 "Betrayal on the menu")
THE COMMUNIST COOKBOOK
Author: Sharmishta Roy Chowdhury
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 304
Price: Rs 399
The central themes of espionage and intrigue in British India are temptingly presented in a cleverly attractive cover design and the synopsis on the back flap promises an absorbing read. Roy Chowdhury does not disappoint. The protagonist is George Clarke, a veteran of the disastrous Chindit campaign in Burma. Ahead of attending an officer training course at Mhow, he is posted to Pithampur, a princely state in eastern Punjab where his battalion is responsible for keeping the peace between restive activists of the Indian National Congress, the Communists and protecting the interests of the local Raja, a British client. It is a posting of unrelenting boredom, the sole highlight being weekly visits to the house of Deborah Sunderland, an elderly unmarried British lady who lives in the "native" part of the city.
A talented cook, she strikes up a friendship with Clarke, whose girlfriend back in England is a cook who had asked him to send her interesting recipes from India. Sensing his interest, Deborah gives him a cookbook of her special recipes, each page exquisitely illustrated by unknown artists. The cookbook is the key to more than just culinary information, but to explain why would be to give away the plot.
Deborah is not the conventional eccentric memsahib - she has a backstory that involves a long-standing romance with Satinder Singh Silonia, a Sikh nationalist and anti-monarchical agitator then in prison. It is this relationship that brings Deborah to the attention of the British authorities. Clarke is approached by an oleaginous intelligence officer, Captain James Ruffington, to spy on Deborah, who has now married Silonia, and the Indian crowd with which she socialises.
Clarke is uncomfortable with this brief, but Ruffington's explanations capture well the dilemmas of the last well-meaning servants of Empire. "…it's for a good cause - our cause," he tells Clarke. "You know these Congress types are up to no good…?" He needed someone who could help "unravel connections between the Congress, the INA and the Praja Mandals" (local activist groups).
Later Clarke is posted to Bajapur, a fictional cantonment town in nearby Haryana but a fair representative of its ilk all over India. At first glance, Bajapur appears to harbour many quirks. The cook is perpetually drunk and turns out inedible meals; the CO seems to be having an affair with a deceased officer's wife, and the battalion, formed from two different regiments - a common occurrence following the heavy losses in the Burma campaigns - was at loggerheads. Into this strange scenario come the American intelligence agent Captain Dennis Porter and Anna Benson, an American photographer who appears very loosely based on Margaret Bourke-White.
Clarke, who had just broken off with his girlfriend in England, now strikes up a promising romance with Benson. She is the kind of photographer who likes to mingle with Indian society, especially politicians emerging on the pre-independence landscape, and capture the local flavour. Porter, bumptious, unsubtle and obsessed with Communists, pressures Clarke to use Benson to infiltrate local political networks. And so the story progresses on an entertaining course, heavy on atmospherics, and the reader is propelled by the expectation of some big denouement. There is one of course, but it is only mildly funny and somewhat disappointing given the splendid build-up.
As a self-confessed "army brat" and daughter of a former chief of army staff Shankar Roy Chowdhury, the writer has ably leveraged her experience of cantonment life and her profession as history teacher to create a canvas that would have been wholly authentic had the copy editor been careful to replace such anachronisms such terms as "mom" (for mother) and "interact" (for meeting) from the text. Her sketches of the petty rivalries especially among the wives, inevitable in sequestered cantonment life, are particularly apt - recipes for cake, plays and flower shows are all sparking points for Incidents. A stronger plotline would perhaps have turned a readable debut into a more memorable one.
Author: Sharmishta Roy Chowdhury
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 304
Price: Rs 399
Also Read
The World War II campaigns of south-east Asia are no longer "forgotten wars", buried under the assiduous publicity accorded to the Western and Eastern Front, the Western Desert and the Pacific Islands. In recent years, this imbalance has been partly redressed by well-researched popular histories on the Asian campaigns. In that sense, The Communist Cookbook is set in a critical period of history, between the fag end of the Burma campaign and the sunset of the British Empire,.
The central themes of espionage and intrigue in British India are temptingly presented in a cleverly attractive cover design and the synopsis on the back flap promises an absorbing read. Roy Chowdhury does not disappoint. The protagonist is George Clarke, a veteran of the disastrous Chindit campaign in Burma. Ahead of attending an officer training course at Mhow, he is posted to Pithampur, a princely state in eastern Punjab where his battalion is responsible for keeping the peace between restive activists of the Indian National Congress, the Communists and protecting the interests of the local Raja, a British client. It is a posting of unrelenting boredom, the sole highlight being weekly visits to the house of Deborah Sunderland, an elderly unmarried British lady who lives in the "native" part of the city.
A talented cook, she strikes up a friendship with Clarke, whose girlfriend back in England is a cook who had asked him to send her interesting recipes from India. Sensing his interest, Deborah gives him a cookbook of her special recipes, each page exquisitely illustrated by unknown artists. The cookbook is the key to more than just culinary information, but to explain why would be to give away the plot.
Deborah is not the conventional eccentric memsahib - she has a backstory that involves a long-standing romance with Satinder Singh Silonia, a Sikh nationalist and anti-monarchical agitator then in prison. It is this relationship that brings Deborah to the attention of the British authorities. Clarke is approached by an oleaginous intelligence officer, Captain James Ruffington, to spy on Deborah, who has now married Silonia, and the Indian crowd with which she socialises.
Clarke is uncomfortable with this brief, but Ruffington's explanations capture well the dilemmas of the last well-meaning servants of Empire. "…it's for a good cause - our cause," he tells Clarke. "You know these Congress types are up to no good…?" He needed someone who could help "unravel connections between the Congress, the INA and the Praja Mandals" (local activist groups).
Later Clarke is posted to Bajapur, a fictional cantonment town in nearby Haryana but a fair representative of its ilk all over India. At first glance, Bajapur appears to harbour many quirks. The cook is perpetually drunk and turns out inedible meals; the CO seems to be having an affair with a deceased officer's wife, and the battalion, formed from two different regiments - a common occurrence following the heavy losses in the Burma campaigns - was at loggerheads. Into this strange scenario come the American intelligence agent Captain Dennis Porter and Anna Benson, an American photographer who appears very loosely based on Margaret Bourke-White.
Clarke, who had just broken off with his girlfriend in England, now strikes up a promising romance with Benson. She is the kind of photographer who likes to mingle with Indian society, especially politicians emerging on the pre-independence landscape, and capture the local flavour. Porter, bumptious, unsubtle and obsessed with Communists, pressures Clarke to use Benson to infiltrate local political networks. And so the story progresses on an entertaining course, heavy on atmospherics, and the reader is propelled by the expectation of some big denouement. There is one of course, but it is only mildly funny and somewhat disappointing given the splendid build-up.
As a self-confessed "army brat" and daughter of a former chief of army staff Shankar Roy Chowdhury, the writer has ably leveraged her experience of cantonment life and her profession as history teacher to create a canvas that would have been wholly authentic had the copy editor been careful to replace such anachronisms such terms as "mom" (for mother) and "interact" (for meeting) from the text. Her sketches of the petty rivalries especially among the wives, inevitable in sequestered cantonment life, are particularly apt - recipes for cake, plays and flower shows are all sparking points for Incidents. A stronger plotline would perhaps have turned a readable debut into a more memorable one.