The Empire Trilogy (60 page)

“Well, Doctor?”

“She doesn't need a diet.”

“But she's getting fat, Doctor!”

There was another long silence. The old man stood there wool-gathering, eyes half closed. Mrs O'Neill and Viola exchanged a significant glance. “Impossible,” Mrs O'Neill was thinking, “impossible for him to keep his mind on anything for more than two seconds!”

“A diet, Doctor,” she reminded him. But the doctor merely sighed and it looked as if they were not ever going to get any sense out of him. At last, however, his trembling, wrinkled lips parted and he said: “Your daughter doesn't need a diet because she's pregnant, Mrs O'Neill.”

“Pregnant! But that's impossible. Viola is only a child. She doesn't even
know
any young men, do you, Viola?”

“No, Mummy.”

“There, you see...It's absurd. And what a thing to say! Really, it's disgusting!”

“None the less, Mrs O'Neill, she's pregnant.”

“But how many times do I have to tell you...?” And again Mrs O'Neill patiently explained (nothing was achieved by losing one's temper) that what Viola wanted was a diet, nothing more complicated than that. But the old doctor persisted in being obstinate and senile. Gradually it became clear to Mrs O'Neill that it did no good to explain anything to him, however patiently. The old boy was beyond it. His mind was made up and there was no hope of making him see reason. Dr Ryan, who had served Kilnalough so well for so many years (and this was true, he
had
done a splendid job, one must give him his due), had at last reached the end of his career in medicine. In some ways it was rather sad. But it was no use complaining.

Dr Ryan shuffled as far as the gate with his visitors and watched them walk away towards the main street. Then with a sigh he made his slow and laborious way round the house to the back garden, where the Major was sitting in a deck-chair reading a newspaper.

On his last day in Kilnalough the Major paid a melancholy visit to the charred rubble which was now all that remained of the Majestic. He did not linger there, however, because he had a train to catch. Besides, there was very little to see except that great collection of wash-basins and lavatory bowls which had crashed from one burning floor to another until they reached the ground. He inspected the drips of molten glass which had collected like candle-grease beneath the windows. He noted the large number of delicate little skeletons (the charred and roasted demons had been picked clean by the rats). He stepped from one blackened compartment to another trying to orientate himself and saying: “I'm standing in the residents' lounge, in the corridor, in the writing-room.” Now that these rooms were open to the mild Irish sky they all seemed much smaller—in fact, quite insignificant. As he was carefully stepping over a large pile of wood-ash (which he suspected must have once been the massive front door) he looked back and happened to notice something white, half concealed by rubble. It was the statue of Venus, strangely undamaged. It was much too heavy for him to lift by himself, but when he got back to Kilnalough he made arrangements for it to be packed and shipped to London.

As it turned out, this lady of white marble was the only bride the Major succeeded in bringing back with him from Ireland in that year of 1921. But he was still troubled by thoughts of Sarah. His love for her perched inside him, motionless, like a sick bird. For many weeks he continued to think about her painfully. And then one day, without warning, the bird left its perch inside him and flew away into the outer darkness and he was at peace. Yet even many years later he would sometimes think of her. And once or twice he thought he glimpsed her in the street.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1970 by J.G. Farrell

Introduction copyright © 2002 by John Banville

All rights reserved.

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

Title Page

Introduction

THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR

Dedication

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Afterword

Copyright

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 producers while turning India from an exporter of high-quality luxury items into a supplier of raw materials for the Industrial Revolution in England. Their extortionate demands for agricultural revenue had forced an older class of landholders and peasants into debt and destitution.

Confronted with Belgian rapacity and destructiveness in the Congo, the narrator of Joseph Conrad's novel
Heart of Darkness
claims that

the conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....

The East India Company chose to redeem its presence in India with the idea that it was the carrier of a higher civilization, bringing the fruits of science, rationality, and progress to lesser peoples. But this evangelical spirit of reform, which sought to undermine Indian social and religious customs, only succeeded in further alienating many Indians, particularly those living in the Gangetic Plain. Even a traveler as unsympathetic to Indians as Richard F. Burton, the translator of the
Kamasutra
, could see in 1856 how arrogant the British had become in India and how hated they were by many Indians. The mutiny, when it erupted, shocked the British, particularly “Cawnpore” (Kanpur), as it was remembered by the British for decades afterwards, where Indian peasant soldiers treacherously massacred more than four hundred British men, women, and children after promising them a safe passage down the river to the city of Allahabad.

The British had managed to dominate India primarily through the threat of violence—in 1857 there were 34,000 European soldiers to 257,000 Indians in the British army. The widespread rebellion made them fear, as the first British historian of the mutiny, John Kaye, put it, “those whom we had taught to fear us”; and predictably, the British first sought to restore the balance of terror.

Soon after hearing the first reports of the mutiny, the British had killed hundreds of Indians as part of what an officer in the Punjab called a “prompt and stern initiative” of “striking terror” among the “semi-barbarous natives”—these preemptive killings by the British were carried out well before they heard about the massacre in Cawnpore. Later, as the British regained control, tens of thousands of Indians were hanged, shot, or blown to pieces from the mouth of cannons. The reprisals were widely covered by such “embedded” journalists as William Howard Russell, who had written about the Crimean War and was to report on the Civil War in America. They were supported aggressively by a British public fed on exaggerated stories of rebel atrocities. Even Charles Dickens felt provoked enough to wish that the British would inflict even greater atrocities in return.

Queen Victoria's proclamation in 1858 finally ended the rule of the East India Company and made India formally part of the British Empire. But the press coverage given to the mutiny and its suppression had already made India seem a British possession to the British public, which had previously not much cared or known about what most of their peers were up to in India. British control over India until 1857 had benefited only the shareholders of the East India Company. Now, as the historian Charles Trevelyan put it, the mutiny “irresistibly reminded us that we
were
an imperial race, holding our own on a conquered soil by dint of valour and foresight.”

In Britain in the late nineteenth century, poets, dramatists, novelists, and journalists wrote copiously about Indian brutality in Cawnpore and British fortitude in Lucknow, where British people trapped in the Residency, the official residence of administrators, held out for five months against mutineers, disease, and starvation in what came to be called the “Siege of Lucknow.” The image of the Indian darkened; his deviousness set in sharper contrast the altruism and generosity of the British; and the stoically brave Christian soldier emerged as a new model of Victorian masculinity. Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steel were only the more prominent of novelists who worked with these stereotypes in the commercially lucrative genre of the “mutiny novel.”

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.