The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [217]
“Ideas make us what we are,” Fleury asserts when years after the siege he runs into the Collector. But Farrell gives the last word to the Collector. In his old age he has the melancholy awareness that “one uses up so many options, so much energy, simply in trying to find out what life is all about,” and that, in the end, there is not much that one can do to change it. Intellectual knowledge, or its inferior form, technical know-how, is not enough. In any case, a people or a nation is shaped not by ideas but “by other forces, of which it has little knowledge.”
“There exists no great English novel,” V.S. Naipaul once wrote, “in which the growth of national or imperial consciousness is chronicled.” But this novel could not have been written when success of every sort attended the British venture in the world and novelists, even liberal ones like Dickens, embraced the assumptions of national and imperial superiority.
The Victorian faith in science, rationality, and progress, which first the Collector and then Fleury uphold, was to be badly mauled on the battlefields of the First World War. Its collapse partly gave E.M. Forster the confidence in A Passage to India (1924) to accuse the British in India of having an “undeveloped heart.” But it took another world war and the disastrous partition of India before British novelists could properly examine the complacent attitudes fostered during the high noon of empire.
As Paul Scott described in what now seems one of the first great works of postcolonial literature, The Raj Quartet, the British had made India a part of a noble idea about themselves. But there was not much Conradian sense of duty in sight as the British packed their bags after hurriedly dividing India and as hundreds of thousands of Indians killed and displaced each other. With the partition of India, “the British came to the end of themselves as they were.” Scott evoked the grubby last days of an imperial fantasy, the discarding of a tattered mask. It was Farrell’s achievement to describe how tentatively the mask was first worn—in a sophisticated novel of ideas that is also an entertaining comic adventure.
—PANKAJ MISHRA
*Shailendra Dhari Singh, Novels on the Indian Mutiny (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann India, 1973) p. 183.
For W. F. F.
Part One
1
Anyone who has never before visited Krishnapur, and who approaches from the east, is likely to think he has reached the end of his journey a few miles sooner than he expected. While still some distance from Krishnapur he begins to ascend a shallow ridge. From here he will see what appears to be a town in the heat-distorted distance. He will see the white glitter of walls and roofs and a handsome grove of trees, perhaps even the dome of what might be a temple. Round about there will be the unending plain still, exactly as it has been for many miles back, a dreary ocean of bald earth, in the immensity of which an occasional field of sugar cane or mustard is utterly lost.
The surprising thing is that this plain is not quite deserted, as one might expect. As he crosses it towards the white walls in the distance the traveller may notice an occasional figure way out somewhere between the road and the horizon, a man walking with a burden on his head in one direction or another...even though, at least to the eye of a stranger, within the limit of the horizon there does not appear to be anywhere worth walking to, unless perhaps to that distant town he has spotted; one part looks quite as good as another. But if you look closely and shield your eyes from the glare you will make out tiny villages here and