BOOK REVIEW : Another Engaging Memoir of India During Raj : HINDOO HOLIDAY <i> by J. R. Ackerley</i> Poseidon Press $8.95, 276 pages

One of the lovely lesser currents in England’s literary tradition can be heard meandering through Noel Coward’s most celebrated song:

“Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun.” We’ve not heard much from the dogs, but how those tropically heliotropic English can write: Sir Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence from Arabia, Mary Wortley Montague from Turkey, Evelyn Waugh from East Africa, Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster from India, and the list goes on and on.

It’s not just the sun delivering from dankness, overcast and flannel-wrapped childhood memories. It may be more a matter of deep-seated oddity, grimly repressed, discovering in Bedouins, maharajahs and South Sea traders an oddity so entirely unrepressed. How often do the writers begin in the Oh-You-Funny-Little-Man manner, only to work into a graver and more magical sympathy; as if they suddenly found it all right to be what they most deeply knew themselves to be.

Certainly Forster’s “A Passage to India” is a prime example of this shift from the surface comedy of mutual eccentricities--British and Indian--to a deeper world. That book is also one of the major British novels. In contrast, J. R. Ackerley’s “Hindoo Holiday,” written in the 1930s and now reissued, is a beguiling but much slighter work. It is a kind of junior cousin, in fact.

Some years after Forster visited India to work as private secretary to a maharajah, Ackerley, his younger friend, did the same thing. “Hindoo Holiday” is his memoir of the experience. It is an endearing and beautifully turned account, though the transformation of experience into art is not nearly as complete as Forster’s.

“He wanted someone to love him,” Ackerley writes of the man he dubs the Maharajah of Chokkrapur. “He alleged had other reasons, of course--an English private secretary, a tutor for his son; for he wasn’t really a bit like the Roman Emperors, and had to make excuses.”

It was a real if brittle need; for a Westerner to talk to, to wear as a kind of intellectual decoration, like the Royal Honours that the Maharajah kept hoping to get. Ackerley was no sooner washing up from his dusty journey than the Maharajah was in his quarters, demanding to know whether G. H. Lewes or Herbert Spencer was right in his contrary notions of God.

Small, aging, ugly, by turns impulsive and reserved, affectionate and lordly, the Maharajah was as frivolous and devious as a Bourbon monarch. His will was both arbitrary and ineffective; the British Political Agent in the next town controlled his wilder impulses and expenses; and Indian society was too complex and recalcitrant, in any case, for anyone to make a mark upon.

He was lustful and self-indulgent. His lust was mainly directed toward young boys, of whom he had several; though from time to time, he would carry out his marital duties with his young Maharani, who lived in a separate palace. Ackerley, who was a homosexual, attempted several liaisons of his own, but apparently got nowhere. At one point, the Maharajah vaguely rebuked him for trying to kiss one of his own favorites. “But good lord, I must kiss someone,” the Englishman replied.

The tone is ironic and detached, and at first Ackerley seems too much the supercilious visitor observing native quaintness. Bit by bit, though, we see that his manner is glass whose stillness is necessary to refract so many different altercating strangenesses. He writes sharp and varied portraits of the members of the Maharajah’s entourage, and of the talents and taboos that ruled each one differently; he zigzags between misapprehension and revelation. He is conducting an immensely entertaining treasure hunt in a mined field.

Finally, affection comes through, along with a growing understanding that is the more interesting for being incomplete. There is the Babaji, the Maharajah’s real secretary, whose shifty and disheveled appearance conceals a poetic and deeply religious man. There is the Prime Minister, efficient and imperious, whose independent wealth makes his service to the Maharajah a matter of duty rather than necessity. At first suspicious of Ackerley, who, he fears, may disrupt his orderly command, the Prime Minister eventually announces that they are friends. “I am like a maiden,” he says. “I need to be wooed.”

Ackerley comes to respect the Maharajah, or at least the mystery that links absurdity and dignity so inextricably. When his time is up, he gives us a glimpse of his employer entering his palace after a farewell drive. The palace’s sacred cow is standing in the doorway, hindquarters outward:

“The servants scrambled to their feet and bowed their foreheads to the ground; the guard, his turban over his nose, started upright and executed a shaky presentation of arms; the tail of the sacred cow twitched to and fro.

“The car stopped; His Highness descended; leaning on the shoulder of his gray-bearded cousin, he climbed stiffly up the steps, and pushing the cow to one side, disappeared into the Palace.”

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Homesick” by Guy Vanderhaeghe.