1857, the pulp fiction version

SPEAKING VOLUMES

A century-and-a-half after the stirring events of 1857, most of us have read a wide array of books on the subject. These range from Amar Chitra Kathas to revisionist histories and eyewitness accounts. Some have read a few great works of Indian fiction and a smattering of well-known novels by the likes of John Masters or George MacDonald Fraser.

But in the two to three decades after 1857, novels about the Mutiny""to use the British nomenclature""commanded bestseller status. Most of these works of pulp fiction are remembered now only by scholars, but they tell us as much about the complexity of the British response to 1857 as a dozen well-researched histories can.

Barely two years after 1857, Edward Money published The Wife and the Ward; or, A Life's Error. Money's perspective was almost entirely from the contained world of the British, but he is disconcertingly sympathetic to Indians.

The novel faithfully follows the tragic fortunes of a band of British officers struggling to protect their wives, children and camp followers as Nana Sahib's men close a deadly trap around them.

And yet, in chapter two, Money has one of his characters lament: "India! how little art thou known to the mass of the English public, and yet who can doubt that thy loss would rob Britain of the brightest jewel in her crown...'Tis strange, this apathy, this ignorance on all Indian subjects..." Remember, this is barely a year-and-a-half after the Mutiny; but several of Money's characters express regret, from the Colonel of the regiment mourning the severing of ties with his men to a sensitive young army officer wincing at the inability of his countrymen""and women""to see India more clearly.

Far more stereotypical was James Grant's First Love and Last Love, a baroque three-volume extravaganza published in 1868. Grant included a scene where the sepoys strip and parade Englishwomen, and offers this sort of explanation: "To the brutal Mussulman and the sensual Hindu, the position occupied by an English lady or any Christian woman, seems absurd and incomprehensible; hence came the mad desire to insult, degrade and torture, ere they slay them."

Just a few years after Mutiny pulp fiction had become a genre in its own right, Philip Meadows Taylor added to it with his own mammoth page-turner, Seeta. Taylor was a police officer whose first bestseller, Confessions of a Thug, brought the words "thug" and "thuggee" into general usage. Taylor's Seeta set a love affair between an English army officer and a Hindu widow against the backdrop of the Mutiny. The novel offers some stereotypes, what with bloodthirsty Muslims and cunning Hindus, but it also displays Taylor's tremendous interest in India's landscapes, social and geographical, and his romantic vision of a world where Indians and the English might meet without barriers.

Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters, published in 1896, is lushly romantic, but it also displays great ambivalence. The novel begins with the auctioning of the menagerie of "the lately deposed King of Oude", a suitably surreal opening for her book.

She portrays Bahadur Shah Zafar as an ineffectual king""and bad poet""ruled by a wife in equal thrall to opium and dreams of power. But Steel was a sharp observer. Her novel includes portraits of the Gissings, "who preferred India, where they were received into society, to England, where they would have been out of it" as well as quick but accurate sketches of the "Bahurupas"""the Bahurupiyas""and the difference between, say, a Gujar and a Banjara. The book ends, atypically, not with an excoriation of treacherous Indians, but with a paean to the legendary soldier Nicholson.

By 1881, the Mutiny pulp fiction stage was dominated by the likes of the all-too-prolific G A Henty. In Times of Peril is a Boy's Own adventure where the Warrener brothers pop up in "Cawnpore" and Lucknow, and Oudh, and Delhi to save a garrison here, rescue a shrinking maiden there. Henty is cheerfully open about the quantity of loot the boys collect during their adventures.

But by the time Henty got around to writing about the Mutiny, there was no room left for ambiguity. There were only the dastardly treacherous Indians on one side and the brave, if looting-driven, flower of British manhood on the other. In a little over two decades, the ambiguity that writers like Steel or Taylor or even Edward Money displayed so freely, and the affection they showed even in their Mutiny novels for their visions of a particular India or specific Indians had died.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

The author is chief editor, EastWest and Westland Books; the opinions expressed here are personal