Sunday, December 29, 2002		Books

Tales from British India
Rumina Sethi

A Various Universe
by Ketaki Kushari Dyson. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Second edition. Pages 406. Rs 495.

KETAKI Kushari Dyson first wrote this book in the late seventies in an Oxford environment feeling rather like an ‘interloper’, claimed neither by historians nor by the Department of Literature, when ‘postcolonial’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ were not yet buzz-words. Race, sex and marital status were other underlying discriminatory factors that stood in the way of jobs and fellowships. A Various Universe was produced during this period.

Significantly, A Various Universe first appeared in 1978, the same year as Said’s monumental Orientalism. Said showed, through his analysis of Anglo-French texts, that there was a family resemblance in their representations. Said’s disciples, then, created a universal grand narrative moving from the particular to the general, causing a ‘havoc in South Asian studies.’ For Dyson, cultural encounters between the white and the non-white races are never the same as the Said industry proclaimed. Neither was all scholarship of the Orient undertaken by the West tainted.

Dyson’s account purports to be different. Her authors are not canonical; they are selected on the basis of their testimonies of a very interesting period of Indian history. Her anthology spans a 90-year period of journal writing from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th. The comprehensive introduction traces the British beginnings from its early successes in the Battles of Plassey and Buxor to the solidification of the Raj in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when evangelists like Charles Grant spread the word that India was a den of decadence and corruption, and James Mill, without having a direct experience of India, rejected all of Indian culture in his widely read History of British India. Thus far, she corroborates Said.

In her collections of the literature of travel, autobiography, anthropological inquiry and reminiscence, Dyson provides historical information as narrative. She skillfully uncovers the moods, dilemmas and yearnings of British men and women in India, which have scarcely even been treated as a literary corpus by historians of British India. The complexity of responses and reactions, the parallelism of reportage as well as the contrast, the repugnance and the bonds of sympathy are daunting, to say the least. The British wrote not only about ‘big’ themes such as the Mughal rule, the practice of sati or the ‘Golden Age’ of India, they were equally loyal to ‘little’ subjects such as Captain Williamson’s warning to his countrymen to steer clear of the horned cattle of India owing to their antipathy towards Europeans, and Bishop Heber’s objection to the preposterous falsehood of this idea.

The journal accounts are varied: from the Marquess of Hastings to those in the military profession, from army wives to the wives of Company officers, from those involved in missionary activity to civil servants. For chronology, Dyson moves from the Enlightenment attitudes towards the east and the religious turmoil caused by proselytisation to the attitudes of Utilitarianism. Although these accounts purportedly move from the general to the particular, one does not see any anti-Saidian tones in descriptions of ‘silk robes, shawls, turbans, jewels, velvet and brocade.’ British accounts of India will speak inevitably of a culture quite different from their own.

Important aspects of journal writing included travelling and the modes of transport, camping, outdoor meals, river-bathing, fairs, processions and durbars. Thus travel writing recounts rides on palanquins and elephants, boating in the Ganges, or riding hill-ponies in the Himalayan regions along with the accompanying confusion of men scrambling for distributed coins or the sight of fakirs. There are interesting accounts of servants who would misbehave if asked to carry out a duty outside their prescribed caste roles for which they would, of course, be kicked soundly. Palanquin-bearers would put the palanquin down and disappear into the forest on such occasions leaving the arrogant traveller at the mercy of wayside robbers and wild animals.

Many of these stories note the Indian willingness to commit suicide by throwing themselves into wells or drinking poison for ‘the slightest reasons, generally out of some quarrel . . . in order that their blood may lie at their enemy’s door.’ There are accounts of pilgrims who would usually tie two large pots on their feet and swim into the Ganges at Benares to be dragged down by the weight of the water. Heber notes that such incidents arose ‘from the genius of the national religion,’ or simply from ‘native character’.

The accounts of Mrs Parks and Mrs Postans dwell on the liaisons between British soldiers and their Indian mistresses and their half-caste offspring that were abandoned when the men returned home. Eye-opening accounts of ‘comfort women’ are provided, such as that of Mrs Sherwood’s portrayal of Indian women servicing British troops. Sometimes British officers had relationships with their children’s ayahs. Perhaps that could explain why Mrs Fenton calls her ayah ‘the blackfaced thing always at my elbow.’

One wonders why Dyson does not include full essays or larger extracts of the accounts of British men and women as first-person reading instead of giving her own rendition or attaching appendices with brief quotations. One has misgivings about her self-conscious writing style as well, which sometimes appears too wordy and contrived although some may consider that a virtue.