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Inventing India : a History of India in Fiction

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Inventing India : a History of India in Fiction INVENTING INDIA: A HISTORY OF INDIA IN FICTION by RALPHIONATHAN CRANE, B.A., M.A. in the Department of English submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania October, 1989 This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other higher degree or graduate diploma in any tertiary institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except when due reference is made in the text or in the footnotes. Zito) \I . CipAA4 Abstract The title, Inventing India: A History of India in Fiction, has been chosen to suggest that whilst India may be found on any map, it has no single, 'true' identity; further, the title suggests the importance of the strange marriage between fiction and history, which leads to the invention of more than one India. The study follows, chronologically, the history of India from the Mutiny of 1857 to the Emergency of 1975, through the works of twentieth- century novelists who have written about particular periods of Indian history from within various periods of literary history. The earliest novel treated is Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), the latest Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981). Although any such discussion must involve some consideration of the theories of history and literature, I have minimized theoretical discussion in order to concentrate on ideas of historicity revealed by the texts themselves. The introductory chapter considers the unique place India has held in the British imagination. It acknowledges that, as a genre, the historical novel is as loose and baggy as Henry James's monsters of fiction; nevertheless it discusses ways in which the notion of such a genre may prove useful critically. This leads to a consideration of those novels which lie on the periphery of the genre, yet still manifest a strong zeitgeist. The seven central chapters each deal with a specific period of Indian history. In some chapters the treatments of the same period of history by British and Indian novelists are compared, and it is also shown that seminal works like Rudyard Kipling's Kim and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India have powerfully directed later novelists' perceptions of India. In the chapters 'Bridges' and 'Swaraj,' the importance of Gandhi invites analysis of how the lives of well-documented historical figures can influence the blending of fact and fiction. Kushwant Singh's Mano Majra and Chaman Nahal's Azadi form the basis of a discussion of Partition, whilst Paul Scott's Staying On and Nayantara Sahgal's Rich Like Us focus the issues which face the Anglo-Indian, Eurasian, and Indian communities after Independence. A constant thread in the thesis is the exploration of the use of paintings as iconography and allegory, used in the novels to reveal aspects of British- Indian relationships. Throughout, the thesis works towards a demonstration of how the invention of India has moved from the fringes of world literature written in English, to hold a central place in the imagination of postmodemist writers. [iv] Acknowledgements In particular, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Jennifer Livett, for her help and enthusiasm, and my wife, Joy, for her support and patience throughout. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr Ruth Blair, for her assistance in the early stages of this thesis, and to the University of Tasmania for the provision of the Estelle Taylor Postgraduate Research Award for four years, from November 1985 to October 1989. * * * I am grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce photographs: the Leicestershire Museums for The Flight from Lucknow (p. 121); Messrs John Dewar and Sons Ltd for The Monarch of the Glen (p. 166); the Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlosser und Garten, Berlin for L'Embarquement pour Lille de Cythere (p. 216); the Tate Gallery, London for The Boyhood of Raleigh (p. 237). The Relief of Lucknow (p. 52) and 'The Courtyard of the Secunderbagh' (p. 53) appear courtesy of the Director, National Army Museum, London. The Jewel in Her Crown (p. 150) appears courtesy of Granada Television, Manchester, England. [v] Prefatory Note In the interests of consistency, I have referred to the British community in India as Anglo-Indians throughout this study. Similarly, I have used the term Eurasian to describe the mixed-race community, despite the fact that after the census of 1911 these people were officially recognised as Anglo-Indians. Many Indian words have no definitive English spelling. As Olivia writes in 0. Douglas's Olivia in India: 'One trait [Hindustani] has which appeals to me is that one can spell it almost any way one likes.' I have been consistent throughout my own text, but various spellings of words like chapati and Muslim appear in quotations. [vi] It is not down on any map; true places never are. (Herman Melville, Moby Dick) Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Prefatory Note vi Chapter I Introductory: Fiction as History 1 Chapter II The Great Revolt -• 1857 15 Chapter III The Period of the Great Game 72 Chapter IV B ridges 97 Chapter V S wa r a j 131 Chapter VI Partition 177 Chapter VII The End of the Old Order 196 Chapter VIII The Chutnification of History 220 Chapter IX Epilogue 244 Bibliography 248 1 Introductory - Fiction as History Historicity is part of human certainty - it makes man rea1. 1 In Midnight's Children (1981), Salman Rushdie' s narrator, Saleem Sinai, tells us that, in 1947, 'a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom'.2 Or, to put it another way, India was invented, not for the first time, nor for the last, at the time of Independence. Every novelist Who has written about India has re-invented that country. As Veronica Brady explains in a review of Bharati Mukherjee's novel The Tiger's Daughter (1987), 'India is a psychic as well as a physical fact, personal even before it is political.'3 To invent India, it is necessary to imagine the landscape too, because the novelist is inevitably inventing the history of a particular place, as well as a particular period in the history of that place. It is noticeable how many novels begin with detailed descriptions of the topography of India - including four of the novels discussed in this study; J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), John Masters's Bhowani Junction (1954), and Manohar Malgonkar's The Princes (1963). 'Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope (London: John Murray, 1960), p. 84. 2Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981; rpt. London: Picador, 1982), p. 112. All subsequent page references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 3 Veronica Brady, 'Straddling Two Cultures,' rev. of The Tiger's Daughter, by Bharati Mulcherjee, CRNLE Reviews Journal, Nos. 1 and 2 (1988), p. 109. 2 Various fictional means can be employed to re-invent a country; in The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell: based his narrative largely on histories and memoirs of the Siege of Lucknow but transferred the action of his novel to a fictitious settlement, Krishnapur (which means 'city of Krishna'). This allowed Farrell to use history in a very flexible way. 4 By re-naming Lucicnow, J.G. Farrell has immediately re-invented that town, but because of the historical events which occur in his novel, it is still recognisable. By contrast, John Masters invents Bhowani and the neighbouring princely state of Kishanpur, which may correspond roughly to Jhansi, but are not recognisable in anything but the most general of senses. R.K. Narayan invents his own fictional world in Malgudi and its environs, which provides the setting for all his novels and stories. None of these places is to be found on any map, but they are, nevertheless, 'true places.' They are true places, at least in part, because of the strange marriage between history and fiction, and because there is no single truth, no single India, no single Krishnapur. Each work of history, each novel which attempts to interpret the Siege of Lucicnow, for example, is likely to be rooted in the same 'facts' or 'truths.' The historian who examines these sources, inevitably, in telling his or her version of the true story, imaginatively reconstructs the events he or she describes. Character, then, may suggest a distinction between the work of the historian and that of the historical novelist, as Manohar Malgonkar recognises in his novel Distant Drum (1960): But of course, the official histories made no mention of what Ropey had said on that occasion, nor did they say anything about the state of morale of the Satpura men at this particular stage in the battle of the 4Ronald Binns, J.G. Farrell (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 64-65. 3 bridge. Official histories merely told you about the way an action was fought; they did not say much about what people said or felt.5 Ever since Aristotle, attempts to define the distinction between history and fiction have been at best, hazy, and appear only to have confirmed the similarities between the two. In the nineteenth century, literature and history were considered branches of the same tree. Serious writers of historical fiction, like Scott and Bulwer, aimed at historical accuracy to the extent that, 'Bulwer's novels were reviewed as history rather than fiction.' 6 It was a period when novelists and historians influenced each other considerably; Macaulay was indebted to Scott, as Dickens was to Carlyle.
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