India in English Fiction

Prof. K. VISWANATHAM

This essay on India in English Fiction narrates the history this topic, explains its nature, pin-points its relevance and comments briefly on seven well-known novelists: Scott, Meadows Taylor, Kipling, Forster, Bain, Myers and Maugham. This topic is part of Anglo-Indian Literature and the earliest sketcher of this was Oaten (1908). Sencourt in his invaluable book India in English Literature (published in 1925) gives a detailed picture of the impact of India on English minds. More than thirty years ago a definitive survey of this area was made by Bhupal Singh in 1934. A recent study is Greenberger’s The British Image of India (1969). The late G. Subba Rao, friend and colleague, studied this region of Indo-British relations from a philological and linguistic point of view in his Indian Words in English: Bandicoot is from Telugu Pandikokku, Godown from Giddangiand the Office Boy from Boyi. It is not irrelevant to mention that my book India in English Fiction was published by the Andhra University Press. Mr. Griffiths wrote in 1961: “This exhibition of British books on Indian subjects is important as a symbol of the bonds of affection and respect between our two countries ... The British literature on India is vast. No man could read it in a lifetime.” Alun Lewis, the War Poet, declined promotion: he wanted “to go East and East and East; there is a consummation somewhere.” It is not noteworthy that Thackeray was born in Calcutta and the two Brahmin agents of Ragonaut Rao were the guests of Burke at Beaconsfield.

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The history of Indo-British connection starts as early as the reign of King Alfred ...The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 884 A.D. King Alfred sent an envoy with rich gifts for the tomb of St. Thomas at Mylapore and the envoy brought spices and jewels from the local king, perhaps the Chola King Aditya I. This history follows the fortunes of the East India Company, is deeply disturbed by the Mutiny, becomes stabilized by the eastablishment of the British Raj, receives the jolt of the two World Wars and the Congress Movement, plunges into the chaos of the British withdrawal. That is, India as a myth, India as a colony, India of the reluctant pangs of abdication, India free–all these avatars tint these writers. The beastly heat, the intolerable loneliness, the elusiveness of the country put out most of the writers. There are puffs of weariness, spasms of exaggeration, sighs of melancholy, looks of bewilderment, jets of disgust; there are also whispers of love, songs of praise, sentences of sympathy. Trade, colonization, administration, scholarship, sympathy are milestones in this story. Intellectually and aesthetically the discovery of Samskrit is a red-letter day in this chronicle; it is a corrective to the cheap remarks of Coleridge, Ruskin or Macaulay about Indian Philosophy and Literature.

The story of Anglo-India is chronicled by travellers, administrators and soldiers, missionaries, indologists and historians, poets and novelists. The novelists are a considerable segment of creative writers from Walter Scott to Paul Scott whose Towers of Silence was published recently. There is a host of women writers: Mrs Steel, Mrs Penny, Mrs Ferrin, Mrs Pennel, Mrs Bell, Mrs Beck, Mrs Savi, Hilda Gregg, Mrs Maud Diver. One can as well call Anglo-Indian Fiction ‘Mrs’ Anglo-Indian Fiction; it is a Legend of good women. But my essay does not deal with them (unchivalrous, perhaps) nor with writers beyond Maugham like, Rumerfarrow, Edward Thompson, Masters, Bates, Paul Scott, Alan Moorehead or Philip Woodruff with whom I had the pleasure of discussing this topic in London.

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What is the relevence of a study like this? It lays bridges of understanding, narrates the variety and ways of the imaginative exploitation of India, chronicles Indo-British relations, enhances self-awareness by seeing ourselves as others see us. Our eyes are better known to the oculist, says Eliot, than to us: the eye sees not itself. To know how we stand we have to know how others stand. It was a turning-point in this dialogue when the Taylors were replaced by the Turtons, the Nabobs by the Sahibs the E. I. C. by the I. C. S., the Indian mistress by the memsahib: the apartheid was complete:

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A few comments now on the writers chosen:

The Surgeon’s Daughter of Scott is the story of the villain Richard Middlemas who barters away the virginity of Menie Grey to the lust of Tippu Sultan but is reduced to pulp under the food of Hyder Ali’s elephant for his treachery. The portrayal of the Indian Machiavel, Paupiah, is of particular interest. Scott’s use of Indian words like sowarree, naggra, nuzzur, etc., is masterly.

Col. Meadows Taylor’s name is popularly associated with The Confessions of a Thug. He is the Scott of Indian history with his Tippu Sultan, Seeta, Tara, Ralph Darnell, A Noble Queen. His Taradeals with the rise of Shivaji. Tara is a Brahmin virgin widow, a Moorlee, who gets married to the son of Afzul Khan. Perhaps it is a plea for Hindu-Muslim unity. Taylor’s knowledge of the customs and manners of the Hindus and Muslims of the Deccan is rich and varied. Taylor was so popular that ballads were sung about him and he was addressed Appah by Rani Iswaramma and the Rajah of Shorapur just as Forster was treated as a brother by the Maharajah of Dewas Senior. It is interesting to note that he mentions the Telugu word ‘charu’(pepper water).

Kipling’s Kim is one of the peaks in Anglo-Indian fiction: Of late there has been a spate of books on Kipling: the rehabilitation is going on. Today we do not regard him as the hot gospeller of the White Man’s Burden; the White Man’s Burden is excellent political philosophy. Platform speakers quote often Kipling’s: “The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet”, not having read the lines in the same stanza which say that there is neither East nor West when two strong men meet. I think, as Nirad Chaudhuri does, that Kim is the finest story about India in English. The Grand Trunk Road is verily the river of Life the Lama seeks. The portrait of the Lama is as magnificent as the description of the Himalayas. Kipling achieves that rare and difficult thing–the creation of a good character. It is because of Kipling that ‘pani Lao’ ‘hitherao’, ‘Lekin’, ‘drawaza bandh hai’ are part of English expression. In Kim Kipling is the Homer of the Himalayas and the Balzac of the Plains and the novel is the marriage of the Hills and the Plains, the meeting of the East and the West. But readers blame him or praise him as if he were a mistress or a country rather than a writer.

Forster’s A Passage to India is usually considered the tallest peak in Anglo-Indian fiction. I had the privilege of discussing the dramatization of this novel when I met him at Cambridge in ’59. It is a kind of White Paper on Anglo-India: the Indian problem, the Hindu-Muslim problem, the Anglo-Indian problem, even the problem of incompatible marriages–a book of problems without a solution. There is no sound of water in this cactus land. The novel says: There is no passage to India; it deflates the aspiration in Whitman’s poem which gives the title to the novel. Aziz, Godbole, Fielding, Mrs Moore, Miss Quested, the Marabar Caves are sharply etched. The Bloomsbury tidiness of Forster is fouled by the muddle of India. Forster is too intelligent to approve of this muddle, too tolerant to dismiss it either. His novel is a delicate seismograph registering the concussions of the Indo-British world. It is a plea for understanding and love and hence its value.

Bain was the Professor of History and Political Economy at Poona. He made the witty remark that nine-tenths of Economics rubbish and the one-tenth explains how it is rubbish, His stories beginning with A Digit of the Moon read almost like translations from Sanskrit classics like Kathasaritsagara. A Digit of the Moon is the story of winning the heart of the maddeningly lovely Anangraga, daughter of a brother of the King of the Nagas, by Suryakanta with the help of Rasakosha. All the stories are so many digits of the moon. We regret that all the digits of the moon have not been chronicled by Bain. His moon is a crescent, not the full Orb. We have only thirteen books. Each book is a casket of distracting loveliness dripping with the ‘amrita’ of woman or wife. His sentences move like a panther and laugh like a lotus. He considers the whole of Hindu literature one long lunar incantation; he goes into raptures over the Sanskrit compound. He says he should have been a worshipper of Siva and his snowy bride in his ‘purvajanma.’ Shallow minds that laugh at cow-worship or advocate inter-caste marriages should read Bain to be convinced of prejudice or emptiness in their thinking.

Myers never saw India like Scott. His novel The Neaz and the Far is actually a tetralogy, four novels in one: The Root and the Flower, Prince Jali, Rajah Amar, The Pool of Vishnu. The novel is located in Akbar’s reign. Far-off India is used as a stalking horse by Myers to aim his missiles against contemporary England. That is how the near and the far meet. The tetralogy graphs the education of Prince Jali, the son of Rajah Amar and Rani Seeta. The Pool of Vishnu is a plea for a Socialist re-structuring of society attempted by Mohan and Damayanti. Myers was of the view: Who dies if Russia lives? His mention of bilwa, dhoti, brahmavihara, rasa gives one an idea of his understanding and equipment. The novel is a seminar on Hindu philosophy, Greek thought, Islam and Buddhism and a scalding exposure of the shallowness, the silliness and the triviality of society.

Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge embodies the newest and the most modish of myths, that of the Yogi in English literature. It deals with the mystic trance of Larry whom the death of his friend turned away from “getting and spending,” the sick hurry and divided aims to one aim, one desire, one business–the business of seeking the Absolute. The visit to the Ashram of Bhagawan Ramana Maharshi forms the core of the novel. The very title is taken from the Kathopanishad. The Larry-way of life seeking the Absolute can be as exciting as the Yankee-way of life raking, in dollars: Larry is the noblest American of them all. Fro a Scotch Feringhee seeking gold in Mysore we have reached Malabar with Larry the American via the Deccan, Punjab, the land of the Sanskrit Katha, Bengal and Agra.

Let me hope that the readers find this itinerary from gold seeking to soul-seeking, from sands of orient pearl to Datta Daamyata, Dayadhvam fascinating and exciting.