When the sun set over the British Empire, you could mark the slow fading of the Raj by the stacks at the pavement booksellers.
Over time, they disappeared from the pavements, and from our memories: Paul Scott, John Masters, Mrs Beeton's cookbook, the rococo flourishes of those who remembered khansammas, khidmatgars and kedgeree-pots. In the last decade-and-a-half, Indians haven't needed Raj nostalgia, or reminders of British India, as much as we've been curious about more recent Indian history. In the popular imagination, Mughal India and Hindu India loom larger than the days of John Company.
Rumer Godden, who died in 1998, was one of the most prolific and best loved writers of her time. Godden, who spent her childhood in Assam and lived in Kashmir after her marriage imploded, walked the line between British India and India-India. She could view both sides with affectionate mercilessness; as the daughter of a manager of The Brahmaputra River Steam Navigation Company, she grew up in a sprawling bungalow in Narayangunj, one of the babalog who considered India their real home.
Her early novels were reprinted recently by Virago, three minor classics among them: Black Narcissus, which follows a group of nuns setting up their mission in an old, crumbling palace in the Himalayas; Kingfishers Catch Fire, based on Godden's experiences of surviving as a single mother on a tiny income in Kashmir; and Breakfast with the Nikolides, where adults and family are seen through the eyes of awkward, sensitive Emily Pool.
For all her insider-ness, Godden was most comfortable perched in between the two Indias. "Europeans in India are like cut flowers; that is why most of them wither and grow sterile: they cannot live without their roots, and so few of them take root; but Charles had taken root," she writes in Breakfast with the Nikolides, employing two emphatic semi-colons and one dominating colon to make her point. And a few pages later, she is equally emphatic, reaching for the semi-colons as she writes about Indians. "He had been contented and that had made him lazier still; laziness, dilatoriness, is natural to India; the sun steals the marrow from the bones…."
But the key to reading Godden is perhaps not to see her as a Raj author, even though she summons that time back effortlessly, giving us British India with no softening screen of nostalgia. In Breakfast with the Nikolides (1942) and Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953), she was startlingly contemporary in the way she wrote about families.
When Lionel Shriver made waves with We Need to Talk About Kevin, it was assumed that few writers had created a fictional mother quite as hard-eyed, as clear in her assessment of her child, but it turns out that Godden had preceded Ms Shriver in her ability to capture the love and dysfunction that lie entwined at the heart of so many families.
Louise, in Breakfast with the Nikolides, sets down all of her child's flaws: the child is sallow, secretive, limp-haired, and yet this litany of defects is also proof of a kind of agonised protectiveness. Kingfishers Catch Fire is really also a love letter to Kashmir, written by an author who understood that her love of the place, however deep, would never be enough to allow her to belong there as anything except a tolerated outsider.
Teresa has all of the intensity of childhood, an intensity a lesser writer might miss - she is a noticing child, one keenly aware both of the foibles and absurdity of adults, and of "the injustice of grown-ups". It needs only this reintroduction of Godden's novels to make you realise how seldom Indian fiction in English has produced plausible children (one of the real triumphs of Arundhati Roy's 1992 God of Small Things).
Black Narcissus is perhaps the most extraordinary of the three, a study of human frailty where Godden left nothing out, from the absurdity of the nuns set down in the wrong environment, to the knowingness of the villagers who help and defraud them by turns. The world's cruelty, the fragility of faith, the impossibility of sealing passion safely outside the walls of a convent, the power of ghosts - though it should, by now, have dated, Black Narcissus is not timeless so much as it is curiously immune to the ravages of age. Trying to explain her love of the mountains to herself, one of the nuns thinks of how their magnificence disturbs the world.
"She liked it, she gloried in it; she had lived too long with the delicate and small and petty."
It wasn't that Rumer Godden didn't understand the delicate and the petty, or that she didn't write about them. But at her best, in these books and in her memoir, she had the other quality, the ability to be a little unsettling, more than a little disturbing. If only a few writers survive from the days of the Raj, Godden should be leading their kind.
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