How to undo the Raj

Remember the days when patriotic Indians, struggling under the yoke of Empire, swore revenge on the Raj? We did our bit. We introduced Britain to chicken tikka masala and bhangra-rap.

We took over cricket, and we did our best to unleash Lagaan on an unsuspecting world. Just to rub it in, we gave the West End Bombay Dreams and we rehashed Jane Austen into the worst kind of Bollywood musical.

But there's a new breed of writers out there, from Barbara Cleverly to Thalassa Ali to Susan Kurosawa, who're doing their best to ease the brown man's burden. You want reprisal? Cleverly offers bad detective stories and the romance of the Raj. You want payback? Ali offers lurid tales of dastardly intrigue, and the romance of the Raj.

You really, really want vengeance? Susan Kurosawa does to the romance of the Raj what Dr Hannibal Lecter did for the popularity of brain curry recipes. Her only weapons are an imaginary hill station called Chalaili and a touching belief in the dictum that history repeats itself, the second time as parody.

Chalaili is a composite made up of hill stations visited by the author. With its reputation for rain and occasional depression among the inhabitants, it's not hard to guess that it has bits of Cherrapunji and Doolali stirred together, with a dash of Chail chucked in for good measure.

This is the setting for a story at once so dreary and so preposterous that you know it will come to a bad end and probably be reincarnated as a Broadway musical. (The British shouldn't have to suffer alone; the Americans must take their chances like the rest of us.)

Mrs Rajat Banerjee, future proprietor of the eponymous Coronation Talkies, soon to be the movie theatre that is the pride and joy of Chalaili, introduces herself in deathless prose: "'All the time I think of food,' she giggled." This, you realise just two pages along, is a blessing, because when she doesn't, she's given to "startling outbursts".

"As Clark Gable hung the Wall of Jericho curtain in his shared accommodation with the runaway Claudette Colbert, Mrs Banerjee let out a scream so loud that three rows from the back, caught in a still-innocent tangle of unfurling shawls and popping buttons, two visitors to Chalaili, Anita Mehta and Sonny Raman, shot to their feet and hurried in opposite directions."

The scream is intended to be Mrs Banerjee's way of paying homage to the beginning of It Happened One Night, and what surprised this reviewer most about it is that the film doesn't begin that way at all""the Wall of Jericho scene happens quite a bit of the way down. But this is uncharitable""Coronation Talkies is billed as a comedy, and we must allow the author a free hand with her imagination, even if it does extend to the plot of classic films.

Lydia Rushmore is Mrs Banerjee's opposite number in this lengthy farce. In contrast to Mrs Banerjee's opulent charms, Lydia is painted as a flat-chested former spinster hustled into a marriage of convenience.

Her husband William, a weather researcher with the forest service interrupted his obsession with the climate and its vagaries long enough to have an ill-judged affair with the wife of the visiting British Resident of Kashmir, and was ordered to return from England with a wife of his own or not at all.

Lydia's introduction to India is made fearsome by heat and dust (and beggars), and while her first visit to the local Chalaili club is turned by the other, duly snobbish, memsahibs into the day of the scorpions, her counterpart discovers that sleepy Chalaili isn't really the jewel in the crown she thought it was when she planned to open Coronation Talkies here.

This is the point at which the novel begins to enter Cold Comfort Farm territory, in the sense that every character turns out to have a past that includes something "narsty" in the woodshed. Lydia's descents into gin-fuelled depression and misguided attempt to make a friend of Anil, the sole servant in attendance at Bluebell Cottage, are explained in capital letters: "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I BLOODY WELL AM?"

Never mind. We'll be told in short but mawkish order as Lydia harks back to the days when her father used to call her the Princess Liddie Diddie while getting plastered at the pub. She seeks temporary solace with Simon Fraser-Gough, but what Simon has lurking in the woodshed is far nastier than anything Lydia might have imagined.

Speaking of woodsheds, William has something nasty stashed away in his, too, a complicated tale of dark illicit passions that must never be spoken of. Anil, not to be outdone in terms of domestic drama, contributes his mite's worth by arriving with his sister, who has been forced into prostitution in the wicked city. She has a heart of gold, but her lungs are made of lesser metal, unfortunately, precipitating another tragedy.

Meanwhile, Mrs Banerjee has progressed from her first dismayed look at the brokedown palace that's Coronation Talkies ("Talking picture theatre, my jolly bottom," she explains, in a fair semblance of what passes for wit in this novel).

Under her careful management, it has survived a disastrous opening night that provided the author with yet another stab at comedy (comedy survived, but it was a close call), and gone on to better things.

But, and this may surprise you, Mrs Banerjee, like everyone else in the novel, has a dark secret of her own. This emerges slowly and painfully through a tangle of comic romps, comic lusts, comic interludes, comic memsahibs and comic newsletters that redefine the critic's cliche "read this and weep".

There are some really good bits in Coronation Talkies, like the epigraphs before each chapter and the hand-drawn map of Chalaili and the very handsome book cover. Not enough, though, to prevent the sigh of relief that escaped me when this period piece finally reached the last full stop.

CORONATION TALKIES

Susan Kurosawa
Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 475, Pages: 488