend on the left continued: “This college is famous for its variety. It is a hothed of socialists, Communists, capitalists, reactionaries, and anarchists.”

After dinner, we adjourned for coffee to the rooms of another newly acquired friend. As our host placed the coffeepot on a gas ring, he painted a picture of Oxford life. I need never leave my bed until noon; at least, one genius that he knew had got a first-class Oxford degree by staying in bed almost all the time with an abundant supply of cheese and biscuits and by having his books brought to him by his friends. A good student need never attend lectures, because most of the lecturers had written books and lectures were only a substitute for reading for oneself. One would, of course, have to turn up for individual tutorials, which usually took no more than an hour or two a week, For each tutorial one would naturally have to prepare an essay and read it aloud to the tutor, but he would only attack it mildly and, if one was not shy, defense would be easy. I was advised that if my tutor was in bed when I arrived for a tute, I should not begrudge him his sleep. I should knock gently and if he awakened withdraw into the junior common room (a lounge for undergraduates) where I was certain to be fetched by the tutor when he was ready for me. The wait, he assured me, would not be very long because tutors were quite practiced in getting into their trousers quickly.

The pressure of work, my host assured me, would be very slight, as there is only one big examination which comes for every student at the end of his third year. The examination is, of course, important, as the mark on it determines the class of the degree one receives or, indeed, whether one fails or passes. But, if one works hard in the last year of one’s Oxford career, one should be able to do decently in the examination.

As I was still in reverie, the host yawned slightly and, since I was beginning to feel the effect of the dinner wine, I excused myself and started toward my room and bed. My next-door neighbor walked out with me. “You know,” he said thoughtfully but with authority, “you’ve got to beware of these chaps. It’s a famous habit here to pretend that life is easy and genteel and that no one works, but don’t you, for a moment, believe it.”

I HAD my rude awakening when, a week later, I read my first essay on the Saxon invasions to a medievalist. The essay involved consulting, if not actually reading, from half a dozen to a dozen books. I worked hard throughout the week, and even then I had to stay up half the night before the tute. The experience of hearing my own words and sentences read aloud in the presence of a tutor was an excruciating ordeal. As I finished my week’s labor, my tutor, who had sat still in his chair all through the essay, simply said, “Yes” and, clearing his throat, he asked me how many Saxons, I imagined, had come over to England; my paper had assumed at least half a million to a million. He pressed me as to how many ships, I thought, such a host of invaders would need for transportation; where did I suppose they could get the lumber to build the ships; how long would it take for the Saxons to build each ship; how long was the stretch of sea they had to cross; how much of a margin was I willing to allow for the multiplication of Saxons once they reached England? When he finished with me, I was left with no thesis — indeed, with hardly an essay! Reading, he told me, need not be exhibited in your essay. It should simply be used as a springboard for “fresh insights” and exercise of critical faculties.

I was made to understand that at the end of my Oxford career there would be thirty hours of written examinations crammed into one week, with a viva to follow. These examinations would be marked not by my tutors or anyone who was even remotely interested in my welfare, but by outside examiners. There was no way of forecasting the types of questions they might ask. In a way, the examination would evaluate both the tutors and their pupils, because it was the tutor’s responsibility to steer his students to the best and the latest material in the field and to raise the kind of questions in a tute which would prepare the student to think and be ready to cope with the uncertainties of an impersonal examination.

My first tutorial had created in my mind real doubts about the so-called leisurely life at Oxford. So, I looked up the host who had served us coffee after the freshmen’s dinner. “What about it?” I asked him. “If I am to have tutes like the one this morning, there won’t be any leisure or sleep for me.” He laughed condescendingly. “What are vacs, for?” The question was rhetorical. He explained that at Oxford half of the year is given over to long vacations in which most of the undergraduates are supposed to do their best work. Term time was playtime. One attended clubs, societies, debates in the union, worked on the university literary magazines and, certainly, played darts at one’s favorite pub. To compensate for this playtime, one literally slaved in the vac. and stored up as much reading material in one’s head and notebooks as possible, so that one could dash off tutorial essays speedily. “After all,” he told me, “one’s tutorial work is simply a form of exercise for one’s own benefit — and one gets the knack of it after a while.” This explanation, though legitimate, seemed to be somewhat farfetched. I was quite prepared to sacrifice my holidays on the altar of Oxford education. But, if my tutorial on Saxon invasions was an example, I would need a good part of a long vac. simply preparing for one essay.

AS MY first days at the university stretched into weeks, however, I discovered that what really lay at the heart of the Oxford system was the aristocratic structure of English society and education. Students who arrived at the university were so thoroughly prepared academically that they could cope with both the tutorial system and the final examinations (called here the Schools), and still devote time and unflagging energy to other activities. Every boy and girl had, as it were, been getting ready for an Oxford education of arts and manners from the time they graduated from their rompers. Their education was highly specialized; it was not at all unusual, I learned, for a headmaster to walk up to, say, a boy of thirteen and ask; “Boy, would you like to be in the scientific or the classical stream?” If he gave a promising answer, he would be placed in one of the streams and so by the time he reached the stage of the university entrance examination, he would have acquired either all the linguistic tools (Greek, Latin, or whatever) for an education in the arts or a fund of data for a scientific education. This early specialization, coupled with a battery of examinations given from the age of eleven, determined whether one ever reached the university. The process of natural selection was so rigorous that, to prepare a nucleus for the university, an expensive boarding school or a highly selective grammar school education was indispensable. Underlying this education, there was an influential class structure of which the aristocratic education was only a part.

How the class society worked in education was made clear by simply observing the snobbery which went with certain types of students up at Oxford. Roughly speaking, in Oxford colleges there are patricians and plebs. The patricians are students coming from the professional or moneyed families, or from families with historic names or titles; these students are educated in public schools (public schools in England are private) and have their particular ancient boarding school stamp. Plebs are products of grammar schools, and their families have not been able to afford a boarding school education for their children. The grammar school men are not so much considered outsiders as invaders of this ancient university, because at one time education here was as much inherited as property or the name of the family. The public school men (although in a minority because of the post-war increase in university attendance) still form the “smart set” at Oxford colleges, who eat together, belong to select dining clubs, and shrink from the horror of admitting to their society a man who, while a brilliant conversationalist, might turn up at one of their meetings without a dinner jacket. Addresses in particular areas, a certain accent, the labels on clothes, all help to put the chaps in a special class with a near-monopoly in particular jobs — as, for example, in the British Foreign Office. The converse is true also; for example, traces of provincial pronunciation will automatically bar many a door for a man.

But the plebs of Oxford are, for all their disadvantages, patricians in the outside English society. Graduates of other universities (the English word is “redbrick” or “tramway” universities) invariably seem to lose when they are competing for a job against Oxford or Cambridge graduates, sometimes even when a redbrick man has a better degree than an Oxonian or Cantabridgian. This is not altogether unfair, as the educational system in England ensures that by and large the best minds end up at Oxford or Cambridge. While it is natural for an Oxford or Cambridge man to favor a graduate of his own university over other graduates, it does lead to the perpetuation of aristocracy, and putting emphasis on the dictum, “Manners maketh the man,” as a qualification for becoming a member of the ruling class.

The chaps, the grammer school gentlemen, and the redbrick men are but a part of the social order which still values gradations and lives on nuances of distinctions, titles, and offices. The important thing about this aristocracy, and about the attachment of the British people to honors, from the view of the experiment of the welfare state, is that the aristocracy which remains is, in large part, an aristocracy of talents and honors that are valued and are hard-earned in post-war England by those who receive them. Besides, for all the remnants of the old aristocratic England, there are strong leveling influences at work. For instance, the “invaders” are coming to the older universities in larger and larger numbers (70 per cent of the student population at Oxford and Cambridge receive some sort of state aid or grants), and the more enterprising of them are gradually working their way into places hitherto ticketed for the smart set.

These influences may be of little consolation to the levelers who want to throw all the remnants of class structure, including Oxford and Cambridge with their gray flannel snobs, to the winds. More thoughtful men, however, are hard at work trying to reform aristocratic England by a compromise between Right and Left. The proposals to reform the House of Lords by using life peers as a counterweight to hereditary Lords, the plans to make the monarchy less removed from the people by closer contact between the Queen and her subjects, the numerous suggestions to open half the places in all public schools to state-supported scholars — all of these are products of a sober-spirited generation. But this new outlook has brought on daily outbursts of nationalism in the cheap press and broadside attacks on “establishment” — all peerage and monarchy. It has also made people tense about the too rapid change in values which is going on; one can find no better symptom of this tension than the Angry Young Men.

Having passed through stages of reactions toward Oxford - reactions varying from my first days in a trance, when I expected Oxford education to consist of simply drinking tea and wine beside the candlelight; to the discovery that the twin pillars which propped the educational system here were the tutes and the examination; to an understanding that, if the color of one’s own skin did not determine whether one were a master or a subject, the name of the university did — I can say this: there is as much chance of overthrowing the prestige and weight of Oxford and Cambridge aristocracy as there is of dethroning Queen Elizabeth II in favor of a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell.