Tag: Vikram Seth

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Essay

A Different Persuasion: On Jane Austen’s Novels & their Adaptations

By Deepa Onkar

Recently, a realisation dawned – it has been over a year since I have watched an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel as a film or television series. My earliest memories of watching them go back to 1995, when the BBC’s version of Pride and Prejudice was released – I would watch the DVDs, or episodes on YouTube, with some enthusiasm. Over the years, I didn’t lose a chance to watch others: Sense and Sensibility, (film), Emma (BBC television series) Pride and Prejudice (film) and so many others. Looking at the comments on YouTube, it was evident that the Jane Austen adaptation fandom was large, and on a global scale. The seamless way in which the adaptations were consumed in so many Indian homes, including mine, puzzled me. I was familiar with the novels, as I had been a student of English literature in postcolonial departments in India, but that could not be true of so many others.

I fretted about the fact that my literary moorings were not so much in my own mother-tongues, but in English. Middle-class India was forgetting its own languages. English has crept in slowly, unnoticed. We could of course, think like Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, for whom writing about our own cultural contexts, our histories, landscapes, and memories in English, changes the texture of that language, and diminishes its colonizing weight. It is also the attitude, conscious or unconscious, of so many Indian writers in English. Curiously not many Indian producers have picked up on the idea of serializing the novels of these writers – either in English or in an Indian translation – which should be easy to do. It was the BBC that first produced an Indian novel – Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy as a television series (for a global audience).  

The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o has a much more radical perspective than Achebe – that it is not enough for people in previously colonised cultures to write in English, nor to claim it as their own. The very process by which English was acquired was violent and repressive. “(So) wherever you look at modern colonialism, the acquisition of the language of the coloniser was based on the death of the languages of the colonised. So it is a war zone.” Unless previously colonised cultures begin to train to think in their mother tongues again, he says, we will never really be able to shake off the mantle of colonisation.

This is a compelling, if daunting prospect – the work of decolonizing our minds perhaps begins within the education system which, in India, shows little inclination to change – it continues to lie in the shadows of the Anglo-American system, as it has for centuries. I draw comfort from Achebe’s attitude to English, which is the reality of many Indians. I don’t have to give up on Austen. But how do we rescue ourselves, and Austen? A critical and self-aware engagement with Austen – both the novels and the adaptations – seems to be a good place to begin. Reading Austen is arduous for those not born into English: I could hear my mother tongues tiptoe away as I read her. Reading is a solitary activity that connects us with the worlds of others, through the imagination. Watching an adaptation, on the other hand, can be solitary, or not. The visual text communicates through the senses rather than the imagination, although it does not mean it is not involved here.

It was not difficult to identify signs of England’s colonial links in either Austen’s novels, or the adaptations. Distant colonies such as the Caribbean and India were mentioned not infrequently in the novels: much of the income of the vast estates owned by the gentry was obtained from the colonies. Watching BBC’s Pride and Prejudice – and not for the first time – I spotted the tea, drunk in fine cups, the cigars that the men smoked, the cotton print dresses that women wore. I mentioned to a friend that some of the fabrics looked like the double-shaded handloom weaves from Andhra Pradesh, or Tamil Nadu. She agreed. Sometimes, the dresses also had paisley designs – these hugely popular prints were adaptations of Mughal mango motifs on textile. We, the global audience, need to train our gaze to the material roots of the English imagination, and be critical of it, rather than unreflectively consume its creations. Scenes of opulent country manors would appear repeatedly in many of the adaptations, and it was hard not to notice a kind of nostalgia for the glories of Empire. So much of the popularity of the adaptations seemed to be the result of clever packaging of Regency era settings and countryside.

Even as the lavish settings seemed to engulf Austen’s ingenious stories at times, a great deal of effort went into modernizing them. When Colin Firth came striding out of the lake in dripping wet shirt in 1995, the scene seemed to set the tone for other serials and films to become more inventive – as long as it created a stir. Almost every adaptation slipped in new scenes to suit their own narrative. They brought about a kind of visual cohesiveness to the series or films. Informal and relaxed body language, and facial expressions, and the manner in which emotions were expressed were adopted – rather than the stiff, stylized ways of the past. What we watched on screen was a hybrid text. I had no problem with this, unlike many die-hard Jane-ites the world over, who are perhaps purists at heart. Modern informality is, after all, a sign that the boundaries of class have become less rigid.  

When Austen’s world in the novel became too distant, and removed from my own, I would turn to the adaptations. They became relatable on screen. Besides, the adaptations were open to emotional expressiveness, where in the novels, emotions are sub-textual: I have lost count of the number of times I watched Elizabeth Bennett’s (Jennifer Ehle) fiery rejection of Darcy (Colin Firth) in Pride and Prejudice (1995, mini-series) or Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thomson) fall in love with Edward Ferras (Hugh Grant) in Sense and Sensibility (1995, film).

One of the main features of modernisation is the highlighting of the romantic plot. Love, is of course, central to Austen’s concerns, but on screen, it is difficult to see the larger moral order of which it was a part. Often, the biggest obstacle on the individual’s path to win over the object of their love is a moral flaw within themselves. Instead of Austen’s ironic, witty voice showing us the complexities of the individual, and of their interactions with society, we have to rely a lot on dialogue, and the point of view of the main character. Rather than the multiple layers of narrative in a novel, we have a linear effect in an adaptation. Everything is propelled towards a rather sentimental ‘happily ever after,’ which is not necessarily the point of a Jane Austen novel.

We do not – perhaps cannot – get to know the thoughts of Elizabeth Bennett or Elinor Dashwood on screen, independently of others. If emotions were more readily expressed on screen, we also had to contend with the loss of inner worlds, which a reader has access to. Action is all-important in an adaptation. The expression of physicality was thought to be enough to drive it, making up for our inability to know anything else. This seems to be the view of Andrew Davies, one of the most prolific adapters of Austen to the television screen. According to him, sexuality was already a major driver of the novels – his only task was to flesh it out. “Don’t be afraid (to represent) physicality… these are young people full of hormones and they are bursting with energy,” he says, when asked for pointers on adaptation.

In the novels, we also see how a character is separated from, or unable to communicate with the object of their love, until a morally satisfying solution is found. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Wickham’s true character had to be exposed, and Elizabeth could overcome her pride, and could accept that Mr. Darcy was right. In Emma, the eponymous heroine had much to learn in order to fully grow up: to be more self-aware and free from vanity, and realize she loved Mr. Knightley. Austen’s dislike of melodrama and writing that was overly invested in emotion is well-known. And so, it seems logical to think that she would not have liked mere ‘feel-good’ romanticism in the productions of her writings.

Morality as a force was more vivid on the page rather than the screen. It was arguably, an imaginatively constructed entity that was contemporaneous with the white man’s burden of colonization. Austen’s depictions of the world she lived in make her a ‘quintessentially English’ writer that is difficult for others to understand. But over the years, I learnt to understand her from my vantage point in post coloniality – the world is constituted of multiple identities and historical contexts, and being curious and open about others is a reasonable way of engaging with my own existential and sociological identities. 

Austen was an insider to her world – she deferred to the fact that women were very dependent on male approval and protection in order to survive. Most of the women in her novels were teenagers when they began their rounds of courtship, and often subjected to severe scrutiny by the world at large. But her women also used wit and rationality to make themselves seen and heard. Elizabeth Bennett (Pride and Prejudice) and Emma Woodhouse, (Emma) for example, challenged the existing model of the ‘superior,’ rational man.

Within the psychological worlds of men and women, Austen sought to describe the play of feeling, will and reason. Post-feminist critiques of Austen have been critical of her acceptance of these opposites and their implied gendered roles. Many adaptations exist, such as Lost in Austen, Pride and Prejudice Zombies, that satirize and parody Austen to a degree that ‘faithful’ adaptations do not aspire to. The comparisons and defenses could go on.

After years of reading Austen, my sympathies have recently begun to shift, imperceptibly – from the ‘wild and rational’ women of Austen’s novels, as Mary Wollestonecraft might have described them, to the quiet and introspective ones – more precisely, to Anne of Persuasion. Austen’s final novel seems to have achieved an introspective appeal that the other novels lacked. Anne’s deeply reflective and melancholic acceptance of her situation – a single woman stranded amidst a family that often exploited her situation – is the culmination of all of Austen’s literary prowess, and she herself seems to be on new ground as she explored Anne’s silences. A little into the novel, when she meets Captain Wentworth after eight years, there is some halting dialogue, as Anne comes to terms with her lost love, perhaps for the millionth time. Through these silences and halting dialogues, Austen seems to be testing the waters of what it means to be deeply self-aware. I’ve also read the dialogues to be a way in which words could be used to establish equality between them. It is through friendship that an egalitarianism of sorts is reached, that grows only gradually in strength.

The 2007 film adaptation of Persuasion portrayed the silences and the hesitant relationship between Anne and Wentworth admirably. It is difficult to portray interior worlds effectively on screen, and Sally Hawkins played the brooding, inconsolable Anne sensitively, particularly in the early scenes. Rupert Penry-Jones was striking as the embittered Captain Wentworth, seeking love elsewhere. The tension in their silences was palpably thick.

The letter Wentworth writes to Anne — “I am half-agony, half hope” — is a study in vulnerability: he is the flawed man who has to let go of his own stubborn refusal to acknowledge his feelings. The letter also indicates the difficulty of speech between them; writing is his only recourse. Men’s points of view are rarely presented in the novels. The adaptations turned this around – nearly all of the men have moments of vulnerability. This is a major breakthrough in modernization. Women all over the globe suddenly came upon visible evidence formen’s struggles with their feelings. This single factor alone, may be the reason for the huge popularity of the adaptations – men suddenly, were human and relatable.

When I learnt in 2022 of Netflix’s release of a new version of Persuasion, I began to watch it excitedly. But only a few moments in, I was sorely disappointed. The character of Anne (played by Dakota Johnson) was nothing like Austen’s – she was talkative and answered back. The key shortcoming of the film was the loss of Anne’s interior world.  When Anne and Wentworth (played by Cosmo Jarvis) meet, in the film, they engage in banter, from their very first meeting. Nothing much is left unsaid.  The absence of speech between Anne and Wentworth, which gives rise to one of the main tensions of the novel, and the earlier adaptation, is completely missing. They have finished saying a lot to each other in the very beginning. We cannot help wishing they hadn’t. Many of the characters were changed beyond recognition, and the sense of many scenes changed.

We know, early on, what the end is going to be. Austen plays words out in the final letter not coldly, but without a trace of extra emotion — that Wentworth’s maudlin show of tears were not for her. Perhaps, that was the final straw that drove me away from the film. I have not gone back to watching a film or adaptation after that. Something within me had died.

References

Language is a ‘war zone’: Conversation with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The Nation, Rohit Inani, March 9, 2018

Adapting Emma for the 21st century:  An Emma no one will like; Laurie Kaplan, Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) V.30, no.1, (Winter 2009)

How to adapt Jane Austen to the screen, with Andrew Davies: Guardian Culture, YouTube, 2018

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Deepa Onkar has degrees in English Literature from the Universities of Madras and Hyderabad, India. She was a teacher at Krishnamurti schools in Bangalore and Chennai, India, and a journalist at The Hindu. Her articles and poems have appeared in The Hindu, Punch magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and The Lake, among others. 

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Interview

A Wonderer Who Wanders Between Waves and Graveyards and Digs Up Ancient Tales

In Conversation with Amit Ranjan

Amit Ranjan. Photo Courtesy: Shailaja

A stranger than fiction book that starts with a limerick and ends with a rhyme, supposed to be a scholarly and playful work on perhaps the first Australian novelist-cum-lawyer-cum-journalist who sold cheap paperbacks for women readers traveling by train in India in the nineteenth century — probably British readership — fought a case for Rani of Jhansi – wrote for Charles Dickens’s Household Words – This can be the description of Amit Ranjan’s John Lang the Wanderer of Hindoostan, Slanderer in Hindoostanee, Lawyer for the Ranee (Niyogi Books). Why would one do a book on a maverick like this Australian journalist-cum-writer of the nineteenth century who opposed the British? What led to such a book? The quest for a ghostly ‘Alice Richman’ who lived in Pune in the 1800s, says Ranjan. And the author’s quest continues…spanning the shores of Australia, ‘Hindoostan’ and America…

The other most interesting thing about this book is the way the story is told – Ranjan says he is deeply influenced by the genre of magic realism and this, perhaps, reflects in his writing. While the research input is awesome, the style is non-academic and even flamboyant at times. It is a book that brings a smile to your face with its obvious cheekiness. But this is also the kind of book you keep on your bookshelf and pull out when you have time to mull over a discussion on historic links and syncretism – for that is the sap that flows through the book concealed behind a laid-back narrative style of a nineteenth-century writer. Who is this Ranjan who has tried to re-invent pedantry and scholarship, treat the serious business of research and academia with such friskiness?

Ranjan is a Visiting Fellow at UNSW [University of New South Wales], Sydney; and a Fulbright Scholar-in- Residence at Miami, an assistant Professor at NCERT [National Council of Educational Research and Training, India] — with eye to the sky, and ear to the ocean. His poetry collection, Find Me Leonard Cohen, I’m Almost Thirty, came out two years ago, and his biography of Dara Shukoh is due out soon. His poetry collection came out 4 years ago, and a new collection of poems The Knot of Juggernaut was just released in Miami in March. Without more ado, as John Lang would have it, we present to you Amit Ranjan –

What was it that made you map your journey of unearthing Lang in the form of his writings instead of writing about his life directly? You have used the forms of limerick, poetry and the epistolary technique along with essays and Lang’s own writing to build your case. An amazing amalgam — Why? It is rather an unusual form of storytelling.

This is an interesting question, or a set of questions. I think poetry is a powerful medium. At a certain time, it was supposed to regale and break tedium; now it seems to create tedium – the trajectory of human taste is interesting indeed. So, unable to write a book in verse (Vikram Seth debuted with a novel[1] in verse a little more than three decades ago, with elan), the least I could do (and generally do with prose) is having poetic invocations at the beginning and the end. I’ve also tried to maintain a certain poeticity through the book – it does add some funk and spunk, I believe.

About the form of writing – what was available to me was writings about Lang, and writings by Lang. Lang’s own voice is richer and wittier than his contemporaries and commentators, and therefore it came naturally to speak about his voice, rather than speak about what has been spoken about his voice. Unfortunately, the personal papers and artefacts of Lang have all been lost – it would certainly have been a riot to peruse his letters. And since letters by him are missing, I decided to write a letter to him (which is the first chapter) much in the way he’d have liked to write or receive a letter.

Also, about the form of writing – history writing and academic writing is caught in its self-referential niche writing – and needs to be freed from that cage, or that page in the history of stylistics of writing. Much influenced by the Latin American novelists, as also the frame narratives like Bocaccio’s Decameron and Alif Laila[2] – I thought it would be an interesting to approach non-fiction and/or history like a novel of the “lo real maravilloso[3]” genre (well, almost). So one could call it creative non-fiction (this work is completely and heavily annotated, so there’s nothing ‘fictitious’ in the work – just to add that disclaimer). I think these experiments are exciting, much like ficto-criticism as a foil of this form.

You have an interesting tone of narration which is half flippant, but it delves deep into research. Tell us a bit about your research.

The tone is what one makes of it. It is also very Victorian in its language, to keep in sync with Lang’s age. The alleged flippancy is a deliberate device I guess – as a tribute to Lang’s own voice that is playful and yet serious, as also to demonstrate that playful writing can be effective and serious.

Telling a “bit” about this research will occupy a bit of space, for dwelling in the haunt of 19th century is a bit of a habit with me now. Those puns aside, the road of this research has been thrilling across space and time. On the home turf, it took me to Meerut, Mussoorie, Agra and Calcutta. We, being good recyclers of papers, the works by or about Lang barely survive here. The copies of his newspaper, The Mofussilite, published from the above-mentioned cities (minus Mussoorie) weren’t available anywhere except London, Canberra, Chicago – and interestingly Islamabad. And so, I went to UNSW at Sydney for my PhD research, courtesy of Endeavour and Inlaks fellowships. There I met a very interesting 86-year-old gentleman, Mr Victor Crittenden, who was a retired librarian, and who had a very keen interest in John Lang. He had republished a lot of Lang’s work, and it was amazing to have conversations with him. The only little problem was that he was such a hopeless Romantic that he had ascribed several anonymous or pseudonymous works to Lang. This, then, became a daunting task, to research about each of these works and see if they could actually be Lang’s. And of course, it also resulted in funny arguments. Meanwhile, I relaxed the scope and the methodology, made it broad and unorthodox, to see where I could get. I met descendants of Lang’s half-brothers; a rabbi in Melbourne who believed Lang was Jewish; a member of Italian nobility in Paris, bitter about the politics in that family, and so on. At one point I emailed one Motee Persaud in hope that he’s a descendant of Jotee Persaud – only to cause him anxiety, for there was some court against him, and he thought my email was a subterfuge for a bigger design! When I returned from Sydney, I lost a pen drive with scans of Lang’s newspaper, for it was in a pretty UNSW backpack that someone took fancy to. I think I met the purloiner for a fleeting minute a few months later! The bit can go on, but I think this bit should be contained before I write a short story about it here.

Was the journey of discovery as interesting as your discovery of Lang?

Oh yes indeed! I think some of that has been revealed in the previous answer. It’s still an open book, an ongoing journey, I am still working with The Mofussilite. In my three fellowships to Miami (none about Lang), I purloined time to peruse Lang’s journal. The journey has been a thriller all through, I would like to believe – including my not being able to find Lang’s grave ever. Once, my friends and I rolled down Mussoorie hills into Camel’s Back Cemetery and the eight of us hunted for Lang at the haunted forest on a rainy afternoon. No luck, and never after in my subsequent visits, though the directions are fairly easy.

One of the most fun discoveries was that a picture of Lala Jotee Persaud, a client of Lang’s, was printed in The Illustrated London News as Nana Sahib’s! I was thrilled to receive that picture from ILN.

Ruskin Bond, a writer many of us deeply admire, found Lang in the Camel Back cemetery in Mussoorie in 1964. Then an Australian scholar investigated him. Lang finally found a way to instigate your pen to take up his cause. What moved you to research and write on him?

I met Mr Bond in 2009 I think, and my friends and I had a great fan moment. His father had some Lang novels, and that is what interested in him. Almost simultaneous, John Earnshaw was interested Lang’s life in Australia, and he wrote a short 30-page account detailing his timeline. And then the interest was lost for 40 years, when Victor Crittenden and Rory Medcalf of Australian High Commission reinvigorated interest in the matter.

All this, unbeknown to me, I was hunting for Alice’s history. Alice Richman, a girl who died at 26 in 1882, is buried in Alice Garden, Pune University, surrounded by a forest and many urban legends. Not knowing how to go about finding anything about her – I followed the Hanuman methodology – pick up the whole mountain if you can’t identify the herb. In reading about Australians in India in 19th century, I stumbled upon Lang, and since then, there’s been no looking back.

So, Alice the ghost sparked your interest in him from her very presence in Pune, what was it about Lang that attracted you to take a decade long journey into his adventures? Tell us a bit about how Alice pushed you to it.

In the pursuit of Alice, I read about the interesting Australian women missionaries in India (they were brought to India to be ‘tamed’); camels and camel drivers that went from India; and several such fascinating stories. The pursuit of Alice prepared my reading list, and that is how I found Lang. A white man fighting a white empire, with a nuanced understanding of India, and with an infective invective – seemed like a natural resonance to me. It is beyond the scope of this interview to get into the thrilling details of discovering things about Alice’s life too throughout this decade you’ve mentioned. Suffice it to say that it is actually the pursuit of Alice I have been on, and she keeps rewarding with some Lang legend and legacy every now and then.

Did you feel there was a need to bring out Lang to the fore? Is he relevant for our times? 

Absolutely so. He was the man who took on Lord Hardinge in his newspaper on a daily basis, to the point where the Governor General summoned him. Lang merely said that he made more profit by writing against him, than he could ever by singing paeans to him. He was a rebel, and witty. Today’s journalists across the world from the age of democracy can take a lesson or two from a man from the time of the Empire.

To understand where we are, we need to look at where we come from. The tedious legal system; the workings and trappings of army; racism; casteism; evolution of sciences and belief in pseudosciences – are explained in detail with wit, rigour and humour in Lang’s writings. To understand our postcolonial ontology, it is very important to understand how deeply colonialism affects us.

Please introduce the most interesting fact about the ‘Wanderer of Hindoostan’ to our readers. Tell us a bit about him concisely, especially as we are told in your preface: “Suddenly, there was an interesting piece of news doing rounds: that the Indian PM gifted his Australian counterpart with John Lang documents to demonstrate how far back the relations between the two countries went. I was not acknowledged. However, it was also a backhanded compliment. Lang had finally found an afterlife.”

Lang died in 1864; his name and works survived until. About 1910. For the afterlife of a writer, critics are important. Shakespeare, for example, was resurrected by the Romantics in the 19th century. After 19th century, Lang was lost until John Earnshaw’s minor interest in the 1960s; and then Victor – as already stated. My research was awarded as a PhD thesis in 2012. Interestingly, in 2014 he was showcased in this prime ministerial meeting. The rest you have told in your question – sometimes one has to take backhanded compliments with high spirits! Of course, it was an anxious time for me, for the cat was out of the bag, and I had to hunt for a publisher fast. However, as stated in the book – Stories forgotten or lying in the cold, find their own time to be told – and therefore finally a book, half in size of the original, in 2021. The advantage of including Lang is of course pushing India-Australia ties to mid-19th century, an idea which has never really been thought of.

Was the John Charnock you mentioned in your book related to Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta? Was Lang related to him and did that impact his choices? Job Charnock was after all a rebel too in a manner of speaking.

That’s a difficult connection to figure out, which I will try to, on some idle day when curiosity gets the better of me. Job Charnock, the alleged founder of Calcutta, died in 1693; and the reference in the Lang book about John Charnock is from 1843 (p362).  Lucy, wife of John Lang, had a sister, Mary, a poet who was married to John Henry Charnock. Mary’s book Legendary Rhymes (1843) was published posthumously, and her husband wrote a preface to this book. This Charnock was Lang’s brother-in-law, so they would have known each other well. John Charnock himself was an agriculturalist and a drainage expert and wrote books on this matter. To answer the last part of the question, in my opinion, Job Charnock and John Lang are as different as chalk and cheese – the former being a thorough imperialist and the latter, the opposite.

In the start of a chapter, you have said: “Lang had foreseen Google.” Elucidate.

Oh, that’s a joke to complement and compliment one of Lang jokes.  The novel Ex-Wife revolves around the predicament of a Eva Merrydale, divorced by her husband for “criminal familiarity with another man.” (p370) Eva’s brother tells that this case has been mentioned 114,227 times in the media, with 107 times in the Times alone. These kind of figures are something one would see in a google search result – 114,227 results for “Eva Merrydale divorce” 

That is Lang lampooning the British media for its obsessing over a poor divorcee through the exaggerated figures. However, one wonders, if there were people employed to keep track of a particular news appearing in the media.

As a digression to this essay, Lang indeed was looking into the future of journalism – sensational headlines, scandals and so on. In one lead article about the Gorham case, which had been talked about to death, Lang just wrote –‘Damn the Gorham Case!’ – and captured the public sentiment!

What was the purpose of this book? What kind of readership did you expect?

I guess the purpose of a prose book, fiction or non-fiction, is to tell a good story. However, my purpose was to fulfil a calling – I had at hand, the figure of a character lost for a century. It then becomes one’s responsibility to resurrect the figure as one has been entrusted by destiny, too. And of the course, the more general idea holds – the keys to the present lie in the past, as has already been discussed.

In terms of readership, I was looking at anyone who is interested in an interesting story of a maverick figure. This is why the language is jargon free, the stylistics are that of a novel. However, of course, one is also looking at the countries Lang is lost to – India, Australia and UK – and to have them remember an important critic and figure of their past. I expect students of literature and colonial/ postcolonial histories to pick this work up; but I’d love it much more that it appeals to the general reader of fiction and non-fiction.

John Lang had encounters with Dickens, Rani of Jhansi — a very wide range of historic personalities and influenced, you have claimed even George Bernard Shaw. Yet, all these personalities lived on while he faded to obscurity. Why do you think that happened?

Lang fought the British imperial sword with his pen, was declared a “hospital bed novelist” by the critics and buried to the British posterity. He wrote in Australia with convicts as heroes, which of course, didn’t go down well with the convict settlement. For Indians, who he had so much adulation for, he still got lost to history. Probably his interest in wine and women did not go down well with Indian historians too; or he was difficult to slot, being an interloper.

One of the things that does come across is Lang faded to obscurity as no one knew of him. Do you feel the role of historians and critics critical to the survival of an author? Or do you feel the colonials he often wrote against were happy to bury his writings?

Both aspects are at work. As already pointed out, the colonial press gave him bad reviews all the time. Subsequent critics were not kind either. This goes on to suggest how deeply ideological and long drawn out the colonial project was.

How was Lang a rebel in his times? Do you feel your own journey has been a rebellion against pedagogical practices of the current times? After all, can a book based on this much research start with a limerick and end with a tongue-in-cheek rhyme?

Two leitmotifs would suffice to settle the matter about being a rebel. It is said, in Lang’s multiple novels, about the white British protagonists – “India he loved, England he despised.” The second motif is strong women characters, some of them very deliberately parodying Victorian women and Victorian novels.

If my writing is considered rebellious to the current conventions, I would take it as a compliment, and not a back handed one. I wish I wrote the entire book in verse. I hope to pull off that trick successfully someday.

Maybe you will – an upcoming one – Alice’s story…Do you have an upcoming book? What about a novel on the ghostly Alice?

A new poetry book titled The Knot of Juggernaut, Or The Mystery of (Miami Mambo) Vexuality was just released, a day before I left Miami to come back to Delhi. It will be out here soon, too, in a month. This collection has poems written about journeys between the Bay of Bengal and the Bay of Biscayne. The title was suggested by The Right Honourable KB Con, Ducktor Albatross.

A biography of Dara Shukoh is scheduled for the year end.

The Alice book – definitely, whenever Alice wills it!

Thank you for the interview. 

Thank you so much.  It was a real fun interview.

[1] Golden Gate (1986)

[2] Thousand and One Nights

[3] Magic realism. As facts are less known or blurry, the content seems magical. Normally applied to Latin American fiction.

(This is an online interview conducted by Mitali Chakravarty.)

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Essay

Neither Tranquil Mandarins, Nor Yellow Devils

While the impasse over the McMahon Line continues and the outgoing POTUS rages over not only the election results but also the Yellow Peril, John Drew gives us an interesting perspective on the perception of both these giants, US & China. 

Credits: Collage by Sohana Manzoor

Many centuries ago, Chinese pilgrims came up the Bay of Bengal on their way to Buddhist sites in the Subcontinent. We have no record of their conversations with the people of Bengal but it was the accurate accounts of early Chinese travellers that enabled archaeologists in the 19th century to rediscover the lost Buddhist sites like that inside a hill at Paharpur (Bangladesh).

A more modern Chinese settlement in Bengal that has left us the word chini for sugar was largely curtailed sixty years ago by the dispute over the Himalayan border, the McMahon Line above Bengal, a remnant of aggressive British imperialism earlier in the 20th century.

Today, Bangladesh, like other sub-continental countries, has its Chinese neighbours within the gates, driving the building of the prodigious rail bridge across the Padma, developing a port hub at Chattogram and proposing a rail link across Myanmar. The Celestial Empire is once again a superpower but this time expanding as never before to the Indian, and perhaps every other, ocean.

The people of the Bengal delta have suffered greatly from empires, whether Persian, Portuguese, British or Pakistani: empires are not a win-win situation and never will be. But while it is as well to be wary of empire-building, also important is to be wary of the stereotypes that invariably accompany it.

When the Japanese were at the gates of Imphal in 1944, they presented themselves as liberators, a clever, ingenious people who were successfully freeing Asia from European rule. The British rulers of India pictured them as cunning and cruel. Both images were stereotypes that served the purposes of those producing the propaganda for or against.

What images does Bangladesh have of the Chinese? No doubt, given the colonial legacy, some of these have, willy-nilly, been bequeathed to us by the West. It is instructive to see how the stereotypes change with the times.

Mandarins

For Europe unlike India, China remained off the map until the 13th century when Marco Polo, among others, made his epic journey to Cathay and reported on a China full of marvels. This report chimed nicely with a superstitious, religious European culture already given to believing in the miraculous and fantastic.

The European Enlightenment in the 18th century ridiculed this farrago, offering a very different view. Leibniz, Voltaire and Quesnay, most notably, canvassed the idea of China as an ideal Confucian state where civil harmony and stability prevailed. Ironically relying on the researches of their opponents, the Jesuit missionaries, rationalist European thinkers used this image to show that a society did not need any religious sanction to be ethical.

Oliver Goldsmith wrote his Letters of a Citizen of the World (1760-1) in the guise of a Chinese visitor, satirizing Europeans for preferring to acquire Chinese frippery rather than to try and understand China. He mocked the way that even the uses of fashionable trinkets, including the pots for infusing a popular new herb, tea, were generally misunderstood.

The idealised view of Chinese civilisation was never uncontested. Moreover, the older images often resurfaced. Coleridge, famously, in his poem “Kubla Khan” returned to the medieval travellers’ image of China as a marvellous place: “It was a miracle of rare device/  A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice”.

Likewise in the 20th century, Lowes Dickinson, following Goldsmith’s epistolary method with his Letters of John Chinaman (1901) adopted the 18th century Enlightenment outlook on China. So did Vikram Seth in his mannered sonnet sequence, The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985).

Peasants

Less happily, in the 19th century as European capitalism and imperialism destroyed the old feudal order at home, feudal China was increasingly dismissed as decadent and backward, its largely symbolic fleet destroyed by the British. Bangladeshis need no reminding of the wretched history of the cross-border trade in tea and opium.

Thereafter the dominant image of China that emerged was of the cunning peasant, especially following the “Boxer” uprising against the foreign imperialists and missionaries. Chinese labourers came to be used as cheap labour across the world, building the American railroads, for instance, and, after being conveyed secretly in sealed trains across Canada, providing labour battalions for the Allies in World War I.

Masters have a way of blaming slaves for their own condition and so was born the ugly racial concept of the Chinese as a Yellow Peril, perhaps a subconscious fear that the roles of masters and slaves might one day be reversed. In one frequently reproduced lithograph, even the meditating Buddha was enrolled as the Peril’s presiding genius!

The peasant figure that displaced the mandarin still belonged to the same feudal order. Ah Sin, a comic stereotype created on page (1870) and stage (1877) by America’s most celebrated writers, Bret Harte and Mark Twain, was shown as debased and thievish. Whatever the intention of the writers, the effect, at a time of anti-Chinese rioting on the West Coast, was pernicious.

Jack London’s portrait of the peasant Ah Cho in The Chinago (1909) was something of an exception to the general run. The French colonial authorities in Tahiti are exposed for the racism that hangs a man even when they find he is the wrong one, so cheap is the life of a Chinese coolie.

That the image of a sly Chinese peasant is not necessarily untrue can be determined from the way it was also used by Lu Xun, China’s foremost short story writer in the 20th century. Ah Q (1921) tells the story of a bully and coward who prevaricates in the face of, among other things, revolutionary change. For Lu Xun, a peasant uprising in China would not be successful until the peasantry was properly educated and genuinely spirited.

Fu Manchu

In the 20th century, while China underwent almost permanent revolution in an attempt to free itself from feudalism and foreign domination, the single most influential and lasting image Western culture threw up in response was that of Dr Fu Manchu who, with the manners of a mandarin and the craftiness of a peasant, was a perfect fusion of the two previous stock figures.

For almost the entire century Dr Fu Manchu filled the minds of first book and comic-reading and then film-going and television-watching public. Urbane and fiendish, he was involved in gambling and drugs as part of a plan to bring Europe and America under Chinese control. Historically, of course, the opposite had been true.

As Sax Rohmer admitted, he made his name as the creator of Fu Manchu because he “knew nothing about the Chinese” (depicted in his books as “the most mysterious and most cunning people in the world”). He got no closer to China than the East End of London but his fevered imagination has proved as contagious as any virus.

It is indicative, and also ironical given the British treatment of China in the Opium Wars, that such virulent dreams of a racist, imperialist China seem to have originated in the drug-fuelled nightmares of Thomas De Quincey, the English Opium-Eater.

Pretty Much Alike

When the incumbent President of the USA describes the racially-indiscriminate Covid-19 as the Chinese virus he is evidently trading on the 19th century image of the Yellow Peril, updated as that became in the 20th century to the Red Peril. It is an old trick to deflect attention from your own shortcomings by blaming somebody else.

The images of China they elaborate tell us as much about Western culture as about China. As we saw with the stock image of the peasant, the image is not necessarily untrue: it is that it is inadequate, incomplete. The real problem is that a stereotype essentializes a vast and various place. People and places are diverse.

Timothy Mo, in his novel Sour Sweet (1982), parodies the silly prejudice that “all Chinese look alike” by having his Chinese protagonist Lily complain that all the “bland, roseate occidental faces” look the same to her compared with “the infinite variety of interesting Cantonese physiognomies: rascally, venerable, pretty, raffish, bumpkin, scholarly.”

In the 21st century we could do worse than let an 18th century English mandarin have the last word. Lord Macartney, Britain’s first Envoy to China (1793-4), wrote: “The Chinese, it is true, are a singular people, but they are men formed of the same material and governed by the same passions as ourselves.”

Goldsmith, in the introduction to his Letters, had written: “The truth is, the Chinese and we are pretty much alike. Different degrees of refinement, and not of distance, mark the distinctions among mankind.”

But Macartney went further. He suggested that before we looked at others we had better take a good look at ourselves. If the English found the Chinese proud of themselves and contemptuous of others, it was because these were the characteristics the English themselves displayed when travelling the globe.

The world we see mirrors us. The first place to look for the Yellow Peril – and the Red and the Black – is in Whitehall and in the White House.

John Drew has been a university teacher on both sides of the Himalaya and of the Atlantic.

First published in the literary page of  Daily Star, Bangladesh.

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