The Girl Who Ate Books Read online

  From that period of Indian history, I retained for many years a small memento, picked up in my travels across the Hindi heartland. A flyer from the Prince School and Education Bureau, distributed at a bus-stand, it offered the familiar ‘English Tutions’ (‘Tuition’ is often misspelled, and the Indian version sounds more euphonious to my biased ears), and this beguiling promise:

  IN THREE WEEKS, LEARN HOW TO READ IN GREMAN. HOW TO READ IN ENGLISH. HOW TO READ IN INDIAN.

  I like the enterprise behind that promise. I think, in many ways, we are all still trying to learn how to read in Indian, even if we don’t always have the right glossaries.

  (First published in Caravan, 2011, with some material added from research and readings between 2011 and 2014.)

  (At the Neemrana Festival: the authors present included Vikram Seth, V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Ved Mehta, Amit Chaudhuri, Khushwant Singh, Dom Moraes, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, I. Allan Sealy, Farrukh Dhondy, Pico Iyer, Nayantara Sehgal, Shashi Deshpande, Kiran Nagarkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, Githa Hariharan, Ruchir Joshi, Imtiaz Dharker, Mukul Kesavan, Amitava Kumar and Anita Rau Badami. So were U.R. Ananthamurthy, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zacharia, Shrilal Shukla, Sukrita P. Kumar, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Ashokamitran and Bhalachandra Nemade, leading the contingent of the eminent authors who wrote in Indian languages other than English.)

  4

  1857 and All That

  Mention the Great Rebellion of 1857 to any educated Indian of a certain generation, and they have the galloping-hoof rhythms of Subhadrakumari Chauhan’s ode to the Rani of Jhansi playing in their heads as background music:

  Bundeley Harbolon key munh hamney suni kahani thi,

  Khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thi.

  A century-and-a-half after the stirring events of 1857, most Indians have read a wide array of books on what is often called India’s first war of independence. These range from Amar Chitra Kathas to revisionist histories and eyewitness accounts. Some have read the few great works of Indian fiction—very few of them contemporary—and a smattering of well-known novels by the likes of John Masters or George MacDonald Fraser.

  But in the two to three decades after 1857, novels about the Mutiny (to use the British nomenclature), were almost guaranteed to sell. Most of these works of pulp fiction are remembered now only by scholars, but they tell us at least as much about the complexity of the British response to 1857 as a dozen well-researched histories can.

  Barely two years after the massacres and stifled rebellions of 1857, Edward Money published The Wife and the Ward; A Life’s Error. Money’s perspective was almost entirely from the contained, slightly claustrophobic world of the British, but it is a disconcertingly sympathetic work.

  The first chapter is set in a regimental mess, where officers exchange banter unaware of the gathering clouds of insurgency around them, and the novel faithfully follows the tragic fortunes of a band of British officers struggling to protect their wives, children and camp followers as Nana Sahib’s men close a deadly trap around them.

  And yet, in chapter two, Money has one of his characters lament: ‘India! How little art thou known to the mass of the English public, and yet who can doubt that thy loss would rob Britain of the brightest jewel in her crown . . . ’ Tis strange, this apathy, this ignorance on all Indian subjects . . .’ Remember, this is barely a year-and-a-half after the Mutiny; but several of Money’s characters express this sense of regret and loss, from the Colonel of the regiment mourning the severing of ties with his men to a sensitive young army officer wincing at the inability of his countrymen—and women—to see India more clearly.

  Far more stereotypical was James Grant’s First Love and Last Love, a baroque, almost rabid three-volume extravaganza published in 1868. Grant included a scene where the sepoys strip and parade Englishwomen, and offers explanations such as this one: ‘To the brutal Mussulman and the sensual Hindu, the position occupied by an English lady or any Christian woman, seems absurd and incomprehensible; hence came the mad desire to insult, degrade and torture, here they slay them.’

  Just a few years after the Mutiny, pulp fiction had become a genre in its own right; Philip Meadows Taylor added to it with his own mammoth page-turner, Seeta. Taylor is an interesting character—a police officer involved closely in the hunting down of the thugs, and his first best-seller, Confessions of a Thug, brought the words ‘thug’ and ‘thuggee’ into general usage. Taylor’s Seeta set a love affair between an English army officer and a Hindu widow against the backdrop of the Mutiny. The novel offers some of the usual stereotypes of Indians, what with bloodthirsty Muslims and cunning Hindus, but it also displays Taylor’s tremendous interest in India’s landscapes, social and geographical, and his romantic vision of a world where Indians and the English might meet without barriers.

  Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, published in 1896, is lushly romantic, but it also displays great ambivalence. The novel begins with the auctioning of the menagerie of ‘the lately deposed King of Oude’, a suitably surreal opening for a book that will include a registered prostitute and a British officer masquerading as an Afghan horse trader.

  She portrays Bahadur Shah Zafar as an ineffectual king (and bad poet) ruled by a wife in equal thrall to opium and dreams of power. But Steel was a sharp observer of both the Anglo-Indian and the Indian scene. Her novel includes portraits of the Gissings, ‘who preferred India, where they were received into society, to England, where they would have been out of it’ as well as quick but accurate sketches of the ‘Bahurupas’—the Bahurupiyas—and the difference between, say, a Gujjar and a Banjara. The book ends, atypically, not with an excoriation of treacherous Indians, but with a paean to the legendary soldier Nicholson.

  The ambiguity that writers like Steel or Taylor or even Edward Money displayed so freely, and the affection they showed even in their Mutiny novels for their visions of a particular India or specific Indians didn’t last. By 1881, the Mutiny pulp fiction stage was dominated by the likes of the prolific and unstoppable G.A. Henty.

  Henty, who churned out more than a hundred boys’ adventures in a range of imperial settings, turned to the Mutiny with In Times of Peril. The opening chapter is a personal favourite: a fine upstanding English family in India heads off for a jolly evening of pigsticking. (‘Hurrah!’ says one of the boys at the treat.) It also has illustrations that tell you a great deal about Henty’s preferred style, i.e.: ‘A tiger stood, with one of the guards in his mouth, growling fiercely’. The dialogue, after these promising signs, does not let the reader down, either:

  ‘Any one hurt?’ the major asked.

  ‘I have got a bullet in my shoulder,’ said Captain Dunlop.

  The rest of the novel is a boy’s own adventure where the Warrener brothers pop up in ‘Cawnpore’ and Lucknow, and Oudh, and Delhi to save a garrison here, rescue a shrinking maiden there. Henty is cheerfully open about the quantity of loot the boys collect during the course of their adventures, and is careful to balance the dastardly treacherous Indians with the occasional portrait of a sympathetic ranee or two.

  For Henty and his fellow novelists, many of them like him the most popular writers of the age, India was an exotic backdrop, and Indians were props, no more. Henty’s fellow adventure novelist Hume Nisbet, for instance, had his hero Sammy Tompkins disguise himself as an Indian to spy on the sepoys. But this was no early forerunner for Rudyard Kipling’s Kim—unlike the Little Friend To All The World, who slipped with ease between the British and the Indians, at home wherever he went, Sammy Tompkins had no use for the Indians, and no interest in them. Going native was just a way to inject a little excitement into the narrative.

  The frenzied dream of vengeance had reached its culmination in 1880, when Jules Verne joined the ranks of Mutiny writers with two books, The Steam House, and its sequel, Tigers and Traitors. The Steam House: The Demon of Cawnpore is an extraordinary early steampunk novel. The premise was just as baroque as you would expect from the author of Ten Thousand Le
agues Under the Sea. Intent on avenging the slaughter committed by Indians during the Mutiny, a small band of brave British officers set out to hunt down Nana Sahib. They seek the perpetrator of the Cawnpore Massacre by journeying through the jungles of India in the belly of the Steam House—a giant mechanical elephant called Behemoth that drags several houses behind it—so that they can travel in comfort while pursuing justice.

  The title of The Steam House has been nervously sanitized over the years; later versions carry the subtitle ‘The End of Nana Sahib’ rather than ‘The Demon of Cawnpore’. ‘Nana Sahib! This name, the most formidable to which the Revolt of 1857 had given a horrible notoriety, was there once more, flung like a haughty challenge at the conquerors of India.’ In Verne’s hands, Nana Sahib lives and has not lost his bloodlust: ‘. . . this railroad, the accursed work of the invaders’ hands, shall ere long be drenched in blood!’

  And what is the reaction of the British in this Mutiny novel written by a man who saw the events of 1857 from a great distance, both physical and intellectual? Their dream is to build first a steam horse (and then the Steam House), that would travel the highways and byways of India, penetrate the jungles, plunge into the forests: ‘Venturing even into the haunts of lions, tigers, bears, panthers and leopards, while we, safe within its walls, are dealing destruction on all and sundry!’

  Only Verne could have dreamed this up—a revenge fantasy that was also a safe retreat back to the womb of a mechanical elephant.

  It would take an insider to write perhaps the best of the post-1857 novels; Flora Annie Steel had lived in the Punjab as the wife of a civil servant for years, and brought an original perspective to the sometimes deplorable school of memsahib writing. Her memoirs of her life are thoughtful and lively; her engagement with India closer to the deep attachment felt by the couple in Staying On, Paul Scott’s novel of the twilight of the Raj. In her 1896 novel, On the Face of the Waters, her protagonist lurks in the heart of occupied Delhi in the guise of an Afghan horse trader, and right from the opening paragraphs, Steel sets out her sympathies.

  ‘GOING! Going! Gone!’

  The Western phrase echoed over the Eastern scene without a trace of doubt in its calm assumption of finality. It was followed by a pause, during which, despite the crowd thronging the wide plain, the only recognizable sound was the vexed yawning purr of a tiger impatient for its prey. It shuddered through the sunshine, strangely out of keeping with the multitude of men gathered together in silent security. But on that March evening of the year 1856, when the long shadows of the surrounding trees had begun to invade the sunlit levels of grass by the river, the lately deposed King of Oude’s menagerie was being auctioned.

  Her world is exotic India—filled with cockatoos and opium dens, king’s menageries, homesick memsahibs who daren’t trust the ayahs; but it is also much more than that. Steel fills the first chapters with heat, dust, and Ye Olde Oriental Charm, and moves briskly on to officials discussing the ‘mischievous paragraph’ in the Christian Observer about widow remarriages, the politics of the ‘Sheeahs and Sunnees’.

  Steel has a tart tongue: ‘In the big dark dining-room also—where Alice Gissing, looking half her years in starched white muslin and blue ribbons, sat at the head of the table—there was no cult of England. Everything was frankly staunchly of the nabob-and-pagoda-tree style, for the Gissings preferred India, where they were received into society, to England, where they would have been out of it.’

  And there we go, flashing from suttees and bahurupias to bis-cobras and Englishmen disguised as mendicants, cries of ‘Deen! Deen!’ in the bloody streets of Meerut. But if Kipling’s Kim had a forerunner, in its complicated blend of sympathy, reluctant respect and yearning for India, touched with a tinge of British superiority, it may have been in Steel’s novel, published four years before Kim.

  Steel set herself large ambitions, and her words, re-read after all of this colour and drama, are startling: ‘I have tried to give a photograph—that is, a picture in which the differentiation caused by colour is left out—of a time which neither the fair race nor the dark race is likely to quite forget or forgive. That they might come nearer the latter is the objective with which this book has been written.’

  She makes it easier to go back to photographs of the Great War of Independence, the Revolt, the Rebellion, the Mutiny according to one’s preferred nomenclature, and see them with a different eye. Perhaps it wasn’t just Steel; perhaps in her time, there were others who looked at the sepia photographs and were comforted (or unsettled) by the way in which they bleached out colour and race.

  (Written between 2007 and 2013.)

  5

  Pioneers: A Line of Unbroken Trust

  One of the great perks of reviewing books in the late 1990s and early 2000s has vanished these days, thanks to the ready presence of courier companies: the ritual visits to publishers’ offices to collect the fortnight’s most interesting titles.

  I had joined the Ananda Bazar Patrika group as a junior dogsbody at the Business Standard. In less than a week, we had established that I was thoroughly unsuited to work at a business paper—I was mildly dyslexic about numbers, dividing when I should been multiplying figures, and tended to drift into writing scurrilous poetry in my head when the powers that be handed me the Economic Survey or annual reports.

  But this was the last of the decades in which every business magazine, and many mainstream journals, was considered incomplete unless they had twelve- or fourteen-page Arts and Books sections, and these could use the only marketable skills I possessed: I could speed-read, and I could touch-type without needing to look at the screen.

  That was useful, since the office PCs were antique and given to shuddering blackouts when the brightness keys died. This was the era when we ran commands from the DOS prompt, stored pathetically small amounts of data on 5¼ inch floppy disks, wrote articles on WordStar or WordPerfect, and talked to colleagues in the Bombay or Kolkata office through Telnet.

  The Business Standard office on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg was a short autorickshaw ride away from Daryaganj, where Cambridge University Press, Rupa & Co. and other publishers had their cramped offices that you approached gingerly, walking up rickety flights of stairs. I loved making the trip to collect books, especially if I could squeeze in a visit to the Old Delhi paper market nearby. The publishers were just a few streets away from another Old Delhi attraction, though that had limited appeal for me. But Daryaganj was also famous for its hakims; at renowned institutions such as the Khandani Shafakhana and the Hakim Hari Kishan Lal Shafakhana, their manuals promised to guarantee anxious couples a happy married life if only the gentlemen would follow their advice on how to avoid Nightfall.

  Daryaganj had a popular Sunday book bazaar, which sold nineteenth-century Indian writers’ books at ridiculously cheap prices: Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Kari in a handsome bound edition for Rs 26, a tattered copy of Behramji Malabari’s memoirs for Rs 53, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura more expensive at Rs 110, Nayantara Sahgal’s more modern Delhi novels sold at a discount because of their water-stained covers. And if I had time, and sufficient funds, I would stop at the nihari shops adjoining Karim’s restaurant near the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. In ‘Dilli ka Dastarkhwan’, an essay published in Khushwant Singh’s 2001 Delhi anthology, City Improbable, Sadia Dehlvi let readers into the secret of a classic nihari. She wrote that a few kilos from each day’s leftover nihari were added to the next day’s cooking: this was the taar that gave the dish its unique flavour. ‘There are still some nihari shops in old Delhi which boast of unbroken taar going back more than a century.’

  I think that writing, too, can have a line of unbroken taar, the ideas and insights of one writer stirred into the pot that another puts on the fire to simmer. When I began reading the pioneers of Indian writing in English, that was the image that came to mind (this is probably true for many Indian literatures, not just English). I have neither the breadth of reading nor the academic qualifications to set down the full hist
ory of the hundreds of writers, small presses and magazines who filled the nineteenth and early twentieth century with their eager prose, their impassioned essays, flowery poetry and ambitious drama, but here are a few of the pioneers whose books meant the most to me.

  Travellers: Romesh Chunder Dutt and Behramji Malabari

  Until I came across Dutt’s Three Years in Europe (1868), I’d thought of him as the Serious Dutt: the formidable R.C. Dutt who turned his hand to economic histories, translations of Sanskrit classics into Bengali, a history of the literature of Bengal that spanned eight centuries, and stern tomes on the causes and prevention of Indian famines.

  But there was another side to him, and Three Years in Europe brought that out—an unabashed delight in travel (he was the kind of tourist who would have been spamming Instagram today), allied to a remarkable degree of confidence. Seventy-four years after Dean Mahomet had prefaced his book on India with blandishments to the English, Romesh Chunder eyed the West with a curiosity that didn’t preclude him from being critical. He had compiled his letters home he wrote, to serve as a guide book to Indian youths containing: ‘The views and opinions of a foreigner for the first time coming in contact with the noble institutions of the West.’

  His book filled a neat gap in the market, as Dutt smartly points out: ‘As it is, none of our countrymen has favoured the public with accounts of their travels in Europe.’ The flow of writing had been in the other direction, travellers from the Occident setting down their impressions of the Orient: Dutt was one of the first writers in English from India to reverse the gaze.

  He, Surendranath Banerjee and Behari Lal Gupta had run away from home, ‘stealthily leaving’ in order to travel to London. Their aim was equally adventurous: they planned to sit for the Open Competition examinations that would make them the first Indians, after Satyendranath Tagore, to join the Indian Civil Service. ‘We have left our home and our country, unknown to our friends, unknown to those who are nearest and dearest to us, staking our future, staking all, on success in an undertaking which past experience has proved to be more than difficult,’ Dutt wrote with patent relish. ‘The least hint about our plans would have effectually stopped our departure, our guardians would never have consented to our crossing the seas, our wisest friends would have considered it madness to venture on an impossible undertaking.’