The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [212]
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Copyright © 1970 by J.G. Farrell
Introduction copyright © 2002 by John Banville
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Cover photograph: Anonymous, overturned hansom cab with spectators, Edwardian era. Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Farrell, J.G. (James Gordon), 1935-
Troubles / J.G. Farrell ; introduction by John Banville.
(New York Review Books classics)
1. Family-owned business enterprises—Fiction. 2. World War,
1914–1918—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Ireland—History—1910–1921—Fiction.
4. Hotels—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PR6056.A75 T76 2002
823'.914—dc21
2002002988
The Siege of Krishnapur
J.G. Farrell
Introduction by Pankaj Mishra
New York Review Books
New York
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Afterword
Copyright
Introduction
In 1857, the eighth Earl of Elgin was on his way to punish the Manchu rulers of China for daring to close the city of Canton to British opium traders when he heard about the Indian Mutiny. The anti-British insurrections were confined to North India, especially the Gangetic Plain, from where most of the mutinous sepoys, or Indian soldiers, of the British East India Company had been recruited. But they threatened to undo all that the British had gained in India in the previous hundred years. Elgin immediately diverted his punitive expedition to India and spent a few anxious weeks in Calcutta, waiting for news of British victories, before moving on to deal with the Chinese.
Elgin was a reluctant imperialist. “I hate the whole thing so much that I cannot trust myself to write about it,” he wrote in his diary as British warships under his command bombarded and killed two hundred civilians in Canton. In Calcutta, living in a mansion modeled on Kedleston Hall in England, he wrote of the three or four hundred servants that surrounded him:
One moves among them with perfect indifference, treating them not as dogs, because in that case one would whistle to them and pat them, but as machines with which one can have no communion or sympathy. When the passions of fear and hatred are grafted on this indifference, the result is frightful; an absolute callousness as to the sufferings of the objects of those passions....
As a police officer in Burma, forced to shoot an elephant he didn’t particularly want to shoot, George Orwell felt acutely the degradations colonialism imposed as much on the oppressor as on the oppressed. Trapped into roles and actions not of his choosing, even the reluctant imperialist, Orwell thought, “becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.... He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
But the outraged feelings of a few individuals do not disturb much the impersonal business of modern empires. A range of influential men in Britain—Edmund Burke as well as John Stuart Mill—spoke up for the Indian victims of the East India Company. But they had little impact on the real rulers of India, whom Burke denounced as “young men (boys almost)” who rule “without sympathy with the natives,” the “birds of prey” who make their fortune before either “Nature [or] reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power.”
In the decades before the mutiny, these officials of the East India Company had radically disrupted India’s old social and economic order. They had forced skilled artisans and craftsmen to become petty commodity