The Girl Who Ate Books Read online

  Toru’s father Govin Chunder Dutt, her uncles Hur and Greece and their nephew Omesh compiled poems for The Dutt Family Album (1870). Some of these poems were reasonably good; some were breathtakingly terrible:

  Home bounded little Edward,

  With loud and joyous cries,

  The rose-red deepened on his cheeks

  And triumph lit his eyes . . .

  Some poems were demonstrations of the pitfalls that await those who write for ‘The West’:

  And should an English landscape ever pall . . .

  Where shall we wander?

  In the fields of France?

  Or classic Italy’s wave-saluted shores?

  Or dearer Scotland’s barren heaths and moors?

  Toru’s poetry was considerably better than her uncles’ attempts. She, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Kylas Chunder Dutt were cousins from different branches of the family. Toru’s writings were published much later than Kylas or Shoshee’s books—her first book, A Sheaf Gleaned In French Fields, came out in 1876, a year before she died. Her second book, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arver, was published posthumously in 1879. The family home was in Rambagan, a part of Kolkata, and the Dutts were collectively dubbed the ‘Rambagan nest of singing birds’ for their love of poetry and fashionable dabbling in literature.

  Her cousins Shoshee and Kylas were prescient, their slim books drawing on the undercurrents of unrest and discontent with British rule that marked the decades that led up to the 1857 war of independence. Shoshee and Kylas were in many ways truly Macaulay’s children, from Shoshee’s glad embrace of Christianity to their mutually shared belief that English was far superior to their native Bengali.

  Indeed, Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Indian Education (‘we have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated in their mother-tongue’) came out in 1835, the same year that Kylas Chunder Dutt’s work of speculative fiction was published. ‘The languages of western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar,’ Macaulay observed.

  And yet, the first serious work of fiction, speculative or otherwise, in English by an Indian writer was Kylas’s destabilizing vision of an India in 1945, rising up against the ‘subaltern oppression’ of British rule, where ‘the dagger and the bowl were dealt out with a merciless hand’ by the ‘British barbarians’. His projected rebellion fails; but the man who leads the Indians against Governor Lord Fell Butcher is a graduate fluent in English, using his education against the British. In the light of the way in which the Revolt of 1857 garnered public support in India just twenty-two years after Kylas penned his fantasy, it’s interesting that he imagines a rebellion supported by ‘many of the most distinguished men—Babus, Rajas and Nababs’. And he is prescient when he writes that the ‘contagion of Rebellion would probably have infested every city in the kingdom, had it only had time to perfect its machinations’.

  Ten years later, Shoshee could imagine a happier ending for those who would rise up in revolt. ‘The Republic of Orissa’ is written as a page from the imagined annals of the twentieth century, an alternate history imagined as the truth. Orissa is independent, and extending its borders into British India, ruled by ‘untamed men’, tribes who combine great strength with intrepid courage. If K.C. Dutt’s fantasy was about language-enabled rebellion, S.C. Dutt’s fantasy, set in the twentieth century, went much further: imagining a future India where the British have been defeated, and an independent democratic republic has been established in the state of Orissa. This fantasy of political independence followed on the heels of K.C. Dutt’s dream of linguistic independence, both anticipating the events of 1857.

  In Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s reworking of the noble savage theme, the tribes—freely exoticized—rise up against the British after a Slavery Act is passed in 1916. They are goaded into final action by the imprisonment of publishers, printers and the suppression of a free press. (Present-day governments might want to take note of Dutt’s assumption that the curbing of free expression would bring on rebellion faster than a Slavery Act, in his vision of India.) As the fierce and courageous Bheekoo Barik confronts ‘drunken John Bull’, the question the tribals aim to answer is crucial: are the Juggomohuns and Gocooldosses, the Opertees and Bindabun Sirdars fit persons to be intrusted with the management of a vast empire?

  Shoshee’s answer is a stirring yes, and the rest of The Republic of Orissa introduces a full-scale tribal rebellion, aided by beautiful women disguised as fakirs and other little flourishes of the novelist’s art.

  ‘The Baboo’s style is clear and good,’ said The Englishman, kindly. ‘It will be a grand thing indeed for India when all her most influential families can be as much Anglicized as this Hindu gentleman,’ wrote the Kolkata Literary Gazette. They were responding, however, to Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s poetry, and his articles on Hindu caste and practices—not to this vision of triumphant native rebellion that ends with the overthrow of the British.

  In many ways, Shoshee had started out as exactly the kind of Baboo Macaulay had imagined—in a rant that praised the superiority of English over Bengali literature, he also refers to the native press as ‘servile, low and indecent’.

  But as time went by, his writings made the British who had praised him for being such a good Baboo more and more uncomfortable, whether it was his diary of a Kerani (published in Mookerjee’s Magazine, a famous periodical of the time run by the flamboyant, opium-smoking Shambhu Chander Mukherjee), or this subtly subversive early work. The natives had taken to English, as Macaulay had hoped, but they were restless. As the first two works of speculative fiction in Indian writing in English prove, what they had to say in that tongue was not just prescient, anticipating the events of 1857, but also unabashedly subversive.

  The lure of English was complex. Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s arguments extolling the superiority of English are not unfamiliar ones. English was the gateway language to the wider Western world, Bengali had once been a great literature but had stagnated, and because English had received so much from so many countries, we could not expect Indian languages to match its breadth and scope.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay would have been pleased at Shoshee’s willingness to raise English higher than any Asian language, though he would have missed the subtle but key differences in their arguments. Macaulay belonged to the school of Englishmen who believed, never having read seriously in any Indian language, that all of Indian and perhaps Asian literature could be replaced by one good bookcase of English writers. Shoshee’s argument, repeated down the decades and centuries by Indian writers all the way to Nirad C. Chaudhuri and beyond, was that Indian languages and literatures had been of immense importance, but they were now waning.

  Behind the baroque prose, the rolling, impassioned sentences, you might sense two things: Shoshee’s excitement about this new language has a great deal to do with the ideas he encountered via English, ideas of sovereignty and the dignity of man, of revolution and freedom. And second, he makes the argument for himself as much as for his readers; he wants to be convinced that the language in which he now writes and thinks is the one that will carry him beyond the provincial, hidebound world of old Bengal.

  The Little Magazines

  He and his cousins were part of an avalanche of Indians—in Bengal, but also in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, anywhere that the printing press thrived—who had discovered the lure of the little magazines.

  The printing press was the latest in new technology at that time, as freshly minted as the Kindle might be today, and far more revolutionary in its impact. It’s hard to imagine the excitement Indians felt, and how joyously they took to the new professions—typesetter, printer, newspaper proprietor, pamphleteer, often bringing to the imported form of the essay or the travelogue a distinctly Indian spin. Most of the new Indian writers arrived at English via the broad rivers of their own rich languages and literatures.

  The printing press may have been one of the most unintentionally
subversive articles of trade ever imported into India. Brought into the country to print Bibles and spread the missionary message, the presses across the country were soon set to other uses. In these fledgling little magazines, mixed in with the extraordinary effusions of the early Indo-Anglian poets (Kasiprasad Ghose’s unintentionally funny elegy ‘To A Dead Crow’, etc.), imported ideas of liberation and home-grown appeals to revolution and sedition thrived, from South India to Bengal and then in the cross-hatchings of the Western Ghats on the other side.

  The intense and immediate love that the educated Indian bore the printing press finds an extreme expression in Rabindranath Tagore’s Nashta Neer (The Nest Destroyed), which Satyajit Ray made into the classic film Charulata. The other woman in Charu’s relationship with her husband, Bhupati, is the printing press that ultimately bankrupts him. As Bhupati focuses on his journals—very similar in description to the Indian Messenger or the Modern Review, the argumentative Bengali Indian’s preferred field of battle—he neglects his young, restless wife to the point where he knows nothing about her writing ambitions, her very modern short stories. I admit this is a minority point of view, but to me, the real sadness of Charulata was not the sterility of the marriage, or Charu’s stormy brush with extramarital love. It was that if only Bhupati and Charu had known each other better, they might have found happiness as a Woolfeian literary couple—love among the leading and the typos.

  Many of the Indian printing presses had mildly deviant histories. The presses set up by the Portuguese in Goa started off well, but died out because of the refusal of the Portuguese to print in the local languages. In about three generations, all that was left of them was rusting iron, corroded and pitted by saltwater, and a collection of Bibles and dictionaries. (Dictionaries, or language primers, were at one time intensely prized and fought over. One of the details James Clavell gets right in Shogun is the jealous zeal with which the missionaries guarded their dictionaries and lists of words—those were the keys to a country, a treasury, a court, not to be traded lightly.)

  The best-known and most influential press after the Portuguese ones closed down was set up in Tranquebar, now Tharangambadi in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district. The printing press narrowly survived piracy on the high seas; the East India Company ship, despatched in 1711, was taken prisoner by the French off the coast of Brazil and plundered. The press, some books and paper were in the hold—in those days, printing presses were greatly coveted and were often pirated from one ship to another—and journeyed on to India after the ship was released. Jonas Finke, the teacher who had accompanied the press to pass on what he knew of printing, was not so lucky: after being held as a prisoner of war, he was released, but died of a fever around the Cape of Good Hope.

  It is unclear whether the Danish missionaries knew about the fate of the jealously guarded Portuguese presses, now silenced from their excessive linguistic caution, but by 1712, they had begun printing in Tamil. The mission in Tranquebar had the blessings of the king of Denmark: in a letter, he bestowed on them the privilege of printing without supervision from the Danish Censor, so that they might more speedily convert ‘the heathen’. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, who headed the Tranquebar mission, had developed some respect for the local love of learning and sourced books in Tamil from the interiors whenever he could.

  Local legend goes that Ziegenbalg learned his Tamil letters on the black, rocky coast of Tranquebar; he married the woman who taught him how to tell her that he loved her, tracing one alphabet after another into the fine-grained sand on that golden, pebbled beach. (A less romantic version suggests that the local schoolmaster taught him the alphabet, and that he learned to read from his interpreter, Aleppa.) By 1709, Ziegenbalg could boast: ‘I have scarcely read a German or Latin book, but have given up all my time to reading Malabar books, have talked diligently with the heathen . . . I have been enabled to write several books in Tamil.’ Among the first books the Tranquebar press produced was a Tamil Bible; among the second was a Tamil language primer.

  When I visited some years ago, I found that the area still loves the smell of printing. In the port town of Karaikal, about fifteen kilometres away from Tranquebar, a collective of enterprising women run India’s only all-woman printing press. They used old lead handset type to print out my name as a gift—Nila Writer in blue letters as wavy and graceful as a sarus crane’s footprint—and nodded when we asked about Ziegenbalg. Tamil Selvi, the manager of the Women’s Press, showed me the heavy rollers of their press and said, ‘Just the same as the Danish one, same kind of machine’, and the centuries that separated her and the Danish printers rolled away as though no time had passed.

  In the nineteenth century, the little magazines gladly gave space to impassioned broadsides, and much more besides. The zest of the journals and periodicals that flourished a century ago still jumps off their crumbling pages, shining out despite the pompous phrases. Political commentary, fledgling literature and (admittedly terrible) poetry reigned.

  Many magazine proprietors took for their model a British original, subverting it in the way of wily Orientals. About 140 years ago, the Indian Charivari joined a long and distinguished list of magazines inspired by the satirical eye of Punch. The Parsi Punch, one of the earliest imitators of the original, was to transmute itself into the Hindi Punch, and Muhammad Sajjad Hussain was to make the Oudh Punch famous as an ‘Indian vernacular serio-comic paper, the first of its kind ever published in Northern India’.

  The Indian Charivari began by reviewing, often favourably, such subjects as the efforts of British painters at the Simla Exhibition, but moved rapidly into political commentary. It was famous for bringing an Indian style to its lampoons, using references to Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings and local folk art in its caricatures—including a celebrated one of Lord Curzon, depicted as the goddess Saraswati, in a commentary on educational reform.

  Mookerjee’s Magazine was founded slightly earlier, in 1861, and was among a score of emerging journals published across the country, from Bengal to Madras, that allowed themselves extraordinary licence. Its stated aim was to cover ‘Politics, Literature, Sociology and Art’, and within a few years, it had drawn criticism. This was not for its poetry, which was in the best traditions of splendidly awful Indo-Anglian verse (Song of the Indian Conservative, for instance, or an ode to Mohinee, the Hindu Maiden), but for its politics.

  In its pages, a defender writes: ‘That Mookerjee’s Magazine should be deemed notorious, and the quality of its articles depreciated by certain Anglo-Indian writers who see nothing commendable in any independent Native undertaking is not at all surprising. Chime in with their views and write yourself down a humble admirer of Hugrut and his oracles, and you are sure to be petted and fondled as a very respectable Hottentot . . .’

  The contents of Mookerjee’s ranged from the comfortably obscure—a plaintive essay asking ‘Where Shall the Baboo Go’, much pedantry about Indian religious texts—to the surprisingly contemporary.

  In the present-day obsession with memoirs from the ‘insider’, it’s worth remembering that Mookerjee’s Magazine published Shoshee’s drily critical Reminiscences of a Kerani’s Life in serial form, which skewered Baboo and Sahib alike. The Indian fascination with long-form journalism showed up in its pages as well—the current affairs magazines at the turn of the century thought nothing of carrying a roughly forty-page history of famines in India, for instance, as Mookerjee’s Magazine did. This article, ‘Indian Famines in the Past’, was just one of the many instances where Indians spoke out against the erasure of their history—in this case, British India’s perceived indifference to the plight of the famine-stricken. The piece was written just after the famines in the Upper Doab, Orissa and Rajputana, and just before the great famines in Bihar, parts of South India and the Ganjam famine.

  By the 1890s, the figure of the intellectual, especially the Bengali Baboo, was a familiar enough one to be caricatured—both by fellow Bengalis and by writers like F. Anstey, whose Baboo Hurry
Bungsho Jabberjee B.A. was immortalized in 1897.

  About 105 years ago, after Mookerjee’s Magazine had quietly folded up its shamiana, another journal would become one of the most influential Indian English periodicals of its time. The Modern Review, started by the journalist and reformer Ramananda Chatterjee, would have among its contributors M.K. Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai, Subhash Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Verrier Elwin, Sister Nivedita and many others. Ramananda Chatterjee was my husband’s great-grandfather. My acquaintance with the Modern Review began when I reached into a crate of books, sent from Kolkata, and pulled out Ramananda Chatterjee’s head: my mother-in-law had thoughtfully packed a plaster bust of the editor along with my husband’s science fiction and military-history collection.

  It felt impolite to dust an ancestor without reading the magazines he’d started, and I soon became an old-magazine addict: both of Ramananda Chatterjee’s magazines, the Modern Review and the Bengali magazine, Prabasi, brought the decades before Independence in 1947 to far more vivid life than had any of my history textbooks. I read them in sequence, like thrillers, wanting urgently to know what Lala Lajpat Rai had said about Home Rule to Gokhale and Gandhi, waiting for the next instalment in the dingdong political argument between Subhash Chandra Bose and Nehru, reading Tagore’s poems as though they had been freshly written.

  Ramachandra Guha rummaged through back issues of the Modern Review to discover that Jawaharlal Nehru—a frequent contributor who utilized the time he spent in the jails of the British to catch up with his reading and writing—had also written a splendid rant against himself under the pen-name Chanakya. Chatterjee, like many of the intellectuals of the age, was comfortably bilingual, and edited the Bengali journal Prabasi as well as the Review, which may also have given the Modern Review its inclusiveness and eclecticism.