Studies in Anglo-Indian Fiction

STUDIES IN ANGLO-INDIAN FICTION *

Trade and commerce prompted sundry Englishmen to explore possibilities in India. One thing led to another and India gradually came under the Company’s rule and then became part of the British Empire. These events, in the fullness of time, gave rise to a two-way literary traffic. While quite a few of the Englishmen who came to India essayed to respond creatively to their new experience, the Indians too acquired a mastery of English and tried to create a new literature in it. These are called Anglo-Indian literature and Indo-Anglian literature, respectively. This process of literary cross-fertilisation and creative colonisation is the best and brightest dimension of Indo-British relations. While it is gratifying that Indo-Anglian literature is now a going concern, even Anglo-Indian literature, understood as literature in English on India by Westerners, is a continuing phenomenon. Paul Scott is a novelist of today whose works deal with the socio-political currents and cross-currents of British India.

Western creative writing on India is marked by variety in attitude and articulation. Many of the writers in British India were dominated by a sense of exile and a mood of frustration, as they could not feel happy in an alien land, far away from home. The strong climate of India was the last straw. Accordingly, there were many poems which voiced a feeling of dislike and melancholy, though a poet like John Leyden could grant abiding utterance even to that feeling in “To an Indian Gold Coin.” There were some who responded to the flora, and fauna of India, while the religious diversity and communal tensions of the Indian society attracted still others. Meadows Taylor’s Tippoo Sultan, Tara, Ralph Darnell, Seeta and A Noble Queen are valuable testaments of different epochs in Indian history. Forster’s A Passage to India, apparently an Englishman’s sensitive view of the schisms of Anglo-Indian society, is truly a plea for human fellowship and world harmony. A few, however, were drawn to the spirit of India. Sir William Jones, who was a judge in the Calcutta High Court from 1783 to 1794, came with a genuine love for India and did significant work as a pioneering Orientalist, Francis William Bain, who was Professor of History and Political Economy and Principal in the Deccan College, Poona, from 1892 to 1919, was indeed an exceptional Englishman, who was perhaps more in love with the Sanskrit story literature and Hindu mysticism than most Indians. He considered himself a devout “Saivite” and accepted, at the time of leaving India, only an idol of Ganesa and a copy of the Mahabharata.

It is this field on which Prof. Viswanatham focuses attention and the book incorporates his study in the King’s College, London, during 1959-’60 under the guidance of that internationally renowned scholar and critic, Prof. Geoffrey Bullough. The selective method of Arnold Kettle is followed and seven novels, Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter, Taylor’s Tara, Kipling’s Kim, Forster’s A Passage to India, Bain’s A Digit of the Moon, Myers’s The Near and the Far and Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge are studied in depth in separate chapters.

Although Scott looked at India through the “spectacles of books,” his novel is a fascinating insight into Indian history, and Prof. Viswanatham makes a convincing plea for popularising the novel. Tara is the first of Taylor’s famous trilogy which spans two centuries of exciting Indian history. For absorbing drama, breathtaking action and grandeur of characterisation, one can turn to few other novels which are as good and Prof. Viswanatham’s chapter neatly sums up criticism on the novel and effectively underscores the novelist’s deep understanding of and genuine sympathy for India.

Recent criticism has done a great deal to place Kipling in proper perspective and the long chapter on Kim is an intensive probe of the different aspects of the novel, which ensures an imperishable place for its author in Anglo-Indian (and English) literature. The following words of the Professor are at once a perceptive comment and a warm tribute: “Kim is of the Plains and the lama of the Hills; the Plains are the Chela of the Hills and the Hills regard the Plains as kindly and. hospitable. The Hills are the eternal peace poised over the pother of the Plains. Kim is a happy attempt at the divine bridals of the Hills and Plains, contemplation and action, the River of the Arrow and the River of Life, the way and the wheel, Enlightenment and the Red Bull, the Great Soul and the Great Game. Kipling is the Homer of the Himalayas and the Balzac of the Plains.”

The discussion of A Passage to India is a forthright exposure of the excesses of critical exegesis which ‘discovered’ many things in the novel. It is well-known that the Marabar caves are the usual peg for critics to hang their philosophical discourses on and there are the obliging triads like the Mosque, the Caves and the Temple. Praise is offered where it is due and one agrees with the Professor when he refers to the novel as “a very sensitive seismograph registering the concussions of the Indo-British world.” There is all the impersonality and disinterestedness of the seismograph in Forster!

Prof. Viswanatham begins the chapter with an account of his interview with Forster in the latter’s rooms at Cambridge, during which he pointed out to Forster the mistake in the thirty-sixth chapter of A Passage–the discomfiture is that of Bali and not of Indra, as mentioned in the novel, when the Universe was ascended in Three Steps by the Saviour. It is good that the Professor took the trouble of drawing the novelist’s attention to this, though the use of the word ‘howler’ is not quite happy in the context. That Forster did not get the story correctly does not really diminish the sharpness of his artistic vision and the authenticity of his understanding of British India. After all, it is like the spot in the moon, as Prof. Viswanatham says about Taylor’s errors.

Bain gets the longest chapter and Prof. Viswanatham reveals the extent to which the enlightened Englishman mastered the story literature in Sanskrit and absorbed Indian culture. Very often the Professor exceeds the narrow confines of criticism and lines like the following are more like a poetic panegyric: “These thirteen heroines are Bain’s Daughters of Passion, Queens of Intoxication, Mistresses of Infatuation, and Moons of Seduction, Waves of the Ocean of Loveliness, Lotuses in the Pool of Beauty, Stars of Witchery, Gazelles of Illusion, Heifers of Love–the ache, the longing, the dream and the fate of bewitched male. They are the Chetis of Sex and the Pratiharis of Distraction.” If Bains’s stories read like translations from Sanskrit, Prof. Viswanatham also seems to impart to his English, in this chapter surely, something of the juiciness and mellifluousness of Sanskrit, and the pages read more like Bain on himself!

In the chapter On Myers, the Professor draws attention to the many-sided appeal of the tetralogy, The Near and the Far, and stresses Myers’s catholicity and eclecticism. The Indianness of Myers is elaborately discussed and the different strands of the novel are neatly sorted out. The comment that the novel is “a dialogue between East and West, Amar and Smith, Humanism and Hinduism, Reason and Revelation; it is a seminar on Myers’s England and Akbar’s India, Christianity and Buddhism, politics and sex; it is a surgical probe into human motives and ambitions, illusions and conceits” is one that includes all the aspects of Myers’s work. A passage is quoted twice–on pages 192-3 and 200–which could have been avoided.

The chapter on Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge points out the parallelisms that exist between the novel on the one hand and The Points of View and The Writer’s Notebook on the other, and indicates the involvement of the author in the experiences of Larry. The novel deals, among other things, with the quest of Larry for happiness in the life of the spirit and gives a fine and perceptive summary of the important tenets of Hinduism.

There is a ‘Retrospect’ in which the pattern of the study is mentioned. From Richard Middlemas of Scott to Maugham’s Larry we seem to cover the whole ground of Indo-English relations and Prof. Viswanatham gives us a convincing cross-section of the attitudes of the Anglo-Indian creative writers.

What do they know of English literature who only English literature know? One feels like saying this when one reads a book like Prof. Viswanatham’s. The learned Professor, who has spent a whole lifetime in the pursuit of English studies, has also drunk deep of Sanskrit literature and thus it is that he is gifted with the double vision required for a work like this. The book is replete with literary reminiscences from a variety of sources and makes supremely engaging reading. There is a distinctiveness in Prof. Viswanatham’s way of perception and presentation and there are many sentences which linger in one’s memory. The book is undoubtedly a valuable addition to critical writing on Anglo-Indian literature. It ought to be read by all those interested in Western writing on India and our warmest congratulations go to Prof. Viswanatham.

* India in English Fiction: By Prof. K. Viswanatham. Published by the Andhra University Press, Waltair. 1971. Pp. 253. Price: Rs. 20.