Anger Under the Snows

THE WILD SWEET WITCH (234 pp.)-- Philip Woodruff--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

The cold mountain air of the upper Himalayas pervades this novel of north India, giving it a quality, like its setting, far removed from the luxuriant misery of the plains. It is a novel notable for a fair effort at balancing sympathies between

Indians and British. The scales tip, however; and no Indian will care for the novel's final implication that, by & large, three generations of British administrators were cool, active and kindly men faced with a buzzing of unstable--if lovable--children.

Novelist Woodruff, whose real name is Philip Mason, worked as a civil servant in India for 20 years, ending up as Joint Secretary of the Defense Department from 1944 to this year. E. M. Forster's Passage to India (1924), a novel in which certain types of British officials were treated with an irony amounting to loathing, has evidently been on his mind. He writes, in his foreword: "Perhaps I have been lucky in the people I have known and the visitors who write books after a six months' stay have been unlucky." This mild slap at

Forster, a profound, canny and better novelist, might be rash ; it would be rasher had not Woodruff written a fairly good novel himself.

Bravery & Bears. The first and best part of his story tells how a hillman named Kalyanu became the favored servant of Mr. Bennett, deputy commissioner of Garhwal, in 1875. Having killed a marauding bear by an exercise of intelligence and angry bravery, Kalyanu soared to the conclusion that bears were easy ; he failed to use his head on the next bear and got mauled. Mr. Bennett set his leg, healed him, and took him on as an orderly at a critical moment.

Mr. Bennett and his new servant, traveling through the hills, took by surprise a village where the forbidden "rope festival" was about to be held. In this rite, believed to make the fields fertile, the sacrificial victim had a sporting chance; he had to ride a forked stick down a rope stretched from a 500-ft. cliff to the fields below.

Mr. Bennett and his party arrived on the scene just as the fun was about to begin --an ill-timed arrival for Her Majesty's representative. Mr. Bennett faced down the sullen hillmen, stopping the show, and Kalyanu helped to see him through. Later, Mr. Bennett took Kalyanu along on an exploratory ascent of the high Himalayan range. On a glassy snow slope at 15,000 feet the two men were caught in a cloud. They fell, but broke their fall and were not killed. But Mr. Bennett would never have made it back to camp without Kalyanu.

Anger & Ambition. Three generations later, in 1923, the relationship between Kalyanu's grandson, Jodh Singh, and the new deputy commissioner, Hugh Upton, was more complicated. The district of Garhwal remained the same: the peasants tilled their terraced fields of millet on the mountainsides, drove their sheep and goats to the high, flowering pastures in the spring, sent their women out to gather sticks for the winter fires in the smoky stone huts. Jodh Singh, however, enjoyed the privileges won by his grandfather; he had been to Lucknow University, and he felt it his mission in life to fight for a free India.

Novelist Woodruff tries half-heartedly to get under the skins of his English characters, who are forever mooning over the little lanes and hedges of England but behaving with wise good cheer. The Wild Sweet Witch ends with Jodh Singh's death by violence in 1938. It is not violence brought on by his political beliefs. When he is framed by two of his enemies, he goes wild and kills them; then he dies fighting rather than surrender to the British commissioner. The "wild, sweet witch" of his visionary hopes--a free and happy India--has at least had a heroic lover.

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