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J.G. FARRELL (1935–1979) was born with a caul, long considered a sign of good fortune. Academically and athletically gifted, Farrell grew up in England and Ireland. In 1956, during his first term at Oxford, he suffered what seemed a minor injury on the rugby pitch. Within days, however, he was diagnosed with polio, which nearly killed him and left him permanently weakened. Farrell’s early novels, which include The Lung and A Girl in the Head, have been overshadowed by his Empire Trilogy—Troubles (published by NYRB Classics), the Booker Prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip. In early 1979, Farrell bought a farmhouse in Bantry Bay on the Irish coast. “I’ve been trying to write,” he admitted, “but there are so many competing interests—the prime one at the moment is fishing off the rocks.... Then a colony of bees has come to live above my back door and I’m thinking of turning them into my feudal retainers.” On August 11, Farrell was hit by a wave while fishing and was washed out to sea. His body was found a month later.

PANKAJ MISHRA was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The Siege of Krishnapur

J.G. Farrell

Introduction by Pankaj Mishra

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Contents

Cover

Biographical Notes

Introduction

THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR

Dedication

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Afterword

Copyright and More Information

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.”