Excerpts from Felix Maynard's novel From Delhi to Cawnpore (original) (raw)
The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination
The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, 2005
Gautam Chakravarty explores representations of the event which has become known in the British imagination as the 'Indian Mutiny' of 1857 in British popular fiction and historiography. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, autobiographies and state papers, Chakravarty shows how narratives of the rebellion were inflected by the concerns of colonial policy and by the demands of imperial self-image. He goes on to discuss the wider context of British involvement in India from 1765 to the 1940s, and engages with constitutional debates, administrative measures and the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian novel. Chakravarty approaches the Mutiny from the perspectives of postcolonial theory as well as from historical and literary perspectives to show the extent to which the insurrection took hold of the popular imagination in both Britain and India. The book has a broad interdisciplinary appeal and will be of interest to scholars of English literature, British imperial history, modern Indian history and cultural studies.
NOTES ON THE FIRST INDIAN NOVEL IN ENGLISH
New Race: A Journal of Integral and Future Studies, Volume I (1), pp. 54-59., 2015
First, a disclaimer. This is not a book review in the actual sense. It is rather a close look at a book, a very special book in the annals of Indian literature in English language, Rajmohan's Wife by Bankim Chandra Chatterji. While the plot and the main characters of the novel are quite appealing in their own way, what is most fascinating about this novel is its history. This is the first Indian novel written in English, published in 1864, and the first and the only novel ever written by Bankim in English. This piece of work was considered a 'false start' by some commentators and critics of Bankim's work and has often been ignored by those interested in Indian writing in English. After Rajmohan's Wife, Bankim never wrote any fiction in English and wrote only in his native language, Bangla. The rest, as they say, is history, of the gigantic literary contribution made by this great son of Mother India.
Scott of Bengal: examining the European legacy in the historical novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee
It is generally agreed that the novel is of European origin and that it was imported into non-European countries through colonial contact. While acknowledging this European precedence, it is important to also acknowledge the unique ways in which non-European authors indigenized the form to respond to the needs of their contemporary readers who were their intended audience. The works of the nineteenth-century Indian novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee are a case in point. This dissertation focuses on the role the historical novels of Bankim performed in determining Indian identities at a particular juncture in Indian colonial history. A comparative study with selected novels of Sir Walter Scott, the premier historical novelist of Europe, helps illustrate the singularity of Bankim's task; Scott and Bankim occupied quite different worlds and their works serve as metaphors of this difference. As the first successful novelist of India, Bankim took on the task of invoking history to cre...
Ch 3. Familiarising the Mutiny: Indian adventures in "The Young Rajah" and "Gil the Gunner"
Imaging the Subcontinent: Colonial Realism and the Ethnographic Writing of British India, 2020
This chapter examines the novels’ claim to veracity by closely reading the texts in light of their presentation of India and Indians. It identifies four primary tropes which may be seen clearly across both novels: Indians’ lack of or extravagance in clothing, their apparent love for ornamentation, the unsettling opacity of their cities, and the fanatical superstition of their religions. Though both authors had no personal experience of the Mutiny or of travel in the Indian subcontinent, the events, persons, and places they create appear premised on rich and intimate acquaintance with the same. In other words, the discursive creation of India in these novels is on the same lines as that in the popular press and on the stage: the boundaries of fact and fiction seem blurred with the extensive historical referencing to actual sites and battles of the Mutiny.
CHAPTER 2 Oh Calcutta!1 The New Bengal Movement in Diasporic Indian English Fiction
2014
Let me begin with a subjective statement. A couple of years ’ back I accidentally picked up a debut novel published by Phoenix House in London and reprinted by Penguin India. The novel was titled Across the Lakes and the short biographical introduction of Amal Chatterjee, the author, stated that he was born in Colombo, grew up in England and now lives and works in Glasgow. Mentally prepared to read a novel set in the beautiful Lake District of England, made so popular by Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets, it came as a great surprise to me when I found the first chapter beginning thus: “The Dhakuria Lakes are the lungs of South Calcutta. Once upon a time they marked the boundary of the city, beyond them lay the railway lines and beyond those the fields and villages”(Chatterjee, 1998). The rest of the story talked about incidents that were firmly rooted in Calcutta and captured its sights and sounds as authentically as possible. This set me thinking about the possible reason fo...
The study of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (1924) gives us the opportunity to contrast the modernist ideas we have been pursuing up to this point with a work that represents a larger measure of continuity with the past. Forster’s novel typifies a formal conservatism that seems at odds with the prevailing appetite for novelty and innovation in the mid-1920s. Although the novel tackles important themes of modernity, its adaptation of traditional narrative approaches and the expressive style of the late nineteenth century, reminds us of the persistence of the past and it anticipates the revival of realism in the work of Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen (among others) in the 1930s and 1940s after the dissolution of the first phase of twentieth century modernism. The novel also quietly returns us to the ethical world of the Victorian moralists in its liberal critique of the British imperial presence in India.
A Passage to India-E. M. Forster
Except for the Marabar Caves-and they are twenty miles off-the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathingsteps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life. Inland, the prospect alters. There is an oval Maidan, and a long sallow hospital. Houses belonging to Eurasians stand on the high ground by the railway station. Beyond the railway-which runs parallel to the river-the land sinks, then rises again rather steeply. On the second rise is laid out the little civil station, and viewed hence Chandrapore appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens. It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble river. The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and in their turn hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where ancient tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples. Seeking, light and air, and endowed with more strength than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city for the birds. Especially after the rains do they screen what passes below, but at all times, even when scorched or leafless, they glorify the city to the English people who inhabit the rise, so that newcomers cannot believe it to be as meagre as it is described, and have to be driven down to acquire disillusionment. As for the civil station itself, it provokes no emotion. It charms not, neither does it repel. It is sensibly planned, with a redbrick club on its brow, and farther back a grocer's and a cemetery, and the bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles. It has nothing hideous in it, and only the view is beautiful; it shares nothing with the city except the overarching sky. The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference-orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault. The distance between the vault and them is as nothing to the distance behind them, and that farther distance, though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue. The sky settles everything-not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little-only feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, infused in it daily, size from the prostrate earth. No mountains infringe on the curve. League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted. These fists and fingers are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves. II Abandoning his bicycle, which fell before a servant could catch it, the young man sprang up on to the verandah. He was all animation. "Hamidullah, Hamidullah! Am I late?" he cried. "Do not apologize," said his host. "You are always late." "Kindly answer my question. Am I late? Has Mahmoud Ali eaten all the food? If so I go elsewhere. Mr. Mahmoud Ali, how are you?" "Thank you, Dr. Aziz, I am dying." "Dying before your dinner? Oh, poor Mahmoud Ali!" "Hamidullah here is actually dead. He passed away just as you rode up on your bike." "Yes, that is so," said the other. "Imagine us both as addressing you from another and a happier world." "Does there happen to be such a thing as a hookah in that happier world of yours?" "Aziz, don't chatter. We are having a very sad talk." The hookah had been packed too tight, as was usual in his friend's house, and bubbled sulkily. He coaxed it. Yielding at last, the tobacco jetted up into his lungs and nostrils, driving out the smoke of burning cow dung that had filled them as he rode through the bazaar. It was delicious. He lay in a trance, sensuous but healthy, through which the talk of the two others did not seem particularly sad-they were discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman. Mahmoud Ali argued that it was not, Hamidullah disagreed, but with so many reservations that there was no friction between them. Delicious indeed to lie on the broad verandah with the moon rising in front and the servants preparing dinner behind, and no trouble happening. "Well, look at my own experience this morning." "I only contend that it is possible in England," replied Hamidullah, who had been to that country long ago, before the big rush, and had received a cordial welcome at Cambridge. "It is impossible here. Aziz! The red-nosed boy has again insulted me in Court. I do not blame him. He was told that he ought to insult me. Until lately he was quite a nice boy, but the others have got hold of him." "Yes, they have no chance here, that is my point. They come out intending to be gentlemen, and are told it will not do. Look at Lesley, look at Blakiston, now it is your red-nosed boy, and Fielding will go next. Why, I remember when Turton came out first. It was in another part of the Province. You fellows will not believe me, but I have driven with Turton in his carriage-Turton! Oh yes, we were once quite intimate. He has shown me his stamp collection." "He would expect you to steal it now. Turton! But red-nosed boy will be far worse than Turton!" "I do not think so. They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike. Do you not agree with me?" "I do not," replied Mahmoud Ali, entering into the bitter fun, and feeling both pain and amusement at each word that was uttered. "For my own part I find such profound differences among our rulers. Red-nose mumbles, Turton talks distinctly, Mrs. Turton takes bribes, Mrs. Red-nose does not and cannot, because so far there is no Mrs. Red-nose." "Bribes?" "Did you not know that when they were lent to Central India over a Canal Scheme, some Rajah or other gave her a sewing machine in solid gold so that the water should run through his state." "And does it?" "No, that is where Mrs. Turton is so skilful. When we poor blacks take bribes, we perform what we are bribed to perform, and the law discovers us in consequence. The English take and do nothing. I admire them." "We all admire them. Aziz, please pass me the hookah." "Oh, not yet-hookah is so jolly now." "You are a very selfish boy." He raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner. Servants shouted back that it was ready. They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved. Then Hamidullah continued, but with changed manner and evident emotion. "But take my case-the case of young Hugh Bannister. Here is the son of my dear, my dead friends, the Reverend and Mrs. Bannister, whose goodness to me in England I shall never forget or describe. They were father and mother to me, I talked to them as I do now. In the vacations their Rectory became my home. They entrusted all their children to me-I often carried little Hugh about-I took him up to the Funeral of Queen Victoria, and held him in my arms above the crowd." "Queen Victoria was different," murmured Mahmoud Ali. "I learn now that this boy is in business as a leather merchant at Cawnpore. Imagine how I long to see him and to pay his fare that this house may be his home. But it is useless. The other Anglo-Indians will have got hold of him long ago. He will probably think that I want something, and I cannot face that from the son of my old friends. Oh, what in this country has gone wrong with everything, Vakil Sahib? I ask you." Aziz joined in. "Why talk about the English? Brrrr … ! Why be either friends with the fellows or not friends? Let us shut them out and be jolly. Queen Victoria and Mrs. Bannister were the only exceptions, and they're dead." "No, no, I do not admit that, I have met others." "So have I," said Mahmoud Ali, unexpectedly veering. "All ladies are far from alike." Their mood was changed, and they recalled little kindnesses and courtesies. "She said 'Thank you so much' in the most natural way." "She offered me a lozenge when the dust irritated my throat." Hamidullah could remember more important examples of angelic ministration, but the other, who only knew Anglo-India, had...