Anna Leonowens' Travel Writing by Shoshannah Ganz Ganz
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com A Fictional Remembering of India: Anna Leonowens’ Travel Writing by Shoshannah Ganz Ganz, Shoshannah. “A Fictional Remembering of India: Anna Leonowens’ Travel Writing.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.3 (2013): 131-51. Web. Licensed Under: "A Fictional Remembering of India: Anna Leonowens’ Travel Writing" (by Shoshannah Ganz) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com. A Fictional Remembering of India | Shoshannah Ganz | p. 131 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com A Fictional Remembering of India: Anna Leonowens’ Travel Writing by Shoshannah Ganz Anna Leonowens is chiefly remembered and celebrated as the English governess and only foreigner to ever fully infiltrate the court and harem of King Mongkut of Siam. The role she played in educating the King’s children, wives and consorts has been widely fictionalized and officially misrepresented in a number of different books, films, and even a television mini-series. The Anna Leonowens created and consumed by the American public is by and large the creation of an American missionary to Thailand, Margaret Landon. Landon whitens and baptizes the dark-skinned Anglo-Indian, and Leonowens, reborn in Landon’s own image, goes on to become an icon of American resistance to a despotic Eastern, though charming, tyrant embodied by actor Rex Harrison in the 1946 film that followed Landon’s 1944 bestseller. Leonowens continues to be remade and reborn – there followed Rodger and Hammerstein’s version in 1951 and 1956, and most recently Fox films’ version starring Jodie Foster as a completely American blonde-haired and blue-eyed Anna. As such, Margaret Landon’s version of Anna – as an American missionary –and Anna Leonowens’ own self fashioning – as a proper Victorian British woman – have both survived and triumphed in popular culture. This paper does not intend to expose or celebrate the “real” and less British- American version of Leonowens; rather, I am interested in exploring one of Leonowens’ lesser known works of travel writing about India. Life and Travel in India: Being Recollections of a Journey Before the Days of Railroad (1884) has been almost entirely ignored in favour of the writing about the exciting and exotic six and a half years Anna Leonowens spent as an insider in the court of Siam. And while I will be reading Leonowens’ celebrated works of her time in Siam in various discussions of her later works and life, these will not form the main body of this exploration. I will begin by discussing the fiction of Anna Leonowens’ life and the reasons why this version of herself was important to A Fictional Remembering of India | Shoshannah Ganz | p. 132 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com her personal and literary success. Then I will explore the self she reveals and disguises in her travel writing, including particularly the places in India that she wrote about and the India she celebrates and denigrates in her penultimate work of non-fiction, Life and Travel in India: Being Recollections of a Journey Before the Days of Railroad . Finally, I will explore how this work of non-fiction written during Leonowens’ life in Canada explores equality for all people of various cultures and religions; abolishment of the oppression of women, caste, slavery and colonial oppression; and her on-going project of educating and correcting foreign misperceptions about India. Leonowens’ writing and activism for racial equality and universal education appear according to popular versions of Leonowens’ life to have found their roots in her experiences of the harem and slavery in Siam. However, I would suggest that the roots lie much further in her past in India and were merely reincarnated in Siam and the United States and later in Canada. Leonowens was born and grew up in a community that respected all races and faiths. Anna was raised in poverty but in an environment that taught her languages, cultures, religions; and through education, passion, and a gift with language she transformed and romanticized this experience and knowledge into a manual on the practices and peoples of India with that touch of romance that while arguably conforming to colonial tropes could also have been cleverly employed to evade censorship and allow for the publication and reading of a work that both disguises and reveals her Indian heritage. Regardless of the strategies Leonowens chooses to employ, like many other women writers of the time, her serious writing was largely dismissed as amateurish and by and large her writing about India had a far narrower appeal. In spite of the dismissal of her formidable knowledge and expertise on Indian history and culture during most of her lifetime, in her later years she was consulted by professors from McGill University and gave a number of lectures at universities in Canada and Europe. However, Leonowens is remembered chiefly for her writing about Siam and her writing about India is almost entirely ignored and forgotten even in scholarly biographies and serious scholarship on her work. Some of the blame for this lies almost certainly in the complicated nature of the text—at times she seems to be writing in ways that conform to colonial expectations of the time and at others seems to be writing back to the colony from her earlier Indian self. As a result, Leonowens’ work A Fictional Remembering of India | Shoshannah Ganz | p. 133 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com on India was dismissed in her day as “inaccurate” and is now dismissed as being fairly typical colonial writing of the time. The other and most obvious reason Leonowens’ Indian writing is ignored in favour of her writing about Siam is because it was not set in a harem and was filled with information and insight rather than intrigue and romance. I however argue that Leonowens’ travel writing has been far under- valued both in terms of what it reveals about the author and for the way in which it responds to much of the Canadian missionary writing of her contemporaries. This is I argue one of those rare opportunities to read a response from one of India’s native children and regardless of the fictionality of the self Leonowens presents, her positions on colonialism, religion, women, suteeism, caste and many other aspects of Indian culture and religion are interesting if conflicted tributes to her Indian heritage. According to Leslie Smith Dow’s 1991 Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond the King and I : “Depending on whom one chooses to believe, Anna Leonowens may have been among the most accomplished, fearless and adventurous of Victorian ladies, or a complete fake who covered up her ignoble origins by inventing and exaggerating at will, simply to sell copies of her books” (1991: xi). However, even the detective work of Leslie Smith Dow, although uncovering aspects of Anna Leonowens’ early life, falls far short of the later biographical detective work of Susan Morgan, whose 2008 Bombay Anna stands as the authority on the “real” life of Anna Leonowens while at the same time questioning with proper academic skepticism the essentialism of the “real” story. However, while Morgan does a commendable job of giving a biographical account of Anna Leonowens she does seem to miss the significance of Leonowens’ travel writing written later in life and after she had become a celebrated author. By the time Leonowens’ wrote her last two works on India, her reputation as a British writer was well established. She no longer had to act the part of the British lady, but was well accepted as what she said she was—and further, she was celebrated in Halifax as an accomplished author of two well-received if disputed works and was embraced as the dowager of an established and wealthy family. What had been posturing when Leonowens first set out to write had in the interim become something of an undisputed reality and regardless in what was then the backwaters of Nova Scotia no one was standing up to dispute the interesting and intelligent champion of human A Fictional Remembering of India | Shoshannah Ganz | p. 134 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com rights and loving grandmother and educator to a growing family who was investing herself in the arts and community life of Halifax. Anna Leonowens’ early life in the barracks in Pune, India meant growing up with many people around and nothing of what would at that time have been considered a “normal” nuclear family. Most of the families Anna grew up with in India because of high rates of disease and early deaths were blended and the children of the fort “ran around in packs” (Morgan 43). The community of what came to be known as mixed-race Anglo-Indians referred to by the British as “half-castes” or “Eurasians” were part of an incredibly multicultural community. And while the conditions of poverty prevailed, the cultural situation was very rich. Christians, Muslims, and Hindus worked and played together unconstrained by the social-norms that would have prevailed had Anna been what she claimed to be, that is a proper English lady.