My
father (K.P.S. Menon Senior) went to China in somewhat peculiar
circumstances: he first went as Agent General for India. The Chinese and
others were aware of the diplomatic ranks, Ambassadors, Ministers, Charge
d’ Affairs, but Agent General? This was something else again. Some thought
it was a military title but, wrote mother, one look at him would have
disabused them of any such illusion.
The
term derived from the fact that when father was appointed as India’s
representative, in 1943. India was not yet independent: but father continued
in China as Ambassador when the Indian National Congress agreed to form the
government in 1946. Father was, in fact, one of the two first ambassadors of
independent India, the other being Asaf Ali in Washington. That Jawaharlal
Nehru thought it fit to appoint one of these two to China shows the
importance he attached to India-China relations.
Whether
as Agent-general or Ambassador, father was received with the warmth of
genuine friendship. Those were difficult days: wartime Chongqing and then
post-war Naming. But he was able to travel widely and meet people in all
walks of life and he established friendships which lasted throughout his
lifetime. Indeed, I was to profit from some of them when I was posted to
China forty years later.
The
then Chongqing was described as an extraordinarily difficult post. My
fathers predecessor, Sir Zafrullah Khan, had advised him to have his
olfactory nerves removed so that he would be saved from the stench that, he
said, prevailed. Fortunately, father did no such thing and was none the
worse for it.
What
a wealth of life there was even in wartime Chongqing! I visited that
Chongqing during my vacations from school and I remember being impressed
even at the young age by the sheer joie
de vivre of the Chinese. The eating-places always seemed full and
crowded and noisy, there was much talking and laughter and drinking - and
gambling. My impressions, however, were certainly superficial, those of a
callow youth, for China was undergoing the most terrible wartime privations.
The climate did not help: Chongqing was covered in fog seven months of the
year, a fog so thick and opaque that it was said when the sun came out the
dogs barked. One of the Ambassadors there, who kept a meticulous record of
the sunshine, calculated that in four and a half months it had shone for
just three and half hours. I visited Chongqing again years later when I was
Ambassador to China. I recollect a kindly official warning me that it would
be so hot that it was said the birds dropped dead from the head. I have no
memory of that head, but I did notice that the talk and laughter and
drinking was as lively as I remembered them - but there was no gambling. I
found that Chongqing still retained for me the attraction first seen through
the eyes of youth, the dwellings on terraced hillsides, the all seeing,
eternal Yangtse on its way to the boundless sea. But I do not recollect
hearing again the dolorous fog horns of passing ships nor the plaintive
cries of bargemen who, tied to ropes, pulled loads up the Yangtse.
In
Chongqing I saw at first hand the efficiency of Chinese record-keeping. I
told my guide that if possible I would like to visit the house in which I
had lived more than forty years ago. I did not have the address and thought
no more of it, thinking it would be well-nigh impossible to trace; but to my
amazement he informed me within half-an-hour of the two addresses at which
the Indian Representative had lived. So, it was with much nostalgia that I
saw the house I had stayed in during a vacation, but from afar because it
was now occupied by six families and I did not wish to intrude upon them. I
was not so lucky in Nanjng. There, I knew the address of the house, the then
42, Beijing Road, but it had given way to a new construction.
Father
has also recorded, amongst much else, of how he marvelled at the painstaking
cultivation around Chengdu, where not an inch of land or drop of water was
wasted, and at the ancient irrigation system in Guanxian which I too
marvelled at years later.
My
parents visited in Chengdu my sister Parvathi, who was studying in Jinling
College, presided over by the famous Dr. Wu Yi-fang. Parvathi’s room-mates
turned out to see them, for they were the first Indians they were seeing.
One of them remarked to Parvathi, “Your mother must have a little foreign
blood in her” -for my mother has large eyes and a prominent nose -“but
your father is all right, he is one of us.” Mother remarked that was why
father had been chosen to represent India in China.
Parvathi
wrote that her room-mates were very considerate towards her. In a dormitory
of six double-decker beds they insisted on her having the lower berth and
wanted even to make her bed. On one occasion, they told her, still in the
most friendly manner, that a hundred years ago India was subject to China.
When Parvathi protested, she writes, “They looked so sad that I felt
tempted to agree with them, until a more enlightened scholar of history came
to the rescue”.
Several
years later when, as a newly-arrived Ambassador in Beijing, I called on the
French Ambassador, he said, “You have two sisters”, “Four”, said I.
“Two of them studied in Chengdu”, he said. Three”, I said. It turned
out that the Ambassador and his wife had been studying in Chengdu with my
twin sisters, the other twin had followed Parvathi there. She studied at
Yanjing University in Chengdu. Today Parvathi’s daughter teaches Chinese
language and history at the Department of Chinese and Japanese Studies in
Delhi University and the son of one of the twins, Shivshankar Menon, now
heads the Division dealing with China in the Ministry of External Affairs in
New Delhi.*
He has already been posted twice to China, the second occasion being when I
was there. When he was due to arrive on this second Occasion one of the
Chinese on our staff in Beijing asked my Counsellor whether he was the same
Menon who had been there before; and she expressed much happiness at his
coming again. It was good to feel this friendship. Shivshankar’s wife,
too, was, as it were, an “old China hand”, for her father, Ram Sathe,
was in Chongqing and Nanjing with my father; and was later Consul-General in
Kashgar and Ambassador in Beqing in his own right.
Another
place my wife, Lalitha, and I visited, which had been visited by father
first in 1944 and then, thirteen years later from the Soviet Union in 1957.
Was Xinjiang and, more particularly, Urumqi, Kashgar and Lanzhou. He had
stayed in these places and so did we. In Kashgar he had been accommodated in
Chini Bagh, the house so beloved of Lady Macartney, whose husband had spent
twenty-eight years there. Ram Sathe had stayed in the same house, as
India’s Consul-general; but by the time we got to Kashgar the winds of
change had converted the house to a transit-shelter for truck drivers.
Father
has described the amazing changes that had taken place in the interval of
thirteen years since his first visit. It was these changes that we saw. We
also saw the remarkable efficiency of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in
arranging visits of three plane-loads of diplomats to the awesome
Takhlamakan desert and to the surrounding areas of absorbing interest,
fabled in history and art, such as the Dunhuang caves. The planning was
faultless: and more perfectly organized visits cannot be imagined. But
Lalitha and I also experienced an example of pride going before a fall or,
rather, as it happened, of pride following a fall. For part of the visit the
participants had to ride on camels. We tried to get on to the same camel, to
its obvious resentment, and when goaded, it took the simple way out: it
gently rolled over on the one side. We were deposited into the gleaming,
white sands; and treasure as a memento the photograph of our sprawling
discomfiture which the Canadian Ambassador had recorded on his camera. But
our pride was salvaged when we were the only diplomat couple to succeed in
climbing the sand hill by the side of the beautiful Half Moon Lake,
described by travellers centuries ago. Others had done it singly; some had
failed altogether.
Father’s
direct association with China was split into two periods, very different in
content. During the first period, from 1943 to 1948, when he was
Agent-general and then Ambassador to China, China was in the throes-of war
and civil war. She was suffering the most terrible deprivations, but there
was nothing to cloud the sun of India-China friendship. He found nothing but
friendship. He would have appreciated what the writer Robert Payne wrote
about him in his China Diaries, 1941-46. “Of all the foreign
representative in China”, Payne wrote, ”He is the most beloved…Men
loved and admired Eggleston (the Australian Minister).
In the same way they love and admire Menon”. (Brackets mine).
From
1948 to 1953, father was Foreign Secretary in Delhi and so also had to deal
with China. Soon after the first clouds began to appear. This is not the
place to go into them. Suffice it to say that it was a constant thread in
India’s foreign policy, when the new China came into being, in 1949, to
hold that it was wrong of the Western community, and some who followed its
lead, to try to isolate that China. For instance, India incurred the wrath
of the United States of America by taking the lead in an attempt to defeat a
Resolution in the United Nations seeking to condemn China for intervention
in Korea at the time of the Korean conflict.
Despite
the vicissitudes through which India-China relations passed in his lifetime,
father always held dear the warm Chinese friendships he had. One of his most
cherished memories was of the great Madame Sun Yat-sen, the Soong sister who
loved China, coming to the airport to see him off when he was leaving China,
and taking the trouble to return to the airport all over again six hours
later when the flight was delayed. Several years later, in 1973, he sent
her, at the suggestion of a common friend, a copy of his book, “Twilight
in China”. He hardly expected a reply and was deeply touched when she sent
him a most gracious letter.
My
own direct association with China was marked by no such cleavage. As
Ambassador between 1985 and 1987, I went to a resurgent China, ever growing
in confidence. As Foreign Secretary between 1987 and 1989, my relationship
was with the same China. Fortunately, the Prime Minister, late Shri Rajiv
Gandhi, as also the then Foreign Minister, Shri Narasimha Rao, now Prime
Minister, had come to the conclusion that even while border-differences
between the two countries were being tackled, with a view to resolving them,
progress should be made in other fields. This desire for improving
India-China relations was fully reciprocated by the Chinese leadership and,
shortly before I left Delhi, it culminated in Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to
China.
From
Madras, Lalitha and I take a continuing interest in happenings concerning
China. We were happy to spend a New Year’s eve here in the pleasant
company of the former Chinese Ambassador, Tu Guowei and his wife. The
evening brought back to us the happy hours we had passed in Beijing in the
company of Professor Wu Xiaoling and his family, who introduced us to
Chinese opera. Equally, we recollected the hospitality extended to us by
those good friends of my parents, Ambassador Shen Jian, also a former
Ambassador to India, and his wife, and the Yangs - Gladys and Xianyi Yang -
opened to us a whole treasure-house of Chinese literature in their
translations.
In
Madras, too, we were happy to see on the stage of the prestigious
Kalakshetra, two flower-like little Chinese girls performing Bharatanatyam
and Chinese dancesThey came to India in response to an invitation extended
by Shri RVenkatraman, former President of India, during a visit to China,
and they were trained in Bharatanatyam by the redoubtable Chinese danseuse,
Madame Zhang Jun, a particularly close friend of Lalitha’s.
Our
memories remain ever green. They will be added to, for, as I have said,
there is already a third generation in the family busying itself with
matters Chinese.
*
This
article was written in 1974. Mr. Shivasankar Menon is now India's
ambassador to Sri Lanka-Editor.
