The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [214]
The rules of this genre, which lasted slightly beyond the Victorian era, were simple:
The hero, who is an officer, meets the young charming lady, just out from England, or who happens to be in India from before, and falls in love or both come to India in the same ship, and strike a liking on board the ship itself. In India the historical situation is already ripe for mutiny, and the lovers are suddenly pitched into the upheaval.*
When in the early 1970s J. G. Farrell used the siege of Lucknow as a broad setting for his fifth novel, The Siege of Krishnapur, the second in a trilogy of novels about the British Empire, he used the basic formula of the mutiny novel, which was then obsolete, while subverting its rules and dissolving its partriotism in irony and comedy. Born in 1935, Farrell was only twelve years old when India became free from British rule. He saw the British Empire unravel in his own lifetime, and become, in the hands of such novelists as Paul Scott and Anthony Burgess, a subject that could be treated not only without sentimentality but with vigorous skepticism and irreverence.
Farrell’s main protagonist, George Fleury, arrives in Calcutta and meets a charming lady called Louise Dunstaple just as news of the first insurrections in the hinterland filters in. Unlike the dashing officers of previous mutiny novels, Fleury is a civilian and a bit of a romantic. He thinks that “civilization as it is now denatures man. Think of the mills and the furnaces...” and believes that what “was required was a completely different aspect of it...its spiritual, its mystical side, the side of the heart!”
Such views are inconvenient partly because Fleury has been commissioned by the East India Company to write a book “describing the advances that civilization had made in India under the Company rule” and partly because they do not much impress Louise, who seems more keen on flirting with the crudely philistine army men who resemble her brother, Lieutenant Harry Dunstaple.
Fleury and Louise first meet amid the flurry of social events that constitute the life of the British ruling class in Calcutta, the exuberant round of tea parties, dances, and picnics where people work hard at being British, to pretend “as if all this were taking place not in India but in some temperate land far away.”
No Indians are allowed to enter this privileged realm. Nevertheless, the absence of Indian character in a novel set in India, apart from a somewhat effete, not very convincing prince, may seem more striking now than in the nineteenth century. Farrell may have been deterred by the technical problems of rendering Indian speech without turning Indian characters into Cockneys. But his decision to leave out Indian characters seems to have largely stemmed from an honest view of his experience of India.
The diaries he kept during his research trip to India in 1971 reveal that he was bewildered, even “defeated,” by the strangeness of the people and the landscape. Rather than invent some implausible Indian characters, Farrell confined himself to describing the insular British and their claim to rule justly a country they, like Farrell, didn’t, or couldn’t, much understand.
The Collector of the fictional town of Krishnapur exemplifies what Farrell saw as the ambitions and delusions of British rule over India—the elaborate imperial self-deception which is the true subject of The Siege of Krishnapur. The Collector has little knowledge of, or empathy with, Indians. He is content to possess what Conrad called the “idea,” which is really an aggressive ideology of science, rationality, and progress. He is a member of many progressive societies, a fervent admirer of the Great Exhibition, which was held in Britain