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'The Last Englishmen' review: Baker recreates forgotten worlds of the Raj

Deborah Baker's awesome micro-research over a variety of subjects leaves you with much to think about

The last englishmen: love , war and the end of the empire book, mount everest, , author deborah baker
Wikimedia commons / Carsten.nebel
Kanika Datta
Last Updated : Sep 28 2018 | 10:09 PM IST
The end of Empire has provided rich fodder for historians and novelists and everyone in between. Given the extraordinary complexity of this era, most writers choose to narrow the focus of their work. In The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire, Deborah Baker has been intrepid, her canvas encompassing overlapping worlds — India on the cusp of independence, Britain the waning world power, and the political, social and cultural dynamics of these tectonic times.  

The book covers several parallel stories, each fascinating and demanding a challenging standard of research. The storyline loosely centres on the brothers of two of Britain’s leading poets of the time: John Bicknell Auden, brother of W H Auden, and Michael Spender, brother of Stephen Spender. The first was a respected geologist of the Himalayas (especially the Garhwal) and the second an explorer of formidable reputation, being the first to draw a map of the North Face of Mount Everest. 

The book chronicles the competition between John Auden (left) and Michael Spender: to be included in the expedition that would put the first Englishman on the summit of Mount Everest. 
The plot, if it can be called that, is the competition between Auden and Spender: to be included in the expedition that would put the first Englishman on the summit of Mount Everest, and to win the affections of a painter who gained considerable posthumous recognition: Nancy Sharp. Don’t expect A Dance to the Music of Time meets Heat and Dust, however. This story is, in essence, an academic work produced with a light and readable touch. 

Baker displays a polymath’s flair in evoking the ethos of Spender and Auden’s worlds. The book ranges over the romantic beauty of the Lakes to the terrifying glaciers in the Himalayas and Karakoram, from the dilettante salons of London’s sexually ambivalent Bright Young Things to the intellectual gatherings of Calcutta’s affluent Indians. She captures deftly the transition from the restrictive mores of the Edwardian age to the social restlessness of the post-World War I period when women and workers discover their voices, and affluent British-educated Bengalis struggle to reconcile their intellectual taste for European culture and distaste for colonialism even as eccentric Englishmen careen between rock faces and whorehouses.

Baker lucidly explains fiendishly complicated survey techniques in vogue at the time and the intricacies of wartime photo-reconnaissance. She captures evocatively the fierce debates in the Everest Committee over the exploration of the world’s highest mountain. Most usefully, she recreates a forgotten slice of intellectual life in Calcutta, as it was known then, and which Bengalis of a certain age will recall. These were the Parichay addas, held at the Hatibagan residence of Sudhin Datta, the scion of one of the city’s wealthiest commercial families. Intellectuals, politicians, spies and writers parade through these chambers, declaiming and arguing about the burning issues of the day, much of the proceedings noted by a secret diarist, a clerk at an English export firm.

 It was Sudhin Datta who introduced Auden to the woman who became the geologist’s second wife, Sheila, one of three granddaughters of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, the first president of the Indian National Congress.

The Last Englishmen Love, War and the End of Empire , Author: Deborah Baker, Publisher: Penguin Viking, Pages: 358, Price: Rs 599
The Last Englishmen is an absorbing and entertaining read, even if you wonder occasionally where this intricate account is headed. Baker’s awesome micro-research over a variety of subjects leaves you with much to think about. But the partial meanderings between multiple worlds also produce a lingering dissatisfaction. On those subjects on which I know a little, I found irritating gaps. For instance, she writes in some detail about the 1935 British Reconnaissance Expedition led by Eric Shipton, the one in which Spender made a photo-theodolite survey. Tenzing Norgay had accompanied Spender as a Sherpa on this expedition, a fact that is mentioned in passing (his name is also mis-spelled in the first reference to him on page 100). But Tenzing’s inclusion was significant in Everesting history, which forms a significant part of this book. The 1935 expedition was the first of seven up the mountain by Tenzing, who became the first man to summit Everest in 1953. The overlap of British and Indian worlds is, after all, a strong sub-theme of this book and Baker has taken the trouble to add a paragraph on Shipton’s relationship with Edmund Hillary, the other first summiteer, in the postscript. 

Other errors and omissions concern my grand-uncle Apurba Chanda. True, he is not a major character in the book. But about the only thing Baker has got right about him is that he accompanied Rabindranath Tagore on his 1929 overseas tour as his private secretary (he was also travelling as a representative of the government of India’s education department to make a presentation at a conference in Canada, but perhaps that would have been unnecessary information for the purposes of this story). Later, Baker says Chanda worked as private secretary to Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a future prime minister of Pakistan, who history has immortalised as the “Butcher of Bengal” for his role in Direct Action Day in 1946. 

This is news to me. Chanda’s son, who lives in Calcutta where Baker conducted several interviews for this book, confirms that this information is incorrect. Shaheed Suhrawardy and his brother, Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy, the art historian and diplomat, a man as different from his egregious brother as chalk and cheese, were family friends but Chanda never worked for the politician.

Finally, in the postscript, Baker writes, “Apurba Chanda was last seen complaining about the dreadful people who managed to get elected as members to the Calcutta Club.” His niece affectionately attests that this may well have been true. But given the details that Baker offers on the other personalities in the book, it would have been useful if she had added that Chanda had also been principal of Presidency College in 1943 and 1945 and the first Indian Director of Public Instruction.