The Siege of Krishnapur - J. G. Farrell [3]
Farrell’s postcolonial cynicism often borders on the burlesque. But it also makes for brisk economy while presenting the moral blindness of some of the characters. Louise’s brother Harry Dunstaple earnestly advises Fleury that “you have to be careful thrashing a Hindu, George, because they have very weak chests and you can kill them.... ”
Farrell’s characters talk a great deal, and reveal themselves quickly. We know the diverse personalities and opinions of all the major protagonists well before Krishnapur erupts in violence and chaos. Here, for instance, is the opium agent, Rayne, admiring the wealth the British made by forcibly exporting Indian opium to China and turning millions of Chinese into opium addicts:
Opium, even more than salt, is a great source of revenue of our own creation.... And who pays it? Why, John Chinaman...who prefers our opium to any other. That’s what I call progress.
The Collector thinks this a limited ideal of progress:
It’s not simply to acquire wealth, but to acquire through wealth, that superior way of life which we loosely term civilization and which includes so many things.... The spreading of the Gospel on the one hand, the spreading of the railways on the other.... Both the poet and the Opium Agent are necessary to our scheme of things. What d’you say, Padre?
The padre, a former rowing man at Oxford, is happy to go along with imperialism, as long as the spreading of the railways allows him to spread the Gospel, although he is “afraid that the duties to which the Lord had called him might prove too much for this strength.”
Though widely regarded as an eccentric, the Collector alone has premonitions of an impending assault by the invisible natives. He orders the digging of trenches and the building of mud fortifications. The news that Europeans in a nearby town have been massacred forces the British community of Krishnapur to retreat to the Residency, and to deploy all able-bodied men in its defense.
As it turns out, British fortitude is not shared equally across British class divisions. The Collector’s manservant, Vokins, for instance, lacks
the broader view. He tended only to see the prospect of the Death of Vokins. Although some of the Collector’s guests might have been hard put to it to think of what a man of Vokins’s class had to lose, to Vokins it was very clear what he had to lose: namely his life. He was not at all anxious to leave his skin on the Indian plains; he wanted to take it back to the slums of Soho or wherever it came from.
The attack on the Residency eventually comes in the form of flying musket balls, and rash cavalry charges, and is barely resisted by such poorly equipped and inept British defenders as Harry and Fleury, respectively. As the attacks continue, and the casualties grow, the British try to keep up their rituals and hierarchies within the Residency. Dinner is as formal as ever; the respectable wives of officials keep a fastidious distance from Lucy, the fallen woman; and the debates about the pros and cons of civilization become even more heated.
Though tested by the uprising, the padre remains optimistic: “Our European civilization, which is rapidly uniting all the nations of the earth by means of railways, steamvessels and the Electric Telegraph, is the forerunner of an inevitable absorption of all other faiths into the One Faith of the white ruler.”
The pedantic Fleury, who is learning to kill, and even to enjoy the mechanical aspect of weapons, pursues Louise in his spare