Colonial India in children's literature [First ed.] 9780203112229, 0203112229

Table of contents :
Cover
Colonial India In Children's Literature
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Series Editor’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. (En)Countering Conversion: Missionary Debates and Colonial Policy in Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and His Bearer
Chapter 2. Resisting Tipu Taming the Tiger and Coming of Age in Barbara Hofland’s The Captives in India
Chapter 3. The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero Bridging Cultural Divides in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib
Chapter 4. ‘Macaulay’s Minutemen’ The Mimic Men and the Subversion of Law in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books
Chapter 5. Trivializing Empire The Topsy-Turvy World of Upendrakishore Ray and Sukumar Ray
Conclusion The Postcolonial Legacy
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

COLONIAL INDIA IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor For a complete series list, please go to routledge.com Youth of Darkest England Working Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire Troy Boone Ursula K. Leguin Beyond Genre Literature for Children and Adults Mike Cadden Twice-Told Children’s Tales Edited by Betty Greenway Diana Wynne Jones The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature Farah Mendlesohn Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 Edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore Voracious Children Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature Carolyn Daniel

Soon Come Home to This Island West Indians in British Children’s Literature Karen Sands-O’Connor Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child Annette Wannamaker Into the Closet Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature Victoria Flanagan Russian Children’s Literature and Culture Edited by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova The Outside Child In and Out of the Book Christine Wilkie-Stibbs Representing Africa in Children’s Literature Old and New Ways of Seeing Vivian Yenika-Agbaw The Fantasy of Family Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal Liz Thiel

National Character in South African Children’s Literature Elwyn Jenkins

From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity Elizabeth A. Galway

Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins The Governess as Provocateur Georgia Grilli

The Family in English Children’s Literature Ann Alston

A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, Vol. 1 & 2 Penny Brown Once Upon a Time in a Different World Issues and Ideas in African American Children’s Literature Neal A. Lester

Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature Monika Elbert Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism Alison Waller

The Gothic in Children’s Literature Haunting the Borders Edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis

Crossover Fiction Global and Historical Perspectives Sandra L. Beckett

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Elizabeth Gargano

The Crossover Novel Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Rachel Falconer

Shakespeare in Children’s Literature Gender and Cultural Capital Erica Hateley Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature Edited by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa A Study of Contemporary Fiction Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature Kathryn James Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research Literary and Sociological Approaches Hans-Heino Ewers Children’s Fiction about 9/11 Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities Jo Lampert The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature Jan Susina Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers Maria Nikolajeva

Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature Julie Cross Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature Tison Pugh Reading the Adolescent Romance Sweet Valley and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel Amy S. Pattee Irish Children’s Literature and Culture New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing Edited by Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan Beyond Pippi Longstocking Intermedial and International Perspectives on Astrid Lindgren’s Work s Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl Michelle Superle Re-visioning Historical Fiction The Past through Modern Eyes Kim Wilson The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature Holly Virginia Blackford

“Juvenile” Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The Age of Adolescence Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson

Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity The Mechanical Body Edited by Katia Pizzi

Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature Debra Mitts-Smith

Crossover Picturebooks A Genre for All Ages Sandra L. Beckett

New Directions in Picturebook Research Edited by Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Cecilia Silva-Díaz

Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination Kirsten Stirling

The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature Invisible Storytellers Gillian Lathey

Landscape in Children’s Literature Jane Suzanne Carroll

The Children’s Book Business Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century Lissa Paul

Colonial India in Children’s Literature Supriya Goswami

COLONIAL INDIA IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

SU PR I YA G OSWA M I

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Supriya Goswami to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Goswami, Supriya. Colonial India in children’s literature / Supriya Goswami. p. cm. — (Childrens literature and culture ; 85) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children’s literature, English—History and criticism. 2. Imperialism in literature. 3. India—In literature. I. Title. PR990.G67 2012 820.9'9282—dc23 2011052747 ISBN13: 978-0-415-88636-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-11222-9 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by IBT Global.

For Ma and Baba, Rian and Reinhard

Contents List of Illustrations

xi

Series Editor’s Foreword

xiii

Acknowledgements

xv

Introduction

Children’s Literature and Colonial India

Chapter 1

(En)countering Conversion: Missionary Debates and Colonial Policy in Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and His Bearer

15

Resisting Tipu: Taming the Tiger and Coming of Age in Barbara Hofland’s The Captives in India

47

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero: Bridging Cultural Divides in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib

79

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

1

Chapter 4

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’: The Mimic Men and the Subversion of Law in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books 107

Chapter 5

Trivializing Empire: The Topsy-Turvy World of Upendrakishore Ray and Sukumar Ray

135

The Postcolonial Legacy

169

Conclusion

Notes

173

Works Cited

183

Index

191 ix

Illustrations

1.1 2.1

The frontispiece of an 1855 Harper edition of Little Henry.

28

‘Tippoo’s Tiger.’ Reproduced with kind permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

68

2.2

A painting (c. 1793) by Robert Home depicting Tipu’s captive sons being received by Cornwallis. Courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London. 75

3.1

The frontispiece of an 1895 D. Appleton edition of Sonny Sahib.

5.1 5.2

92

S. Ray’s illustration of the king’s aunt playing cricket in “The Customs of Bombagarh.”

155

S. Ray’s illustration of the “Baboo” in “The Purloined Moustache.”

157

5.3

S. Ray’s illustration of the bold infants in “Infant Joy.” 158

5.4

S. Ray’s illustration parodying colonial laws in “The Rule of Twenty-One.”

159

5.5

S. Ray’s illustration of the Cat in A Topsy-Turvy Tale.

162

5.6

S. Ray’s illustration of the Crow in A Topsy-Turvy Tale. 162

5.7

S. Ray’s illustration of Professor Heshoram Hushiar and his expedition party in the Karakoram.

Cover image: S. Ray’s illustration of the trial in Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La (A Topsy-Turvy Tale).

xi

166

Series Editor’s Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture, the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particularly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with children’s radio, fi lm, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, but there have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world.

Jack Zipes

xiii

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank the people who have made it possible for me to write this book. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Judith Plotz, an extraordinary mentor, for her magical and inspirational guidance and steadfast encouragement over the years. My warmest thanks to Tara Ghoshal Wallace for her careful and engaged reading of the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Margaret Higonnet for her interest in my work and for her helpful suggestions. Many thanks go out to Teya Rosenberg for her advice during the early stages of this project. I also wish to thank Narayani Gupta for so kindly sharing a historian’s perspective with me. Susan Wanlass deserves a special mention for being an exceptional friend and for her gentle encouragement along the way. The lessons learnt from the late Meenakshi Mukherjee were seminal and have shaped this book in immeasurable ways. I owe my school friends a debt of gratitude; Sohini Dasgupta for reading two of my chapters and for her insights on late nineteenth-century colonial Indian history; Tilottama Karlekar for enabling me to find the answers to questions relating to the Rays which were seemingly unanswerable from Washington, DC; and Shweta Mansingka and Rashmi Punshi for sustaining me as only the dearest of friends can. I would like to thank the faculty (especially Jayati Gupta) and students of the English departments at Presidency College, Calcutta and Scottish Church College, Calcutta for inviting me to share my arguments with them; their excellent questions helped to sharpen my thinking on children’s literature in colonial—and postcolonial—India. I have taught in English departments which have been nurturing of my interest in children’s literature and my thanks go out to the department chairs (especially Mark Hennelly) for their support. I have also benefitted from lively discussions with my students, both past and current, in my children’s literature courses.

Portions of the introduction and Chapter 3 have previously appeared in “The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero: Bridging Cultural Divides in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib” (Copyright © 2009 Children’s Literature Association. This article first appeared in Children’s Literature xv

xvi • Acknowledgments

Association Quarterly, 34.1, Spring 2009, pages 38-50). I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint it and to Richard Flynn for his editorial guidance. Excerpts from The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray, translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri, are reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi. I am also grateful to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and to the National Army Museum, London for granting me permission to reproduce their images. My thanks to Abhijit Bhattacharya at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta for granting me access to the digitally archived editions of Sandesh. My family has been an invaluable source of encouragement, strength, and good humor; especially, my grandmother Madhuri Dutt, my aunt Anjali Singh, and my uncles Vijay Singh and Monish Dutt. Finally, and most importantly, my deepest thanks to my remarkable and amazingly supportive parents Satish and Sujata Goswami for their unconditional love and for always being there for me, no matter what; my wonderful husband Reinhard Reichel for his unwavering patience, good cheer, and expert technical assistance; and my beloved son Rian for the boundless joy he brings to my life. It is to them that I dedicate this book, with love.

Introduction Children’s Literature and Colonial India A naked white child kneeled by the side of the boat, and stooping over, must needs try to trail his hands in the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a child loves running water. I had fed all day, but still there was a little unfi lled space within me. Still, it was for sport and not for food that I rose at the child’s hand. They were so clear a mark that I did not even look when I closed; but they were so small that though my jaws rang true—I am sure of that—the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passed between tooth and tooth— those small white hands. Rudyard Kipling, “The Undertakers,” 249

The two Englishmen hurried down from the bridge and across the sandbar, where they stood admiring the length of the Mugger. Then a native with an axe cut off the big head, and four men dragged it across the spit. “The last time I had my hand in a Mugger’s mouth,” said one of the Englishmen, stooping down (he was the man who had built the bridge), “it was when I was about five years old—coming down the river by boat to Monghyr. I was a Mutiny baby, as they called it.” Rudyard Kipling, “The Undertakers,” 254 In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Undertakers” (1895), a mugger (crocodile) proudly recounts to a crane and a jackal how his reputation as “murderer, man-eater, and local fetish” (237) was established among the local population of an Indian village. However, the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut acknowledges that his reputation as “the demon of the ford” (237) had taken a severe beating once a railway bridge had been built across the river by the British. He was unable to prey on people crossing the river by boat because most of them now used the gleaming new bridge. As the Mugger says: “Since the railway bridge was built my people at my village have ceased to love me; and that is breaking my heart” (238). The only other regret the Mugger has is the fact that as a young crocodile he had 1

2 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature allowed a small English boy, who was fleeing the horrors of the Indian Mutiny on a boat, to slip through his teeth. When asked by the crane, “What does the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut need more?” he replies, “That little white child which I did not get . . . He was very small, but I have not forgotten. I am aged now, but before I die it is my desire to try one new thing” (252). In “The Undertakers,” not only does the little English boy escape the terrors of the Mutiny of 1857 and the jaws of a wily crocodile unscathed, but he also grows up to become a bridge-builder and ends up killing the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, the very same crocodile that he was in danger of being swallowed up by as a child. As he tells a fellow-Englishman while hunting down the Mugger: “He [the Mugger] took about fifteen of my best coolies while the bridge was building, and it’s time he was put an end to” (253). The English child is, therefore, able not only to overcome and triumph over all the dangers that India holds out for him, but also to grow up and subdue all the hostile elements that had posed a threat to him. In this story, the English boy has the potential to thwart the crafty crocodile’s greatest wish, bring modernity and progress to India, and save the unprotected natives of an Indian village from being devoured by a ravenous beast. Thus, this young child becomes a location of tremendous agency and the instrument by which destructive or harmful elements are wiped out in colonial India. The image of the child’s frail hand entering the wide-open mouth of a dangerous mugger and simultaneously evading its sharp teeth just in time is suggestive and powerful. The tale allegorically invokes the idea that the child’s hand intervenes in and overcomes, as it were, a mutinous moment in colonial Indian history. The Mutiny—embodied in the prodigious, man-eating mugger—is unable to demolish the young English child. Instead, the “Mutiny baby” is able to save himself from being swallowed up and grows up to violently destroy a symbol of insurrection and insurgency. As Kipling writes: “One of them [the bullets] struck just behind the Mugger’s neck, a hand’s breath to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. . . . the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut was literally broken into three pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him” (253–54). Thus, instead of India annihilating the English colonist, the English colonist (in this case, a child grown up) is able to overcome and subdue India. The English child, embedded in a moment of historical trauma, successfully survives it to become a bridge-builder, a protector, and triumphant agent of British modernization and technological advancement in the colonies. Looking to explore the links between children’s literature and colonial Indian history, this book is about the intersections of British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s books and defining historical moments in nineteenthand early twentieth-century India. More specifically, I will examine children’s texts in the context of five key historical events in colonial India: the missionary debates leading up to the Charter Act of 1813, the defeat of Tipu Sultan, the Mutiny of 1857, the birth of Indian nationalism, and the Swadeshi movement

Introduction • 3 resulting from the partition of Bengal in 1905. I will argue that just as the child’s hand intervenes in and ultimately overcomes a traumatic historical moment, similarly, nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature and early twentieth-century Bengali children’s literature attempt to represent, control, and evade momentous historical events in colonial India.1 Thus, like the child’s hand of the bridge-builder, these texts not only intervene in colonial history through the medium of childhood agency—whereby fictional children are shown to be able to effectively exert their will upon their environment—but also attempt to reconcile, and even enlist, young readers to the colonial or the anti-colonial enterprise in India. Further, by exploring the connections between colonial Indian history and children’s literature, my aim will also be to examine the ways in which British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s literature of empire not only engage in political activism, but also seek to empower children (both real and fictional) by celebrating them as active colonial and anti-colonial agents. In The Hidden Adult, Perry Nodelman usefully defines the distinctive features of children’s literature and presents us with an indisputable fact: that “its production and consumption—is so overwhelmingly occupied by adults” (207). Does this imply that children—both inside and outside the text—have been disempowered and silenced completely because of this undeniable feature of children’s literature? As Nodelman himself warns, one must not underestimate or be dismissive of the maturity and sophistication displayed by real and imagined children. In fact, in the last three decades, our perceptions of childhood agency (or the ability of children to exercise their will and possess a voice) have shifted from notions of powerlessness attributed to fictional children and (real and intended) young readers—which have included comparisons with colonized ‘others’—to exploring and understanding the ways in which they are able to assert agency and power despite being subjected to hegemonic historical forces and adult impulses. In her pioneering work, The Case of Peter Pan: or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose has argued that children’s fiction is rarely about children or for children, since it is constituted by adults and tends to reflect their social and sexual preoccupations, a view which is echoed by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein in Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Nodelman, in his seminal essay, “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature,” has suggested that adults, like colonizers, dominate over children and represent them in a manner that leaves them with no authority and power. In Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood, Joseph Zornado has similarly suggested that the main agenda behind all (Western) children’s stories is to make children submissive to adult authority. More recently, however, in Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature and in Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature, Clare Bradford has persuasively argued that children, when they are privileged by race (or whiteness), can hardly be regarded as powerless and submissive, and calls for

4 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature a more historicized and non-homogenous approach to analyzing the positions children assume both inside and outside the text. In Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Marah Gubar has also convincingly made the case for nuanced and savvy fictional children and socially alert young readers who resist “unthinking compliance with adult desires” (43). Although Bradford and Gubar have reframed the conversation about childhood agency, the former by arguing that children who are historically privileged by race are not subalternized, and cannot be regarded as colonized ‘others,’ there still continues to be little analysis of the ways in which colonized children, for instance, are able to exercise their will in and through children’s literature. This book attempts to examine the notion of empowered childhoods from both sides—from the point of view of colonist children as well as colonized children—and suggests that British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s literature of empire celebrate children and their ability to become transformative agents of change. In the texts I examine, children are shown to exhibit tremendous agency and transformative power over the politically volatile environment of colonial India. In fact, children seem to demonstrate a greater resilience in surviving culturally fraught occasions than adults, who are often rendered impotent and powerless in the face of historical trauma. In nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian texts, children seem to have a greater influence on their alien environment than adults, who are often debased or corrupted by their experience in the colonies. Further, these children are not only the spokespersons for British colonialism, but are also central to the process of consolidating power in India. They are active agents who are able to rescue the Orientalized Englishman and simultaneously attempt to redeem the vast population of India. Early twentieth-century Bengali children’s literature, on the other hand, foregrounds the ability of subaltern Bengali children to successfully undermine all forms of colonial and official authority. Bengali children are, therefore, far more capable of subverting empire and challenging the laws of the land than Bengali adults, who are often enfeebled or emasculated by colonization. Thus, while English and Anglo-Indian children are deployed in these narratives as tools to both confute native insurgency and glorify imperial conquest, Bengali children are positioned as resistors who are able to sabotage Britain’s imperial agenda in India. In a century that simultaneously witnessed the rise of the British Raj and the development of children’s literature, it is hardly surprising that children’s texts were not only implicated in British colonialism, but also actively negotiating the idea of a British empire in India. In “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), Kipling outlines the duty of a colonial nation towards its colonial subjects. He writes: “Take up the White Man’s burden—/ . . . To serve your captives’ need;” (221). In British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature, the young English and Anglo-Indian child cheerfully bears “the White Man’s burden” and is, arguably, more successful in his or her attempts to civilize the childlike natives of India than the grown up Englishman or Englishwoman

Introduction • 5 is. In a sense, one can argue that the little child in colonial narratives signifies all that is noble about England (a little country) and is designated to carry out the uplifting mission of enlightening the colonized population of a large country. One can certainly attempt an allegorical reading of why the child has the ability to effect a spiritual and attitudinal change in the colonized peoples of India. Just as the little one has the power to redeem misguided adults (especially if they are natives), a geographically diminutive (but morally superior) England has the power to rescue a big (but morally deficient) India. Thus the English and Anglo-Indian child in nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature represents an unprecedented location of power when he or she is deployed to do ideological work for the British imperial project in India. In fact, I argue that British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature is burdened with the important mission of preparing children to do their duty and become ideal imperial citizens who work tirelessly for the greater good of an Indian empire. In my reading, Mary Sherwood (1775–1851), Barbara Hofland (1770–1844), Sara Jeanette Duncan (1861–1922), and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) write children’s books that serve as preparatory guides on how to conduct oneself in India and propagate the notion that the British Raj is in dire need of youthful British intervention. While it is acknowledged that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature has been deeply influenced by empire, this phenomenon has almost always been analyzed in the context of British children’s texts, and children’s books written by colonized non-British authors have yet to be examined in a similar context. This study seeks to open up the canon by looking at early twentieth-century Bengali children’s texts of empire that not only draw literary inspiration from nineteenth-century British children’s literature, but whose themes and discourses are equally shaped by the British Raj. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha has famously argued that there was tremendous anxiety at the heart of the colonial project since there were subversive tools available to the colonized to unsettle, disrupt, and displace the seemingly watertight and impenetrable power structures. What is of particular interest is Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry as a seditious gesture of colonial resistance. Bhabha argues that “mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (122) and that its effect on “the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing” (123). According to Bhabha, the “reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double” and, resultantly, mimicry becomes “at once [a] resemblance and [a] menace” (123). Thus, in Bhabha’s opinion, the very act of appropriating the behavior and speech of the colonial masters causes a slippage or a gap as the process of replication is never complete or flawless, and this enables the colonized to subvert the master-discourse. The menacing and subversive power of mimicry described by Bhabha can certainly be applied to Bengali children’s literature that effectively mimics

6 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature British literary traditions in order to interrogate imperial rule. In fact, the earliest Bengali children’s authors, Upendrakishore Ray (1863–1915) and Sukumar Ray (1887–1923), are products of a colonial educational policy conceptualized by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835 to preclude the issue of religious interference in India. Macaulay laid down the governing principles of an educational system that was to introduce a small group of Indians to Western thought and literature, and they in turn would become the link between the British and the masses they governed. These cultural middlemen were essentially going to learn and appropriate the language, habits, and customs of the British, and become the bridge between two vastly different cultures. What Macaulay had not accounted for, when he framed his “Minute” on Indian education, was that his “minutemen” (Moor’s Last Sigh 165), to borrow Salman Rushdie’s term, would not only end up questioning the foundations of British rule in India, but would also write children’s literature with a nationalistic agenda which successfully combined British and Bengali literary traditions to mockingly debunk the colonial mission. Although there was a rich pre-existing oral tradition of storytelling and rhymes in Bengali, ultimately, it was the middle-class Western-educated intelligentsia of Bengal, inspired in part by British literature, who gave Bengali children their very own written literature. If British literature was, as Gauri Viswanathan has persuasively argued, a pedagogic mask of conquest used to culturally colonize Indians, ironically, it also paved the way for resistance and defiance. In the last thirty years or so, there have been several important inquiries into the intersections of British imperialism and children’s literature. Among the early scholarly explorations, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, a collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Richards, makes excellent connections between imperialism and juvenile literature, and its goal is to illustrate how imperialism produced certain types of juvenile literature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Further, to argue that the adventure tradition in juvenile literature was fuelled by voracious colonial expansion has been another point of entry for literary critics who make connections between colonialism and juvenile literature. The popular juvenile fiction written in the mid- to late nineteenth century in relation to imperialism has been discussed at some length, most significantly by Martin Green and Joseph Bristow. In Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, Green proposes that the colonies are an ideal space for adventure, and that adventure is predominantly a male-dominated exercise in virility and strength, and instigates imaginative identifications with real and imagined (fictional) adventure-heroes. In Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World, Bristow looks at late nineteenth-century writers of juvenile literature, and explores the ways in which they invent and perpetuate British masculinity of a kind that could only be the product of aggressive imperialism. In spite of the pioneering scholarship mentioned above, Peter Hunt and Karen Sands rightly pointed out (in an article published in 2000) that one of the reasons why British children’s literature is “undertheorized” in terms

Introduction • 7 of colonialism is that “the historical and cultural importance of the Empire to British . . . children’s literature is taken as a truism by children’s literature historians” and that the “extent and nature value” of how children’s books “wittingly or unwittingly” reflected and diffused imperial views has yet to be thoroughly analyzed, “precisely because it is so apparently obvious” (40). In the last decade or so, however, this omission has been redressed by some exceptional studies in which British children’s texts have been viewed through the lens of empire, most notably by Kathryn Castle, Mawuena Kossi Logan, M. Daphne Kutzer, Rashna B. Singh, Troy Boone, and Karen SandsO’Connor. Castle focuses on images of Indians, Africans, and Chinese in history textbooks and children’s periodicals in the period before and after World War I in order to explore how notions of race and nationalism became integral to the process of British self-identification. Through a study of G. A. Henty’s fiction, Logan examines the role of nineteenth-century literature both in perpetuating African stereotypes (which continue to circulate even today) and in indoctrinating young adults in imperialist ideologies. Kutzer examines canonical British children’s books from the late nineteenth century to the beginnings of World War II for the ways in which they encouraged children to uncritically accept the values that sustained the British Empire. Singh explores how British children’s literature builds ‘character’ and becomes an instrument of early indoctrination into the hegemonic discourses of British colonialism, while also foraying into imperialism in the context of American literature and film for children. Boone focuses on representations of English working-class children in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, and examines how this body of literature sought to recruit working-class children for the British imperial project. Most recently, Sands-O’Connor looks at the history of contact between Britain and the West Indies, and focuses on representations of West Indian people and culture in British children’s literature. Although these interventions in the field of children’s literature and imperialism have been extremely significant and timely, with a few exceptions, imperialism has been interpreted rather loosely as ‘Britain’s conquest of the colonies,’ and these critical studies have focused almost exclusively on British children’s literature.2 The varied and checkered history of colonial (and later imperial) expansion in different regions of the globe continues to be largely undocumented, particularly in the context of children’s texts written by nonBritish authors.3 In fact, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s definition of a subaltern as underrepresented, marginalized, and unspoken for can be used to characterize nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian and early twentieth-century Bengali children’s literature, especially in light of its links to colonial Indian history. This study, then, is the first to suggest that British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s literature’s dense connections to the political, military, and social history of India in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is a previously unexplored and rich area of inquiry. It is my intention to look at literary representations of certain historical figures and events in these texts in an

8 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature attempt to relate textual analysis to social and political forces that propelled and complicated the colonial project in India. I propose that a closer reading of a substantial body of texts that are written predominantly for children and adolescents will reveal that their themes not only intersect, but also grapple overtly with the social, political, and military history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. In other words, the materiality and disruptive potential of actual wars, debates, laws, and insurgencies in the colonies that are inevitably suppressed in the celebratory narratives of the colonial project, erupt into these texts in interesting and unexpected ways. There is not only a surprisingly long and rich tradition of political activism in these children’s texts, but they also draw on a lively cast of characters from colonial Indian history which include missionaries, mutineers, bogeymen, mimic men, and rule breakers. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, as the Mughal Empire spiraled into a decline, the East India Company became a major political player in India as it began to consolidate its position and authority by interfering in the local affairs of regional powers, particularly in the east and south. The desire for territorial possessions—largely spurred on by the Company’s trading interests—resulted in almost all of India being under its control by 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny. The first hundred years of Company rule in India have been often characterized by historians as a phenomenon that just fell into place, starting with J.R. Seeley, who famously argued that Britain’s empire in India was gained in a fit of absent-mindedness, to Ronald Hyam’s more recent claim that there was no conscious or consistent policy that drove the conquest of India. In the last three decades or so, however, there has been a greater emphasis by Indian historians such as Ranajit Guha on the idea that the colonization of India was fraught with anxiety and that the British— especially those who actually lived in India—were deeply conscious of the fragility of empire.4 Thus, historical events such as the fierce resistance put up by Tipu Sultan during the Anglo-Mysore Wars in the closing years of the eighteenth century, Warren Hastings’s bizarre saga of corruption and greed in India, and the early missionary attempts to Christianize India (despite resistance from the East India Company and Indians) contributed greatly to the feeling of insecurity experienced by the British. These anxieties, I argue, fi lter into early nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s texts written by Sherwood and Hofland. The Mutiny of 1857—a crucial moment in colonial history that ended Company rule in India by handing over control to the British Crown—and the burgeoning Indian national movement also become key themes in children’s literature written by Duncan and Kipling in the closing years of the nineteenth century. As the twentieth century dawned, the national movement entered an increasingly anti-colonial phase due to ‘divide and rule’ policies, such as the partition of Bengal in 1905, adopted by the British Raj. The Swadeshi (of our country) movement—largely a reaction to the partition—not only inspired Bengalis to boycott British goods and

Introduction • 9 institutions, but also ignited a sense of pride in the local and the home-made. Bengali children’s literature written by the Rays in the first two decades of the twentieth century can clearly be traced back to this moment of patriotic fervor and colonial resistance. While it is well documented that a large number of children’s texts written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century focus on Britain’s colonial endeavors, scholars of children’s literature have yet to explore just how many of these children’s texts touch on a major historical crisis in colonial India. In fact, I propose that there is a conversation between British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s literature of empire and particular historical moments in the Indian subcontinent. And, while the British and Anglo-Indian texts are written to consolidate empire against the threat of native resistance at a particular historical moment, the Bengali texts are written to assert the impermanence and absurdness of the oppressive colonial machinery. In the first chapter of this book, I examine how Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814) responds to the debates over missionary activity in India in the early part of the nineteenth century. The English child is faced with the threat of paganism in Little Henry, and the conversion debates that threatened to fracture colonial authority in Bengal circulate in the text in interesting and unexpected ways. In chapter two, I show how Hofland’s The Captives in India; a tale (1834) responds to the fact of Indian resistance as the memory of the colonial encounter with Tipu Sultan of Mysore is invoked, and the narrative demonizes him as a fearful resistor and sexually potent Oriental tyrant. In Captives in India, a pair of English cousins is not only placed in captivity by Tipu’s agents, but also has to resist the native ruler’s potential to mentally and physically undermine their defi nition of themselves as British subjects. In chapter three, I argue that Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib (1894) responds to the post-Mutiny unease experienced by the British in India as it reconstructs the events of the Revolt of 1857. Duncan narrates the potency of armed resistance and insurgency during the Mutiny of 1857, and presents the Anglo-Indian child as the ideal post-Mutiny survivor. In chapter four, I discuss how Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895) responds to the rise of Indian nationalism, and how Kipling’s desire to legislate all aspects of jungle life in the Mowgli stories can be traced back to his rejection of the Indian National Congress. In The Jungle Books, there is a desire to curb the potency of native activism as the animals that are most vocal and threatening to the law of the jungle and to the Anglo-Indian child are ruthlessly ignored or suppressed. In chapter five, I turn to Bengali texts of response and resistance: I analyze how U. Ray’s Tuntunir Boi [Tuntuni’s Book] (1910) and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1914), and S. Ray’s Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La [A Topsy-Turvy Tale] (1922) and Abol Tabol [Rhymes Without Reason] (1923) are shaped by the Swadeshi movement which was set in motion by the partition of Bengal in 1905. The unpopular attempt by Lord Curzon, viceroy of India from 1898 to 1905, to rearrange the political landscape of colonial Bengal resulted in

10 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature the deeply patriotic and defiantly anti-colonial swadeshi phase of the national movement that, I propose, provided the right milieu for Bengali children’s literature to thrive. While Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne foregrounds the successes of two ordinary peasant boys who are able to (with humor and magical assistance) thwart the territorial ambitions of an authoritarian king, Tuntunir Boi presents us with characters such as Tuntuni, a clever little tailorbird, who also displays the ability to outwit a powerful king. S. Ray’s Abol Tabol and Ha-JaBa-Ra-La, inspired in part by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, caricature adult behavior and parody the laws of the land laid down by the British. This book, then, attempts to analyze nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature as transparently pro-empire glorifications of British and Anglo-Indian children who are presented as active participants in the colonial enterprise, even as it seeks to understand the ways in which early twentieth-century Bengali children’s literature resists empire by celebrating Bengali children who are able to subvert colonial authority. Not surprisingly, in British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature—ostensibly simple tales of British bravery, adventure, heroism, charity, and chastity—persistent threats to British authority in India are invoked and demonized in an attempt to exorcise and sublimate their disruptive and anarchic potential. The reason for this can be traced back to the fact that the British Empire in India was consistently conceptualized as a youthful endeavor in the nineteenth century. On December 1, 1783, Edmund Burke delivered a speech in the British Parliament (in response to Fox’s East India Bill) in which he noted the juvenile nature of British imperialism: Young men (boys almost) govern there [India], without society and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England—-nor, indeed, any species of intercourse, but that which is necessary to make a sudden fortune, with a view to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. (Portable Edmund Burke 371–72) In his opinion, the colonial project in India was being mismanaged by the young boys who joined the East India Company with the sole aim of amassing personal wealth. He went on to chastise them for their reckless behavior: “as the English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither Nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for the remedy of the excesses of their premature power” (Portable Edmund Burke 372). Although Burke’s remarks are

Introduction • 11 derogatory, he is one of the earliest to characterize Britain’s colonial endeavors in India terms of youth. This realization—that it was the youth of Britain who was going to mould Britain’s empire in India—resulted, as I will argue, in a steady stream of children’s texts in the nineteenth century seeking to represent colonial Indian history to young readers (and future rulers of India) in a manner which made it both controllable and accessible to them. Furthermore, in The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India, Francis Hutchins argues that the Mutiny of 1857 was instrumental in creating a “new temper” (x) in colonial India. It is his contention that the “British response to the Mutiny gave a defi nite shape to Imperial attitudes” (Hutchins 79), which were remarkably different from attitudes displayed by the British in India in the fi rst part of the nineteenth century. Thus, there is a shift in the way the British conceptualized their role and presence in India after the Mutiny. Prior to the Mutiny, the colonial enterprise was less codified and somewhat influenced by the belief that India was a despotic land in need of spiritual redemption. However, these attitudes changed after 1857 as the civilizing mission became intimately bound with technology, law, science, and a systematized consolidation of imperial power.5 I propose that the British and Anglo-Indian children’s texts reflect the two distinct moods in Britain’s colonial enterprise in India in the nineteenth century. Sherwood and Hofland (writing before 1857) use the tropes of conversion and captivity as a means of awakening children to the dangers of India, whereas Duncan and Kipling shift the emphasis to martial prowess, discipline, adaptability, mental agility, and empirical knowledge as defi ning qualities in British and Anglo-Indian children. Not surprisingly, far from questioning British rule in India, British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature attempts to consolidate imperial authority in a direct and candid manner. All subversive elements in the text are, therefore, represented as dangerous and undesirable. Thus, as a genre, British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature is conservative as it attempts to contain moments of historical and cultural trauma for the British in India. Events like the early nineteenth-century conversion debates leading up to the Charter Act of 1813, British defeats in the Anglo-Mysore wars, the Mutiny of 1857, and the rise of the Indian national movement in the late nineteenth century are sublimated and made more controllable in these narratives. As Karen Coats suggests: “The only way we come to make sense of the world is through the stories we are told. They pattern the world we have fallen into, effectively replacing its terrors and inconsistencies with structured images that assure us of its manageability. And in the process of structuring the world, stories structure us as beings in that world” (1). Thus, nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature frames, crystallizes, and simultaneously diffuses the historical trauma that is the inevitable outcome of British imperial aspirations in India. In the process it glorifies childhood agency and the English and AngloIndian child’s ability to survive and overcome colonial insurrection.

12 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Interestingly, early nineteenth-century women writers like Sherwood and Hofland, who played a significant role in introducing young readers to Britain’s fledgling empire, have been largely overlooked in critical studies. While the efforts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s authors, particularly male authors like Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Henty, in indoctrinating imperial ideologies in their youthful readers have received a great deal of critical attention, it is my contention that early children’s authors like Sherwood and Hofland were equally successful in familiarizing their young readers with Britain’s colonial concerns. It is only recently that the contributions of British and Anglo-Indian women to colonial Indian society have been seen in a positive light. In In Their Own Words, Rosemary Raza has persuasively demonstrated that, contrary to the widely held view that women were initially a hindrance to British rule in India, there were a significant number of British and Anglo-Indian women who lived in India and made important literary and social contributions to the colonial project in the subcontinent. It is in this spirit that my analysis of early nineteenth-century women’s texts for children will attempt to redress the preoccupation with male authors and boys’ adventure stories that have largely informed discussions of juvenility in the context of colonial India. If British and Anglo-Indian children are spurred on by pro-empire literature to become ideal colonists, one can hardly underestimate the impact of anti-colonial Bengali children’s literature on Bengali children. In the last three decades, postcolonial scholarship spearheaded by Bhabha, Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and others has changed our perceptions of Britain’s empire by examining just how susceptible it was to Indian resistance. In this book, I propose that early twentieth-century Bengali children’s literature is an excellent example of the power of Indian defiance—emerging from the most subaltern of sources—to counter colonial rule. Thus, Bengali children’s texts make an important ideological contribution towards dismantling the colonial project. By casting the Bengali child as the designated protagonist who was able to unsettle colonial structures of power and authority, Bengali children’s authors were able to free their young readers, at least temporarily, from the shackles of colonial rule. In Abol Tabol, for instance, S. Ray presents us with ravenous young children who are able to devour, as it were, British rule. If, by the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists were increasingly willing to challenge British rule with agitation, boycotts, picketing, and other acts of civil disobedience, it can be argued that the early Bengali children’s authors like U. Ray and S. Ray contributed substantially towards fanning these f lames of nationalism, particularly in their young readers. To sum up, for all the attention colonial India has received in studies about empire, and for all the emphasis on the youthful nature of Britain’s colonial enterprise and the importance of juvenile literature in fuelling imperial dreams, there has been little attempt to analyze the significance of colonial

Introduction • 13 India in the context of children’s literature. This book, then, is an attempt to begin a dialogue between children’s literature and colonial Indian history, a topic that has gone unnoticed by scholars of children’s literature and colonial and postcolonial studies.

Chapter One (En)countering Conversion Missionary Debates and Colonial Policy in Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and His Bearer

The rapid disintegration of the powerful Mughal Empire after the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 provided European trading establishments in India with an unparalleled opportunity to intervene in local Indian affairs, with a view towards consolidating their own commercial interests. The British East India Company, in particular, under the leadership of Robert Clive, engaged in an aggressive military campaign against the French and regional Indian rulers in the mid-eighteenth century to stake economic control over large sections of southern and eastern India, which in turn resulted in territorial acquisitions that were to become the foundation of Britain’s empire in India. The issue of how to govern these newly acquired regions was to emerge as one of the leading concerns of the time and is, perhaps, best reflected in Edmund Burke’s impassioned parliamentary speeches, made during Warren Hastings’s impeachment for crimes and misdemeanors committed in India, about responsible governance. As a trading house that had commercial interests in India since the early 1600s, the Company’s official policy in the mid- to late eighteenth century was to stay away from meddling with the religious, cultural, and social practices of Indians. In reality, however, as historians of the British Empire such as Ronald Hyam contend: “The empire was unified by no coherent philosophy, nor by any coercive policy. Local administrators defined the strength of imperial rule” (16). Thus, on the one hand, Warren Hastings, governor-general from 1774 to 1785, championed inclusive Orientalist policies which privileged the languages, laws, and traditions of the newly colonized Indian subjects; on the other hand, his successor, Lord Cornwallis, governor-general from 1786 to 1793, was dismissive of Indian principles and practices and sought to Anglicize Company rule in India.1 15

16 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Back in England, the ever-increasing economic and political might of the East India Company, its monopoly over Indian trade, and the lack of accountability of Company officials to the British Parliament were becoming increasingly worrisome for the British government and it looked for ways to curtail the powers of the Company. In particular, the level of corruption and greed among Company servants, embodied most spectacularly in Warren Hastings’s ability to amass a personal fortune, compelled the British government to intervene more aggressively in Company affairs. Ironically, the missionary question—or the right to proselytize in India—spearheaded by pro-missionary factions in Britain and India—gave the British government the excuse it was looking for to intervene more forcefully in Company affairs. It used the missionary question as a cover for other concerns such as the unbridled behavior of the East India men and the increasing need, in the wake of the industrial revolution, to open the markets in India to free-trade practices. Thus, the Charter Act of 1813 passed by the British Parliament to renew the Company’s charter for another twenty years not only curtailed the powers of the East India Company by taking away its monopoly over trade in India, but it also included a clause licensing missionaries to proselytize in British-controlled India.2 The debates leading up to the Charter Act of 1813—both in the metropolis and in the colony—were historically significant as they brought to the fore the issue of responsible governance in the colonies. Till this point the Company servants held on to the view that British missionaries (who were clamoring to set up missions in British-controlled India) could potentially get in the way of their economic endeavors by offending Indian religious beliefs. However, the idea that British principles were inherently superior to Indian ones, and the belief that it was the responsibility of the British to morally uplift its so-called heathen populations, began to take shape as a result of these missionary debates. Colonial enterprise, which up until then had been largely rooted in economic exploitation, was thus reconceptualized as a civilizing mission, whereby it was the duty of the British, as responsible colonizers, to enlighten and ameliorate the colonized races. Mary Sherwood’s The History of Little Henry and his Bearer, a tale of charity, loyalty, and kindness, which traces the deep bond between an English boy and his faithful Indian bearer, emerges from the theological debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century on the propriety of missionizing India. Written in India around 1810, and sent by Sherwood to England for publishing three years later, the work responds to one of the most pressing debates of the time and intervenes in the moral and historical crises that the British colonial project faced while negotiating the delicate issue of religious conversion in early nineteenth-century India. 3 The missionary debates (among Company servants, members of Parliament, and powerful pro-missionary factions in India and England) leading up to the Charter Act of 1813 focused on whether it was prudent to encourage

(En)countering Conversion • 17 missionary activity in India, and whether religious and moral conversions were ideal ways to effect change in India. In this chapter, I suggest the burden to ‘civilize’ and convert Indians is borne by Henry, a little English boy, who attempts to Christianize Boosy, his native bearer. In this novella in which the religious conversions of a young English boy, and subsequently his loyal bearer Boosy, are played out, the English child is not only given the responsibility to effect the moral transformation of spiritually bereft ‘heathens,’ but is also seen as an active participant in Britain’s colonial enterprise in India. Far from being subalternized, Henry is portrayed as the little savior who is initially contaminated by his Indian upbringing, but ultimately has the ability to redeem his skeptical bearer and show him the true path to Christian enlightenment. Thus, he is deployed as the catalyst who can bring about the spiritual and moral awakening of a land that is in dire need of the right kind of British intervention. However, it is also my contention that although Little Henry is overtly triumphalistic, it is covertly doubt-ridden, since the figure of the English child is deployed on a potentially impossible and dangerous mission to combat both native resistance and the hostility of the East India Company servants towards missionary activity. In a sense, the weakness of the little boy (he is sickly and frail) reflects the weakness of the missionary project in the face of powerful opposition from the Company servants and local Indians. Thus, echoing the arguments that Sherwood would have encountered as a religious writer at the time both in India and Britain, Little Henry also presents the fi ssures, fears, and contradictions in British missionary conceptions of India and Hinduism, and simultaneously reveals the mixed and often incredulous Indian response to British missionary zeal.

Sherwood in India Although largely overlooked as an influential children’s author today, Sherwood’s works—numbering more than four hundred titles written over a fi fty year period—went a long way in introducing the idea of an Indian empire to Britain’s youth in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century.4 Long before Rudyard Kipling penned his lively descriptions of daily life in colonial India, Sherwood, the wife of a British army officer, who lived in India from 1805 to 1815, delineated for her young readers what it was like for English children, in particular, to be born and raised in India. M. Nancy Cutt describes Sherwood as an immensely influential and prolific nineteenthcentury children’s author whose “readers [not only] grew up to shape the Victorian world,” but were also “members of the ruling class at home and in the colonies” who went on to become prominent statesmen, businessmen, officers in the armed services, clergymen, missionaries, and writers (ix). Echoing Cutt, Ketaki Kusari Dyson also portrays Sherwood as a “prolific

18 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature author of stories, tracts, and pamphlets, all strongly religious in message and mostly meant for young readers,” who was so popular in the nineteenth century that her books “were read throughout the English-speaking world” (169). Similarly, Naomi Royde Smith has noted that Sherwood’s works for children flooded British nurseries until the publication of Lewis Carroll’s successful Alice books. In fact, in her autobiography, The Life of Mrs. Sherwood (1854), Sherwood shows a keen awareness of her own burgeoning literary reputation soon after the publication of Little Henry: “Its success was great, and I suddenly found myself . . . within reach of high literary honour as a writer for children” (513–14).5 The daughter of a clergyman and a devout evangelical Christian, Sherwood accompanied her officer-husband, Captain Henry Sherwood, to India at a time when the debates about the status and role of Christianity in India were at their peak both in India and England. However, even before she set foot on Indian soil, like most British Evangelicals of her time, she was deeply convinced about the moral superiority of British principles and Christianity, a belief that was further strengthened during her decade-long stay in India. Sherwood’s Indian experiences are well documented in her autobiography, and it is evident that her Indian sojourn was marked by deep personal tragedy as two of her children born in India—Henry and Lucy—died in infancy after succumbing to illness. Her autobiography also reflects her anxiety about the strong attachments that were forged between English children and their Indian servants, her desire to educate and Christianize the neglected children of British soldiers, her rejection of the irreligious ways and mercenary excesses of the Company officials, and her sympathetic attitude towards missionary activity in India. Her experiences in India, which are etched so sharply in her autobiography, and her strong religious convictions form the narrative backbone of several of her works, some of which— such as Little Henry; Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism (1817), an accessible children’s version of the Catechism which alludes to life in the Indian barracks; and The Indian Pilgrim (1810), an Indian version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—were written while she lived in India. In fact, one can go so far as to infer that the British reading public—children and adults alike—must have displayed a keen interest in Sherwood’s Indian tales as she continued to publish stories that draw upon colonial India as a setting—The History of George Desmond (1821); The History of Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1823); Arzoomund (1929); and The Last Days of Boosy (1842), to name some of the more popular titles—even after she returned to England for good. Rosemary Raza has persuasively argued that texts written by British women who had actually lived in India went a long way in fashioning late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century popular perceptions and opinions about British rule in India. And, perhaps, no author in the first half of the nineteenth century was as prolific and well received as Sherwood as a purveyor of Indian tales.

(En)countering Conversion • 19 The Missionary Debates in Colonial India In order to understand the complex cultural and moral configurations of Christianity within the British colonial enterprise in India and mirrored in Little Henry, it is vital to take a look at the historical background of the missionary debates leading up to the Charter Act of 1813. These debates produce a richer and fuller understanding of Little Henry, as they shed light on the issues that Sherwood was most certainly aware of as a religious writer living in colonial India. The missionary debates not only underscored the necessity of converting the ‘heathen’ populations of India, but they also emphasized the nobility of the British efforts to convert resistant natives. At the same time, there was an awareness that overcoming Indian opposition—and to some extent British hostility (from the old India hands)—to the idea of Christianizing India was not going to be an easy or uncomplicated task. And as I will show later in this chapter, Sherwood addresses and documents all aspects of the missionary debates for her young readers—many of whom would go on to seek their fortunes in India—in painstaking detail. Although modern missionary activity in India began towards the end of the fifteenth century with the arrival of the Portuguese, it was some time before British missionaries set foot on Indian soil. As E. Daniel Potts remarks in his meticulous study of the British Baptist missionaries, the English who initially come to India “generally evidenced no desire, nor apparently felt much obligation, to spread their faith. Trade was their goal” (4). Thus, from its inception in 1600, the East India Company was chiefly a trading enterprise whose officials appeared to exhibit very little desire to meddle in the religious affairs of the Indians. For instance, in his Memoir of William Carey (1836), Eustace Carey, reflecting upon the contributions of his uncle William Carey, one of the most prominent missionaries in India in the early nineteenth century, writes: The conduct of the British authorities in India, upon the subject of religion, was strangely anomalous and absurd; arising partly from the ignorance of the true genius of christianity, and the legitimate means of diffusing it; and partly from a profane indifference to the spiritual welfare of the millions they governed, and a repugnance and hostility to whatever might seem only to interfere with their own secular ambition and cupidity. (350) While Eustace Carey may be excessively pro-missionary in his views, what is of interest to me is the fact that he highlights the antagonistic attitude of the East India Company towards missionary activity, especially when it comes into conflict with its “secular ambition[s].” In fact, the Company’s open hostility towards British missionaries made it almost perilous for them to set foot on British-controlled territory towards the end of the eighteenth century. As Potts has shown, the Baptists were arguably the most enterprising

20 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature and pioneering British missionaries in India as they braved the ill will and animosity of the East India Company to establish the Baptist Missionary Society in Danish-controlled Serampore. William Carey, for instance, the most renowned missionary of this group, who, not unlike St. John Rivers in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), arrived in India in 1793 with a burning zeal to spiritually enlighten people who had “no Bible . . . no ministers, no good civil government” and to “introduce the Gospel amongst them” (quoted in Potts 2). However, his early years as a missionary in India, as H. P. Thompson narrates in Into all Lands, proved to be challenging as he was not granted permission by the East India Company to reside in Calcutta. Carey had to work undercover as an indigo planter for the next six years in Dutch-controlled territory before he was allowed to re-enter British India. What, then, led to a change of heart and policy towards the missionaries in 1813? Missionary activity in India, ironically, got a boost because the British Parliament, anxious to disrupt the East India Company’s monopoly on Indian trade and unchallenged power base in Bengal and the South, played the reformist card in an attempt to intervene in Indian affairs. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the British Parliament had passed several measures such as the Regulating Act of 1773 and Pitt’s India Bill in 1784 in an attempt to acquire greater administrative control over British-controlled India; however, it largely tended to leave commercial matters in the hands of Company officials. The policy of allowing the East India Company a free hand to pursue its commercial interests began to unravel as the call to open Indian markets to all British traders became increasingly vociferous in a country that was on the verge of an industrial revolution. Ironically, the attempt to give free-trade a boost found an unlikely ally in the Evangelical movement—an increasingly powerful force in British domestic affairs—which, along with its domestic agenda of making the lower classes more tractable and devout, was also calling for the moral and spiritual salvation of non-Christian people. Furthermore, in India, the British missionaries were direct beneficiaries of Lord Wellesley’s (governor-general from 1798 to 1805) vision to establish a college to educate and acculturate newly arrived Company recruits from England. The East India Company was compelled to soften its stance towards British missionaries as the College of Fort William, founded in 1800, needed the services of missionaries who had become fluent in local Indian languages. While eminent Orientalist scholars like Neil Edmonstone, Henry T. Colebrooke, John Baillie, and John Gilchrist developed the departments devoted to ‘high’ languages such as Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Arabic, William Carey, who was proficient in Bengali, was recruited to head the department that would be responsible for teaching ‘popular’ Indian languages. It has been observed by David Kopf in his laudatory analysis of British Orientalism, and by Potts, that Wellesley, in keeping with the distaste that Company servants exhibited towards missionaries, displayed a remarkable disinclination to hire a missionary, and Carey was given a much lower rank and salary than his more revered colleagues.

(En)countering Conversion • 21 One of the key supporters of the missionary cause, and the chief architect of the theory of moral duty being the ultimate rationale for British rule in India, was Charles Grant, a high-ranking Company official who had spent a considerable number of years in India, eventually becoming a director of the East India Company in 1794 and a Member of Parliament in 1802.6 He belonged to the pro-missionary Clapham Sect and, as Gauri Viswanathan contends, along with fellow-members Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Thornton, and William Wilberforce, was responsible for “supplying British expansionism with an ethics of concern for reform and conversion” (Masks of Conquest 36). A staunch Evangelical, who had acted as an advisor to Cornwallis—the governor-general whose Anglicist policies were largely responsible for creating the first significant ruptures between colonizer and colonized—Grant, unlike most other Company servants, was convinced that India was in dire need of moral reform, and was an unwavering advocate of British missionary endeavors. In his treatise, entitled Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, largely written in 1792 to influence colonial policy before the Company’s charter came up for renewal in 1793, Grant advocated for missions to be established in India in order to bring about the so-called amelioration of morally bereft colonial subjects. Although the missionary cause was defeated in 1793, Grant persisted with his vision of a Christianized and Anglicized India, and presented his treatise to the Court of Directors in 1797. In it he proclaimed: “The true cure of darkness, is the introduction of light. The Hindoos err, because they are ignorant; and their errors have never been fairly laid before them. The communication of our light and knowledge to them, would prove the best remedy for their disorders” (Grant 83). As Eric Stokes points out in his seminal work, English Utilitarians and India, Grant not only “condemned the religions of India but everything which might claim a civilized status for its people—their laws, arts, agriculture and handicrafts, and their personal manners and habits” (31). However, to gain official support for his position, Grant was careful to couch his views in the language of commerce: “In every progressive step of this work, we shall also serve the original design with which we visited India, that design is still so important to this county—the extension of our commerce” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 34).7 Further, he proposed that British manufactures would find a huge market in India with the spread of British ideas and Christianity, for “wherever our principles and language are introduced, our commerce will follow” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 34). Therefore, as Stokes observes, Grant attempted rather cleverly to diffuse the perceived threat of missionary activity in India by “demonstrating the natural alliance between his views and the interests of British commerce” (English Utilitarians 34). The fight to enable missionaries to proselytize in British-controlled India fi rst came to the attention of the general public in 1806, when a mutiny at Vellore by Indian sepoys (soldiers) led to a massacre, creating a stir both in India and England. In an attempt to fi nd a scapegoat, Company

22 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature officials mainly blamed missionaries for a revolt that had undermined its position of authority in southern India. In a “Minute” (1806) submitted on the events at Vellore, William F. Elphinstone, the chairman of the Court of Directors, declared: They [The East India Company] certainly are canting, & preaching away their Authority in India. The very keystone of the Arch of that authority is now in Danger. The Country can only be held by the native Troops, & it is in vain to disguise; that at this Moment their Attachment is wavering. The operations of the Missionaries, even admitting them to be well meant, which I very much doubt, & the numerous Translations of the religious books of the Christians, have alarmed the Sepoys, or rather have furnished a pretence for Emissaries & evil disposed Persons to alarm them, with the Idea, that the Company intended to make them all Christians, they would as soon be converted into as many Devils. The Missionaries have succeeded in making some Converts, the Scum of the Earth, outcasts from every Religion, & these, in their Zeal, have threatened to destroy the Idols, & Temples of the Hindoos, should they make such an Attempt, it is to be hoped, they will all be exterminated, & if the Missionaries are treated in the same manner, there will be no harm done. (quoted in Potts 179) This scathing indictment of missionary activity led to heated debates in England and, as Kopf notes, “ books, pamphlets, and petitions . . . brought the Hindu and missionary questions into print for the first time before the English public” (136). In fact, according to Potts, this single event in Vellore “marked the temporary end of cordial relations between the Baptists and the government; setting in motion a series of crises, in England and India, which continued until the Charter Renewal Act of 1813” (177). Thus, not only were the East India Company and Parliament polarized in their positions on missionary activity, but their debate also quickly caught the attention of a nation on the brink of becoming the supreme colonizing power in the nineteenth century. British interest in India was at an all-time high in the early years of the nineteenth century; the spectacle of Warren Hastings’s long drawn out impeachment and the storming of Seringapatam, Tipu Sultan’s capital, in 1799 were some of the sensational events that had captured the imagination of the British public, their appetite for information about Indian affairs further whetted by the British press. It was also a period of post-Enlightenment reform and re-evaluation in Britain and, as Linda Colley puts it, the “question” of how the “millions of men and women who were manifestly not British, but who had been brought under British rule by armed force should be treated and regarded . . . became inescapable. What responsibilities, if any, did the mother country have towards them?” (Britons 323). Thus, the climate in Britain was not only ripe for public opinion on what role the British should play in their

(En)countering Conversion • 23 colonies, but it was also potent enough to influence the outcome of some of the most monumental issues of the time. In 1807–08, the British public was exposed to pamphlet wars that erupted between supporters of a Hastings-style of government in India—who were largely in favor of retaining Indian traditions—and powerful pro-missionary factions piloted by Grant and William Wilberforce. Wilberforce, a founding member of the Clapham Sect and a Member of Parliament, who had led a well-organized campaign to abolish slavery in England in 1807, was a personal friend of Grant. Grant, aware of Wilberforce’s formidable organizational skills and ability to sway public opinion, was quick to enlist his support to combat critics of the missionary cause. As Jeffrey Cox detects in his study of missionary activity in colonial Punjab: “For evangelicals like Charles Grant and William Wilberforce in England . . . something was very wrong with India, and the source of evil was crystal clear: it was religion” (24). Interestingly, detractors of the cause, largely comprising Company servants who favored Orientalist policies, chose to make their position known by using Wilberforce’s ploy of directly appealing to the British public. In an open pamphlet which was read widely in England, Thomas Twining, who had served in the Bengal from 1792 to 1805, warned: “If ever the fatal day shall arrive when religious innovation shall set her foot in that country, indignation will spread from one end of Hindoostan to the other; and the arms of fifty millions of people will drive us from that portion of the globe with as much ease as the sand of the desert is scattered by the wind” (quoted in Kopf 136–37). Historian C. H. Philips notes that this statement ignited a “pamphlet war, in which over twenty-five writers took part” (163), and even the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review took oppositional positions. As Kopf documents, Twining was supported by Major Scott Waring, a close associate of Warren Hastings in Bengal, and later a Member of Parliament, who declared: “any attempts to interfere with the religion, the laws, or the local customs of India, must inevitably tend to the destruction of the British powers” (quoted in Kopf 137). Kopf also cites a pamphlet entitled Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer, written by Colonel “Hindoo” Stewart, as typifying the Orientalist point of view: “Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilized society” (quoted in Kopf 140). In the long run, however, and, in particular, when the East India Company’s charter came up for renewal in 1813, Wilberforce had the experience to sway not only the British Parliament, but also the opinion of the British people. For instance, according to Philips, when Parliamentary committees were investigating the missionary question, Wilberforce encouraged fellow-abolitionist Zachary Macaulay to mobilize religious and secular organizations in Britain to send 837 petitions between the months of February and June in support of the missionary position on India (189). Wilberforce, who had no personal knowledge of India, drew heavily from Grant’s Observations—which had been

24 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature printed and circulated in Parliament in 1812–13—to formulate his pro-missionary position. In a speech in Parliament in 1813, Wilberforce declares: “let us endeavour to strike our roots into the soil by the gradual introduction and establishment of our own principles and opinions; of our laws, institutions and manners; above all, as the source of every other improvement, of our religion, and consequently of our morals” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 35). He asked the Members of Parliament to take responsibility for improving the conditions in India: Are we so little aware of the vast superiority even of European laws and institutions, and far more of British institutions, over those of Asia, as not to be prepared to predict with confidence, that the Indian community which should have exchanged its dark and bloody superstitions for the genial influence of Christian light and truth, would have experienced such an increase of civil order and security, of social pleasures and domestic comforts, as to be desirous of preserving the blessings it should have acquired; and can we doubt that it would be bound even by ties of gratitude to those who have been the honoured instruments of communicating them? (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 35). This Evangelical approach of making Indians adapt to English ways was entirely at odds with the Company’s official attitude, which, as Stokes suggests, had traditionally been governed by “motives of expediency” resulting in “the most scrupulous regard for Indian religions, laws, institutions, and customs” (English Utilitarians 35). It was also in total contrast to Warren Hastings’s Orientalist policy of “adapt[ing] our [British] Regulations to the Manners and Understanding of the [Indian] People, and Exigencies of the Country, adhering as closely as we are able, to their Ancient Usages and Institutions” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 36). Although the missionary cause had failed to muster up enough support when the Charter Act of 1793 was passed, it gained momentum over the next twenty years, and the promissionary bloc led by Wilberforce and Grant won a major victory when the British Parliament voted to include a clause in the Charter Act of 1813 which established a bishopric in India and granted licenses to missionaries to work in British-controlled India. Although the theological debates of the early nineteenth century are largely forgotten today, they did have an impact on the literature of the period. Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) reflects the complex British attitudes towards the question of conversion as Hilarion, a dashing Jesuit priest, with a searing desire to “dispel the darkness of the ignorant” (32), tries desperately (and unsuccessfully) to convert Luxima (derived from Lakshmi), a young and articulate Hindu “Heathen Priestess” (115). In The Curse of Kehama (1810), Robert Southey, who was sympathetic to the missionary cause, takes an even more imperialistic and intolerant stance towards

(En)countering Conversion • 25 the concept of polytheism in Hinduism. The multiplicity of gods in the Hindu pantheon is looked upon with horror and fascination and, in the Preface, Southey declares that of all the “false religions,” Hinduism is “the most monstrous in its fables, and the most fatal in its effects” (vii). Nigel Leask, among others, has demonstrated that number of Percy B. Shelley’s works such as Alastor (1815), The Revolt of Islam (1818), and Prometheus Unbound (1820) were deeply influenced by Owenson’s book, and by the religious debates of empire. Therefore, it is inevitable that Sherwood, a religious children’s writer who had lived in India for a considerable period of time, begins to write not only some of the earliest works which can be classified as children’s colonial fiction, but which also actively negotiate the theological questions of empire.

Converting Little Henry Sherwood begins the narrative with a vivid description of an unchristianized and orphaned little English boy living in Bengal, who has been adopted by a rather frivolous, uncharitable, and materialistic Englishwoman. From the very first sentence, it is evident that Henry’s destiny is inextricably linked to the acquisition of territory in India as he is the son of an army officer in the East India Company who dies while “attacking a mud fort belonging to a zemeendar” (7)—“a landholder” (7) according to the footnote—when Henry is a few months old. As Joyce Grossman points out, “Sherwood’s allusion to a violent struggle over Indian land” (19) may have been a reference to Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement of 1793, a land settlement policy which sought to supplant Mughal-era landlords with civil servants of the East India Company. Henry’s biological mother dies soon after, and his adoptive mother leaves him in the care of servants. Since Henry is in constant contact with Indian servants, chiefly his beloved bearer Boosy, he ‘goes native,’ and imbibes Boosy’s habits and beliefs. Thus, Henry would “sit in the verandah between his bearer’s knees, and chew paun, and eat bazar sweetmeats. He wore no shoes or stockings; but was dressed in panjammahs, and had silver bangles on his ankles” (9). In Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Bernard Cohn has shown how clothes played a vital role as markers of Englishness and Indianness during colonial rule, and it is evident from this description of Henry that he had—not unlike the “white Mughals” to borrow William Dalrymple’s term—adapted to local customs and practices. More significantly, by the age of five, Henry had not only absorbed the external indicators of Indian culture, like dress and eating habits, but had also adopted the language and the religious beliefs of Boosy and the other servants: so while Henry “could not speak English,” he could “talk with Boosy in his language as fast as possible; and he knew every word, good or bad, which the natives spoke” (9; emphasis in the original). In addition, Henry was “used to see[ing] his bearer and other natives performing poojah, and carrying about their wooden and clay gods; . . . [and] so he believed

26 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature that there were a great many gods, and that the God to whom his mother had prayed at Dinapore was no better than the gods of wood, and stone, and clay which his bearer worshipped” (9). Thus, in stark contrast to the Christian belief that the ultimate authority of the Word of God is enshrined in a single book, the Bible, an unchristianized Henry is exposed to the idea that there are multiple gods and religions, each with its own merits. An encounter between a young English lady and Henry changes his beliefs dramatically, and, in what can only be called an ideal Christian conversion, the little boy gives up his ‘heathen’ ways forever. However, Henry’s initial reluctance to accept the lady’s point of view is shown by his repeated retreats to the servants and verandahs on the margins of the house, in order to block out her proselytizing. The lady, who had brought with her from England “a box of Bibles, and some pretty children’s books and pictures,” tries tempting Henry with them for, in her mind, “it is a dreadful thing for little children to be left among people who know not God” (10). She takes “some of the prettiest coloured pictures she had, and spread them on the floor of the room, the door of which opened into the verandah” (10) where Henry and Boosy regularly sat. Although Henry is attracted by this simple ploy, and is tempted to enter the room where the lady and her books are, he does not come in without his beloved bearer. Thus, he initially clings to Boosy and his religious worldview, despite the earnest efforts of the lady to convince him of the superiority of Christianity and English principles. One of the stumbling blocks the young lady encounters in her attempts to convert Henry is his inability to speak or understand English. In what can be described as a rudimentary precursor of Macaulay’s Anglicist educational policy in India, she realizes that one way of penetrating Henry’s reluctance to accept what she is preaching is to tutor him in English. She proceeds to introduce him to “many English words by showing him things represented in the coloured pictures, telling him their English names. . . . [and teaches] him his letters in one of the little books she had brought from home” (10). Initially, Henry remains largely unconvinced about what the young lady has to say about the superiority of Christianity; however, by the time Henry is six years old “he could spell any words, however difficult, and could speak English quite readily” (10) and is far more accepting of her opinions. It would appear that language, even more than the tenets of religion itself, becomes a necessary tool in the moral conversion of Henry. Interestingly, the necessity of the English language as an instrument of British hegemony in India, which Sherwood appears to advocate for in Little Henry, was initially crafted by Grant in Observations. While much of his treatise was a rant against polytheistic Hinduism and the moral depravity of its followers—to be repeated two decades later by James Mill in The History of British India (1817)—he was among the earliest to consider the importance of English language education as a means of cultural dominance. Long before Macaulay drafted his “Minute” on Indian education, Grant’s “inquiry into the means of remedying disorders . . . among . . . Asiatic subjects” (82) proposes

(En)countering Conversion • 27 English language instruction as the “key which will open to them a new world of ideas” (84–85). Much like the young lady in Little Henry, he links the acquisition of English language skills with religious betterment: “undoubtedly the most important communication which the Hindoos could receive through the medium of our language, would be the knowledge of our religion,” which in turn would “correct those sad disorders . . . for which no other remedy has been proposed nor is in the nature of things to be found” (Grant 88). The farreaching consequences of Grant’s Anglicist agenda—echoed by the young lady in Little Henry—cannot be overstated; although the Orientalist policy of privileging Indian languages dominated in the early decades of British rule, a secular version of Grant’s proposals formulated by Macaulay—who was strongly influenced by Observations—would eventually come to fruition by 1835. Given the intersections in the positions taken by Sherwood and Grant on issues of religion and language in India, it is more than likely that Sherwood was a supporter of the propositions Grant put forth in Observations, and, more notably, she also seems to actively propagate them in her books for children. For instance, Grant’s dismissive attitude towards Hinduism “with all the rabble of its impure deities, [and] its monsters of wood and stone” (88) is neatly mirrored in the young lady’s actions as she demonstrates to Henry the breakable nature of Hindu idols. In an arguably wishful gesture on Sherwood’s part, the young lady throws “one of the Hindoo gods, made of baked earth” on the ground, and asks Henry to observe that “it was broken into a hundred pieces” (Little Henry 11). Further, she challenges his convictions by proclaiming: “Henry, what can this god do for you? it cannot help itself. Call to it, and ask it to get up. You see it cannot move” (11). Thus, she is able to show Henry rather crudely and literally the impotence of idolatry, and the notion that there is only one true religion and god. Henry, who had hitherto resisted her bribes, prayers, and manipulative games, becomes miraculously “convinced by her arguments” (11) once he witnesses her ability to smash clay idols. Moreover, Henry’s deep sulks and despotic behavior, perceived as an inevitable result of spending too much time with native servants in a state of godlessness, begin to swiftly disappear with the acquisition of English language skills since his own ability to read the Bible enables him decipher right from wrong. Eventually, Henry is so influenced by the tenets of Christianity that he encounters in the Bible that “he became careful of every word he said, and of everything he did” (13). Henry is an ideal convert since his transformation is both spiritual and attitudinal; his earlier petulance is replaced by a charitable and sweet temperament ostensibly due to his contact with more ethically appropriate Christian values. Thus, Henry’s prodigious metamorphosis is brought about in a short period of time, as he goes from “the grossest state of heathen darkness and ignorance to a competent knowledge of those doctrines of the Christian religion which are chiefly necessary to salvation” (14–15). More significantly, once the lady is satisfied with Henry’s moral (and linguistic) conversion, she is

28 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature also able to convince him that all non-Christian people are in need of redemption. She assures him that one way of ensuring that he is able to “preserve” his “whole spirit and soul and body” (18) is by taking it upon himself to convert the very people who are source of his early contamination. In an appeal similar to Grant’s plea to the Court of Directors and Wilberforce’s entreaty to the British Parliament, the young lady urges him to influence Boosy into giving up his ‘base’ beliefs and this becomes the sole purpose of Henry’s brief existence on earth.

Figure of the English Child as the Tool of Conversion An important reason for using the English child as a tool of conversion can be traced back to the fact that Henry and Lucy Sherwood, Sherwood’s own children, died in India at a very early age. In fact, explorations of Sherwood’s writings undertaken by Cutt, Dyson, and Nandini Bhattacharya have under-

Figure 1.1

The frontispiece of an 1855 Harper edition of Little Henry.

(En)countering Conversion • 29 scored the manner in which the tragic and early deaths of her two children are hauntingly reconfigured in her children’s tales. Thus, Sherwood—in what can be categorized as some of the earliest colonial children’s narratives—works to justify childhood death by showing that even a child with a pathetically brief life span—the fictional Henry dies at the tender age of eight—can accomplish great things. It is an example of a personal wistful desire on Sherwood’s part when she suggests that English children who die young in the colonies do not die in vain, but can carry out the noble mission of redeeming non-believers in the few short years they spend on earth. As Sherwood writes about her own daughter’s affection for her native nurse and her ability to bring about spiritual conversion: [H]ow dearly did Lucy love her nurse; how earnestly did she strive in after years, by saving her pocket money, to effect means by which her beloved Piarée might be taught the truth; how often did she pray for her, that they might meet in glory; how many were the little tokens of affection sent to her: and when my Lucy was no more, I found amongst her papers, prayers for this poor creature, and a letter and presents to be sent to her. I fear that none of these tokens or parcels reached her; but why should I fear? He who gave the infant the heart to pray had surely determined in His infinite love to grant that prayer before it was uttered. (Life 497–98) Sherwood goes on to declare: “It was in consequence of the strong affection of my Lucy for Piarée that I was induced to write the little tale of “Lucy and her Dhaye,” which is, in many points, true” (Life 498). In fact, the recurring motif in Sherwood’s domestic narratives for children—such as The History of the Fairchild Family (1818) and The History of Henry Milner (1822)—of an initially corrupted English child who is able to redeem himself and the people around him not only has its conceptual origins in her Indian experiences, but also takes on even greater significance in colonial settings. By empowering an English child (who has disavowed his Indianness) to become a medium of English acculturation, Sherwood attempts to diffuse the dread of the natives whose initial influence on their young charges seems alarmingly potent. In her autobiography, Sherwood writes that it was not unusual in India to have “the European babe hanging on the breast of the black woman, and testifying towards her all the tenderness which is due to its own mother” and that it was fairly common to “see the delicate, fair hand [of the English child] stroking the swarthy face of the foster-parent” (Life 406). On a more ominous note, Sherwood also had a “firm belief that half the European children who die in infancy in India die from the habit which their nurses have of giving them opium” (Life 318), and was certain that her own children, Henry and Lucy, had unsuspectingly imbibed opium. However, by reversing the pattern of cultural contact—the English child not only resists and overcomes Indianization, but also rescues the native—Sherwood is able to reestablish the cultural

30 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature and moral potency of the English. As Dara Rossman Regaignon similarly suggests: “Sherwood transforms her vulnerable child-protagonists into figures for imperial hegemony and expansion,” thereby “offer[ing] a narrative of the intimacy between British children and Indian adults that is ultimately productive of, rather than a threat to, a Christian British empire” (84). In Little Lucy, for instance, the young English girl is initially as embedded in Indian customs as Henry is. She is brought up by her dhaye (wet nurse), who becomes the center of her young universe, and not surprisingly, like Henry, she ‘turns native’ in the most unsettling manner. She enjoys her excursions to the local bazaar with her retinue of servants and is “never weary of admiring the little stalls heaped up with bright brazen lotas, or the small shops of sweetmeats and cakes made of treacle and gee” and, more alarmingly, would enjoy eating these “compositions, [that were] so disgusting to an English palate” (Little Lucy 44). Her entire day was often “idled away in the midst of her numerous household, in a manner not easily to be conceived by one who has never experienced the enfeebling effect of the air of India, or witnessed the lounging and indolent customs of its inhabitants” (45), and although her “general deportment was modest and tender,” she was not “wholly divested of that foreign and peculiar air which would at once have distinguished her as a stranger if placed among English children” (48). In a state of linguistic and sartorial imperfection similar to Henry’s, Lucy could not speak any English and was “wholly unacquainted with the use of a book” (48); furthermore, the way she dressed was “half Hindoostanee and half European” since she was “accustomed to wear[ing] panjammahs, no stockings, and seldom, indeed, a pair of shoes” (48). Lucy’s luxuriously languid lifestyle and moral and linguistic orientation change when she turns seven and her widower father decides to return to England. On the long voyage back, Lucy’s chance encounter with a pious young widow transforms her views about religion, and, like Henry, not only does Lucy learn to speak and read English fluently, but she also becomes a deeply religious child. Lucy’s beliefs are so strong that she feels that it is her moral duty, even after having left India for good, to “save” (55) her beloved dhaye and persuade her to convert to Christianity. Thus, Sherwood is insistent that it is the child, rather than the adult, who has the capacity to bring about this change among the natives of India. She transparently states to her young audiences her didactic goal in writing Little Lucy: “the chief object of our story . . . is not merely to give amusement, but to convey an important lesson to such young persons as may find themselves in any respect situated like Lucy” (54). In fact, in Sherwood’s colonial tales for children, Englishmen and Englishwomen who live in India are often shown as corrupt and irreligious. For example, Sherwood writes in her autobiography that her inspiration for The History of George Desmond—which Cutt characterizes as a cautionary tale for “boys going to India as army officers or East India Company writers” (20)— came from witnessing Englishmen who were “once blooming boys . . . slowly sacrificing themselves to drinking, smoking, want of rest, and the witcheries

(En)countering Conversion • 31 of the unhappy daughters of heathens and infidels” (Life 450). It is apparent in her autobiography that Sherwood was alarmed by the moral lassitude displayed by the British in India and, as Dyson notes, Sherwood “loathed the gaieties and frivolities of British social life in India” (172) and spent much of her time in the company of British priests and missionaries. Thus, Sherwood spells out for her young readers quite emphatically that it is they—and not the adults—who are morally responsible for the spiritual well-being of the millions under British rule in the colonies. Adults like Henry’s mother and Lucy’s father are chastised by Sherwood for their lack of interest in religion, and are regarded as culprits who allow the young children in their charge to initially go astray. For instance, Lucy’s father is chided for the fact that “he had been unable to communicate with her [Lucy] on the subject of religion: and she seemed therefore to be left . . . [in a] state of hopeless ignorance” (61) during her early years. On the other hand, children like Lucy and Henry are celebrated for successfully bringing about a change in the mindsets of their servants, as well as in their indolent and debased English parents. However, as I will demonstrate, Sherwood is cognizant of the fact that convincing erring English parents to return to the fold is a lot easier than persuading loquacious Indian servants to embrace Christianity.

Containing the Indian Response It is no coincidence that Henry’s attempts to convert Boosy mirror the efforts of the various British missionaries in India who labored to convince the locals that they were believers of a ‘false’ religion. Sherwood was deeply sympathetic to the missionary cause, and it is evident in her autobiography that she was in contact with a number of missionaries during her stay in India. As Dyson records, the early demise of two of her children in India “deepened her religious commitment” and she was comforted during her bereavement by her “missionary friends” (177). This intimate contact with missionaries not only shaped her theological views, but, as Dyson puts it, also enabled her to live in “an atmosphere of great religious ferment, where the ‘conversion of the heathen’ was the leading topic of conversation” (177). In fact, as her autobiography attests, Sherwood was persuaded to write an Indian version of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress around the time that “religious persons in Calcutta were just beginning . . . to think of translating some of the best English works on religious subjects into Hindostanee” (Life 417), and one can certainly speculate that The Indian Pilgrim; or, The Progress of the Pilgrim Nazareenee (Formerly Called Goonah Purist, or the Slave of Sin), written in India around 1809–10, and circulated in England and India among pro-missionary sympathizers, might have played a role in buttressing the campaign to legalize missionary activity in India. Sherwood’s autobiography also documents her admiration for the Baptist Mission (which she describes as a “bee-hive of busy people”),

32 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature her delight upon meeting Carey, and her approval of his efforts in establishing “a chapel, a school for native boys, and schools for boys and girls of higher degree, and printing offices, in which were types for twenty languages, a paper manufactory, and innumerable small dwellings for Christian disciples” (Life 500). However, despite her praise of the successes of the Baptists’ evangelical labors, in reality, the missionaries during the early nineteenth century encountered stiff resistance from the local population. Writing about the evangelical failures of his initial years in India, Carey declares that his “mind was often almost dried up by discouragement and want of success” and that he “went to work like a soldier who only expects to be defeated” (quoted in Potts 17). In fact, Henry’s endeavors to persuade Boosy to imbibe the tenets of Christianity, and the latter’s somewhat superficial and halfhearted conversion, are exemplary illustrations of how difficult it was for missionaries to make inroads in India. Apart from the fact that the East India Company frowned on any evangelical impulse displayed by Englishmen in India, the counter-arguments to Christianity put forth by Indians were potent, articulate, and difficult to refute. As I have noted earlier, one of the reasons Sherwood writes Little Henry is to formulate an imperial mission for Henry and, consequently, all British children who read this story. Its blatantly propagandist tone was to inspire young children to “make Boosy [and other natives of his kind] a Christian; that he may be no longer numbered among the heathens, but may be counted among the sons of God” (Little Henry 19), and once Henry is convinced of the moral superiority of Christianity, he turns his attention to the spiritual reformation of his bearer. As Henry earnestly tells Boosy: “this [India] is a good country: that is, it would be a very good country if the people were Christians. Then they would not be so idle as they now are; and they would agree together, and clear the jungles, and build churches to worship God in” (22). Once again, Sherwood is in resonance with Grant’s view that “Men would be restored to their use of reason; [and] all the advantages of happy soil, climate, and situation, would be observed and improved” upon being “instructed in the nature and perfections of the one true God” (Grant 88). However, unlike Henry’s rather simplistic conversion, Boosy’s conversion is fraught with contradictions and introduces elements of irony that the text unevenly attempts to transcend. Initially, the pious Henry does not know how to make Boosy see reason, since “so fond was he [Boosy] of his wooden gods and foolish ceremonies, and so much was he afraid of offending his gooroo” (Little Henry 19–20). Henry naively believes that if he prays for Boosy to turn away from “his wooden gods” and towards “the cross of Jesus Christ” (20), he might be able to make some headway with Boosy and his staunchly held beliefs. However, Henry’s simple missionary zeal is, ironically, displaced by Boosy, as the latter has the more potent and convincing argument. Boosy’s rejoinder to Henry’s evangelical and somewhat dogmatic efforts is lucid and astute: “There are many brooks and

(En)countering Conversion • 33 rivers of water, but they all run into the sea at last; so are there many great religions, but they all lead to heaven: there is the Mussulmaun’s way to heaven, and the Hindoo’s way, and the Christian’s way; and one way is as good as the other” (20). It has been noted by Potts that one of the stumbling blocks that the Baptist missionaries (and by inference, all British missionaries) faced in India was the fact that most people “believed [that] man could reach God by any of many paths, despite accidents of birth which made one man a Christian, another a Hindu, another a Buddhist, and another a Muslim” (1). Not only were the missionaries “unfamiliar” with such a multi-religious approach, but it also “confused them for years” (Potts 1), and they were unable to formulate a rational counter-response to such sound logic. In fact, so persuasive and compelling is Boosy’s conviction that all religions are equally worthy that he “sometimes quite out-talked the child” (Little Henry 20). Boosy’s ability to verbally quell Henry and present the more viable argument demonstrates quite clearly that Sherwood was mindful of the fact that the Indian response to the British civilizing and Christianizing mission was neither servile nor verbally unassertive. In fact, the counter-arguments to Christianity that Boosy presents, and his skeptical response to Henry’s faith, are reflective of the early nineteenth-century Indian response to the religion of the colonizers. From Kopf’s celebratory take on British Orientalism to Michael Dodson’s more revisionist approach in Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture, it is evident that Indian pundits, maulvis (scholars of Sanskrit and Arabic respectively), and munshis (translators), who either in their capacity as private tutors or as language teachers and translators in colonial institutions such as the College of Fort William and Benares College, vigorously engaged their colonial masters in theological debates about religious pluralism. Kopf cites the example of Ramram Basu, the munshi who taught Carey Bengali and Sanskrit (and in turn was taught English by Carey), and who went on to became an erudite Fort William College pundit, as a prime example of enlightened Indian opposition to conversion. Although Ramram Basu was disillusioned with the malaise that had crept into Hinduism, and was attracted to the principles of Christianity, he, according to Kopf, “continually resist[ed] actual conversion” (125–26), and was able to argue convincingly for the right to practice and respect all religions. Ramram Basu wrote tracts and pamphlets that attacked the social and religious stagnation that had seeped into Bengali society, and with missionary-inspired zeal, dismissed idolatry and the moral decay among his people. However, despite his disenchantment, he remained a Hindu; as he writes in a letter dated March 7, 1801, to John Ryland, one of England’s foremost Baptist priests: “I understand something of the gospel, and can make it a little known to others, but I cannot leave my caste. This is my great difficulty” (quoted in Kopf 126). In addition to religious and linguistic interlocutors, a group of Bengali reformers, led by Ram Mohan Roy, had also just begun to question the debased and ritualized form of Hinduism that had seeped into Indian soci-

34 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature ety. While they were deeply influenced by the tenets of Christianity, they were equally incredulous of some of its claims, and as Potts asserts, Ram Mohan Roy and his contemporaries were successful in formulating an effective Indian rejoinder to missionary assaults on Hinduism. Ram Mohan Roy’s efforts to reform the ritualized and corrupted form of Hinduism which had gripped early nineteenth-century Bengali society, and simultaneously to argue for religious tolerance, make him one of the most remarkable and enlightened men of his time. While he was deeply influenced by Christianity, he was suspicious of some of its basic claims and, like Ramram Basu, resisted conversion. He presented well-formulated and skeptical responses to the rituals, practices, and dogmatically held beliefs of both Hinduism and Christianity, and, in his own words, called for “a good understanding and brotherhood among all who have correct notions of the manifestation of God” (quoted in Crawford 78). Ram Mohan Roy, who was originally in the money-lending business, established intimate contact with officials from the East India Company in Calcutta from around 1797 onward, in particular, with John Digby, who was one of Carey’s students at the College of Fort William. Potts writes that there is enough “circumstantial evidence” to suggest that there was “some early contact between the foremost Christian missionary [Carey] and the man [Ram Mohan Roy] who was to become the foremost in presenting an adequate Hindu answer to the Christian attacks on India’s major religion” (230). Potts speculates that it is possible that both men debated and exchanged views on religious issues on more than one occasion between 1800 and 1803. Ram Mohan Roy left Calcutta in 1803 to work in the districts in Bengal, but returned ten years later to live permanently in the city, by which time he had written his fi rst extant work, “Against the Idolatry of all Religions,” in which “passages might well reflect a response to missionary teachings on the Trinity” (Potts 229). The ability of Indians to articulate an enlightened and tolerant viewpoint was a major stumbling block for the proselytizing missionaries who were convinced that it was their obligation to convert unchristianized people and bring them into the fold, as it were. Many of them, including Carey, were tormented by the fact that they were making very little progress in their missionary endeavors. Although they truly believed that “Hindooism . . . [was] incapable of carrying forward a nation in the career of improvement, . . . [since it was not] adapted for a high state of civilization” (quoted in Potts 2), in reality, they were unable to win over more than a handful of disciples to their way of thinking. Ironically, the sheer didacticism and blind belief in the superiority of Christianity displayed by British missionaries and priests in India, often matched the fervent and fanatic zeal they accused Indians of displaying towards religious matters. Thus, the profusion of religious debates and ferment of diverse theological opinions in India and in England from the early 1790s onward were clearly noticed by Sherwood, and Boosy’s arguments—which approximate what reformist Indians like Ramram Basu

(En)countering Conversion • 35 and Ram Mohan Roy were proposing—attest to the fact that she was, in part due to her close association with missionaries, acquainted with all sides of the conversion question. An Englishman who tried, often unsuccessfully, to engage in theological debates with local Indians was Henry Martyn. Martyn stands out, in the context of this chapter, partly because of his personal connections with Sherwood—the fictional Henry, and Sherwood’s son who died in India, were named after him—and partly because of his links to Grant. Martyn arrived in India in 1806 not as a missionary (although he was very much in favor of converting Indians), but as a chaplain of the East India Company, an appointment that was made possible due to Grant’s drive to evangelize the colonial project. Martyn became a close associate of Sherwood as they were both posted in Dinapore and Cawnpore (Kanpur) around the same time, and, more significantly, because they held similar religious beliefs. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the deaths of her two children in India left a profound sadness in Sherwood’s life, and Martyn not only provided her with succor, but also had a deep impact on her views on the issue of conversion. What is of particular interest to me, in connection to Little Henry, is Martyn’s frustration at not being able to influence his Indian audiences, which is noted vividly in his journals and by Sherwood herself. The ability of the so-called ‘heathens’ to tire Martyn with theological reasoning is startlingly similar to Henry’s exhaustion after listening to Boosy’s counter-arguments. Sherwood’s accounts of Martyn’s endeavors to preach the gospel suggest that Martyn was quite overwhelmed by the task he had set out for himself. She describes a scene in Martyn’s garden with graphic and lurid horror, in which he is swamped by a motley and disfigured crowd: No dreams or visions excited in the delirium of a raging fever could surpass these realities. These devotees vary in age and appearance; they were young and old, male and female, bloated and wizened, tall and short, athletic and feeble; some clothed with abominable rags; some nearly without clothes; some plastered with mud and cow-dung; others with matted, uncombed locks streaming down to their heels; others with heads bald or scabby; every countenance being hard and fixed, as it were, by continual indulgence of bad passions, the features having become exaggerated, and the lips blackened with tobacco, or blood red with the juice of henna. (Life 410) Sherwood proceeds to write about Martyn’s predicament: “he was often interrupted with groans, hissings, cursings, blasphemes and threatenings; the scene was altogether was a fearful one” (Life 411). On another occasion, she notes: “From time to time low murmurs and curses would arise in the distance, and then roll forward till they became so loud as to drown the voice of this pious one [Martyn], generally concluding with hissing and fierce cries” (Life 417). Although this is arguably a deliberate attempt on Sherwood’s part

36 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature to invest the crowd with monstrous and repulsive qualities, what stands out is the ability of the crowd to successfully “drown” Martyn’s sermonizing. Martyn records his own religious debates with various munshis and priests in the letters and journal he wrote during his stay in India, which ended around 1811. He despairs of ever being able to convince them of his religious position: “How shall it ever be possible to convince a Hindoo or a Brahmin of any thing. These are people possessed by Satan, like the idols they worship, without any understanding. Truly, if ever I see a Hindoo a real believer in Jesus, I shall see something more nearly approaching the resurrection of a dead body, than any thing I have yet seen” (quoted in Dyson 166). Interestingly, he is almost envious of their composure and serenity: “A Brahmin, about my own age, was performing his devotions in the river early this morning, just as I was going to prayer. . . . With what intense devotion he seemed to worship an unknown God!” (quoted in Dyson 166). In another journal entry Martyn describes an altercation with a Brahmin: “Mr. Brown’s moonshee, a Brahmin of the name of B. Roy came in and disputed with me two hours about the gospel. I was really surprised at him;. . . . He spoke with uncommon energy and eloquence, intending to show that Christianity and Hindooism did not materially differ” (quoted in Dyson 329). The debilitating effect of engaging in theological debates with Indians is evident when Martyn writes somewhat cryptically: “My faith tried by many things; disputes with moonshee and pundit very violent; moonshee shewed remarkable contempt of the doctrine of Trinity” (quoted in Dyson 331). The fatigue and disappointment that Martyn experiences after his various “disputes” is somewhat akin to Henry’s predicament after each eager attempt to convince Boosy to embrace Christianity. Once he takes it upon himself to convert Boosy, Henry begins to pray earnestly since he is often left speechless by Boosy’s logical answers, and despite his devotion to the “cause he had undertaken,” he was often “silenced” (Little Henry 20) by his bearer. It is noted by Sherwood that although Boosy was never “ill-humoured or disrespectful to his little sahib,” he “seemed to pay him [Henry] little or no attention,” and easily dismissed the little boy’s “argument” that “the great God who made all things, could not be like the gods which he [Boosy] believed in, . . . [who] were more wicked and foolish than the worst men” (21). Instead of presenting rational and viable notions for Boosy to counter, Henry’s somewhat prejudiced and illiberal opinions are easily disregarded by his bearer. Ultimately, Henry is compelled to appeal to Boosy’s emotions to make inroads, by plaintively confessing that he may be dying: “Sometimes I think, . . . when I feel the pain which I did this morning, that I shall not live long: I think I shall die soon, Boosy. O, I wish! I wish I could persuade you to love the Lord Jesus Christ!” (23). Thus, when Boosy does embrace the religion of the colonizers rather tentatively, it appears to be more out of affection for the little boy and less out of any real spiritual conviction on his part. At the same time, it is noteworthy that although Sherwood acknowledges Boosy’s attachment to

(En)countering Conversion • 37 Henry as the principal reason for his conversion, she also takes great pains to link it to language acquisition of the sort that the missionaries were surreptitiously practicing in India. I have noted earlier in this chapter that the issue of which language(s) to privilege in India becomes a contentious point of policy discussion in the early decades of Company rule. While the British Orientalists were ‘rediscovering’ classical Indian languages, and the Evangelicals were proposing English as the lingua franca, ironically, it was the missionaries who attempted to learn socalled vernacular languages—a term used for modern Indian languages such as Bengali and Hindi—in order to convey their religious beliefs. Although they attacked idolatry, the caste system, and the rituals in Hinduism, Carey and his fellow-missionaries recognized that if they wanted to make progress with spreading the gospel, they would not only need to speak the local languages fluently, but also make the Bible linguistically accessible to the population at large by teaching them to read it in their own languages. As M. A. Laird writes in his study about the intersections between early nineteenth-century missionary activity and the spread of education in Bengal: “In the main they [missionaries] used Bengali as the medium for their educational experiments, and in doing so helped extend the scope of the language” (xi). Kenneth Ingham has pointed out that the Baptists also pioneered printing technologies in Bengal, and the Baptist Mission Press—which Sherwood admires for having “types for twenty languages” (Life 500)—was established in 1801 primarily to produce a Bengali version of the New Testament. In fact, it is clear from her autobiography that Sherwood’s own books, including Little Henry, were being translated into Hindi by a munshi almost immediately after she wrote them in English “so that they were completed in two languages within a few days of each other” (Life 441). She is also fully aware of the significance of such a bilingual endeavor, as she declares: “Mr. Corrie [an East India Company chaplain and close associate] was busy . . . getting my “Indian Pilgrim” translated into Hindostanee, for the benefit of the Hindoos, to point out their errors of belief” (Life 429). In the course of his attempts to convert Boosy, Henry, like the missionaries who inspired Sherwood, realizes that his bearer’s inability to read becomes a stumbling block in the conversion process. Initially, Henry reads aloud from the Bible and attempts to orally translate it for an illiterate Boosy; however, the latter does not show any sign that he is convinced by what Henry has to say and the boy’s fervent attempts to verbally “interpret the sacred book to his bearer in the bearer’s own language” (Little Henry 24) meets with very little success. Mr. Smith, a pious indigo planter, with whom Henry and his mother lodge on a visit to Calcutta, suggests to Henry that he should not only orally translate verses of the Bible into Persian and Hindi, but should also teach Boosy how to read. In this manner, Boosy would be “improving, at least, in his knowledge of the Bible” (28) and would show less reluctance to imbibe Henry’s daily dose of religious instruction. Sherwood herself was engaged in rudimentary educational endeav-

38 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature ors in India as she established what she describes as a “regimental school” (Life 303) for neglected (and often, orphaned) children of army officers, many of whom were of mixed Anglo-Indian heritage. In fact, as part of her efforts to educate the children, Sherwood wrote an Indianized version of the Catechism which alludes to “common incidents in the life of a child in an Indian Army post” (Cutt 16), and although published in London in 1817, Cutt speculates that an edition may have already been published in India in 1814 by the Baptist Mission Press (Cutt 14). In her autobiography, Sherwood is also appreciative of Martyn’s “various plans for advancing the triumphs of Christianity” which include the establishment of “one or two schools for children of the natives of the lower caste” (Life 376). Under the guise of teaching children how to read and write, the aim of Martyn’s schools, it would appear from Sherwood’s narrative, was to introduce them to the Bible. Sherwood comments with a sense of accomplishment: “As no mention was ever made of proselytism, there was never any difficulty found in introducing even portions of the Scripture itself, . . . to the attention of the children” (Life 376–77). Laird has noted that it was the British missionaries and priests in eastern India who laid the foundations of early colonial educational policies by foregrounding literacy as a necessary means of religious conversion. In fact, it is no coincidence that the Charter Act of 1813, which opened up the India to British missionaries, also included a clause about the advancement of Indian education which explicitly stated that “a sum of not less than one lack of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India” (Zastoupil and Moir 91). Viswanathan has astutely observed, in documenting the origins of English literary studies in India, that “the more far-reaching significance of the Charter Act lay in its commitment enjoined upon England to undertake the education of the native subjects” as the British Parliament, in part pressurized by Grant and his Evangelical allies, allocated public funds for a pedagogical measure that had yet to be officially enacted in Britain (Masks of Conquest 23). The Christianizing impulse, which influences Sherwood’s own pioneering educational efforts in the army barracks and that of the missionaries and Company chaplains she befriends in India, is visibly reproduced in Henry’s attempts to teach Boosy how to read. However, Boosy is initially disinclined to respond to instruction, and it is his anguished reaction to Henry’s failing health that propels him to learn to read the Bible: “He [Boosy] did everything he could to please him [Henry]; and, more as he afterward said, to please his dying master than his God, he began to read his chapters with some diligence; and little Henry would lie on his couch, listening to Boosy as he read (imperfectly indeed) the Word of God in Hindoostanee” (Little Henry 30). Thus, Boosy’s defenses are lowered not because of any deep conviction on his part, but because he has become somewhat literate, which in turn enables him to read the Bible in order to gratify a dying Henry. As Boosy candidly tells

(En)countering Conversion • 39 Henry: “I wish I could believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” (32), and confesses he only does so because he is saddened by the fact that the little boy is on his deathbed. Boosy, the illiterate and rustic bearer, ironically, seems to mouth the most progressive views in the text when he rebuffs Henry’s religious ardor and anticipates a “time when all the world would be of one religion, and when there would be no caste,” although “he did not know when that would be, and he was sure he should not live to see it” (22). This almost utopian belief in a world united by a single religion, where disparities, exclusion, dogma, and segregation do not exist, is exactly what Ram Mohan Roy was propounding, a decade later, when he established the Brahmo Samaj in the 1820s. Boosy, like the Indian reformers and pundits of the early nineteenth century, makes the more convincing argument in this children’s text, and Henry is initially enchanted, controlled, and subjected by the spoken words of Boosy. Ultimately, however, I propose that Little Henry attempts to contain and diffuse the elements of resistance that it introduces. As mentioned earlier, Boosy “quite out-talked” (20) his little master, so how, then, is Henry able to silence his bearer? It is my contention that the written word is deployed by Sherwood as a mechanism of smothering and subduing Boosy; in particular, the Bible, which plays a prominent role in convincing a pre-Christian Henry and a semi-literate Boosy that the written Word of God is indeed paramount. Homi Bhabha, Javed Majeed, Cohn, and Viswanathan are among a large and eminent group of scholars who have examined how the British sought to maintain their power and their control over colonial subjects in India through the medium of textual hegemony. Bhabha, in his incisive reading of early nineteenth-century missionary activity in colonial India as a ‘location of culture,’ has proposed that “the sudden, [and] fortuitous discovery of the English book” in the wilderness of colonial spaces is “at once, a moment of originality and authority” (145) and, furthermore, has suggested that the “immediate vision of the book figures those ideological correlatives of the Western sign—empiricism, idealism, mimeticism, monoculturalism . . . —that sustain a tradition of English ‘cultural’ authority” (150). In particular, Bhabha’s assertion that “the Bible translated into Hindi, . . . is still the English book” (154) is especially useful in foregrounding the palpable presence of textual power in Little Henry. As I have previously discussed, “the English book” (in this case, the Bible) plays a central role in the spiritual and moral awakening of Indianized English children such as the fictional Henry and Lucy. In Little Henry, we are told that once the young lady “had put into his hand the book of God, and had taught him to read it . . . God had, in an especial manner, answered all her prayers for the dear child” (15). The young lady repeatedly stresses the importance of the Bible to Henry: “These books have different kinds of covers, and some are larger than others, but they all contain the same words, and are the book of God. If you read this book, and, with God’s help, keep the sayings written in it, it will bring you to heaven; it will bring you to where your Redeemer is, to the throne of the Lamb of God, who was slain for your sins” (14). In fact, once Henry is given the

40 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Bible he is so entranced that he begged “a bit of silk of the lady, and carried it to the tailor to make him a bag for his new Bible” (14). After several unsuccessful attempts to verbally convince Boosy about the superiority of Christianity, Henry concludes that oral arguments about religion get him nowhere and that he must make Boosy learn to read the Bible. In a way, one can argue that Henry is able to muffle Boosy’s speeches on religious tolerance by redirecting his bearer’s energies into reciting from the Bible. Significantly, Boosy is far more vocal in his protests when he is illiterate than when he is semi-literate and learns to read verses from the Bible. The written word, therefore, becomes more potent than the spoken word in this text, and even Henry’s frivolous mother becomes “a more serious character” once she begins to “daily read little Henry’s Bible” (34) after his death. However, even though Sherwood’s text is seemingly a triumph of the written word, one must also bear in mind Bhabha’s contention that “the institution of the Word in the wilds is also an Entstellung, a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, [and] repetition” (149), which is certainly borne out by Boosy’s contrived and reluctant conversion.

Responding to East India Company Policy If the narrative, perhaps unwittingly, reflects the fact that the missionaries and pro-Christian members of the British community in India were often stumped by a cogent and credible Indian response, it also resonates with the conflicting messages that the missionaries got from the East India Company during the first decade of nineteenth century. While theological issues were being fiercely contested in England, the East India Company officials went back and forth in their treatment of missionaries. As mentioned earlier, topranking Company servants held the missionaries responsible for the mutiny at Vellore in 1806, but had overlooked their differences with them earlier in the decade when they needed Carey to join the staff of the College of Fort William. Although they were on the verge of deporting all Englishmen in Bengal who were not contracted to the Company in 1799, they were remarkably restrained and almost respectful in the manner in which they treated the Baptist missionaries once they took control of Serampore (the hub of the Baptist Mission) from the Dutch in 1801. The relations of the missionaries with the East India Company alternated between cooperation and hostility, depending on whether the Company officials needed their help or needed a scapegoat to explain any erosion of the Company’s mandate in India. So precarious is their position in India just after the Vellore mutiny that, in order to get official sanction for publishing and circulating tracts, Carey has to be ingratiatingly respectful in this carefully worded letter to Company officials: “and as we wish to avoid every thing inflammatory and have a genuine desire to promote the tranquility [sic] of the country, I have no doubt we shall be permitted to print nearly all we wish” (quoted in Potts 188). In 1812, a few months before

(En)countering Conversion • 41 the crucial vote in the British Parliament to legalize missionary activity in India, Lord Minto, governor-general from 1807 to 1813, requests the Court of Directors in England to dissuade missionaries from coming to India: That meritorious spirit of religious zeal which animates those respectable persons who deem it their duty to exert their endeavours to diffuse among the misguided natives of India the truths and blessings of the Christian Faith, can seldom be restrained by those maxims of prudence and caution which local knowledge and experience alone can inspire and without which, the labours of the Missionaries become a source of danger, and tend to frustrate, rather than promote, the benevolent object of their attention. (quoted in Potts 188) Although the tone of his request is scrupulously polite, he criticizes the missionaries for meddling in affairs that they have no experience of and singles them out as “a source of danger.” Given the double life Sherwood leads in India—as the wife of an officer of the Bengal Army deployed to defend East India Company interests and as a staunch supporter of the missionary cause— the insecurity and apprehension that comes from this kind of open criticism of missionary activity and government censure is tangible in Little Henry. As noted earlier, Henry is fervent in his attempts to convert his bearer; he gives a reluctant Boosy daily religious instruction by reading aloud verses from the Bible, chanting prayers, condemning the multiplicity of gods in the Hindu pantheon, and denouncing the worship of idols. These efforts are duly noted and appreciated by Mr. Smith, an indigo planter and acquaintance of Henry’s mother, as he witnesses Henry “sitting on the mat at the head of the stairs, between his bearer’s knees, with a Bible in his hand” (Little Henry 24). While it impresses him greatly that “a little creature, who eight years ago had not breathed the breath of life, is endeavoring to impart divine knowledge to the heathen” (24), Mr. Smith immediately warns the boy that although he is engaged in a noble cause, he would need to be more vigilant in the manner in which he puts across his message to Boosy. It is apparent that Mr. Smith is uncomfortable and apprehensive about Henry’s unguarded proselytizing. He cautions the young boy that it is “almost dangerous, . . . for a child . . . to dispute with a heathen,” and proposes that he could “put” Henry in a “better way of converting Boosy: a safe way to . . . [him]self [Henry] and a better way for him [Boosy]” (26). Thus, he takes it upon himself to repeatedly counsel Henry to be “in the safe way of giving instruction” (28) since it is not prudent to “argue and dispute” (27) with Boosy about religion. What is remarkable about the dialogues that Mr. Smith has with Henry is his obsession and paranoia with the idea of staying ‘safe,’ and with the notion that there are more discreet and insidious ways of getting his message across to his bearer. While it is never clearly stated that Mr. Smith is a missionary, he says that he belongs among “people who call themselves religious,” and when Henry’s mother teases him for displaying a religious bent of

42 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature mind and jokingly “suspect[s] him a little of being a Methodist,” the otherwise flighty and frivolous wife of Mr. Smith “looked grave” (25). It can be argued that the pious Mr. Smith is a Carey-like figure who passes as an indigo planter, but is, perhaps, connected in some insidious and underground way with missionary activity in India. His religious inclinations are certainly out of place among the more mercenary and profit-oriented East India Company officials. He is deeply suspicious of his surroundings, evident in the way he discourages Henry from preaching the gospel openly, and warns him not to debate with an innocuous and loyal Boosy. His fi xation with issue of personal safety and security seems to suggest that, like Carey and his fellow-missionaries who worked in indigo plantations to avoid East India Company censure, Mr. Smith might also be an indigo planter with covert missionary connections. Thus, it is in the movement towards Anglicizing and Christianizing India, which in turn makes visible the cultural schism between ruler and ruled, that one can trace the beginnings of, as Viswanathan phrases it, “the sense of beleaguerment and paranoid dread” (Masks of Conquest 10) that is experienced by the British from the early nineteenth century onward. Mr. Smith’s admonitory stance also reflects Sherwood’s personal awareness of the dangers that missionaries and, indeed, all devout Englishmen faced in India. In her autobiography, she notes her fondness for a group of army officers— “pious men” (Life 460) who clandestinely “met in jungles and ravines to pray and read their Bibles” (Life 461)—and who, paradoxically, also participated in an aggressive military campaign to subdue the Gurkhas. Her good friend, Martyn, albeit employed by the East India Company, was also treated with some degree of suspicion by Company officials whenever a crowd of underprivileged Indians congregated in his garden. In Sherwood’s own words: “he [Martyn] was most carefully watched by the British authorities, and had he attempted at anything which could have been represented to be an attack upon the religion of these poor people, he certainly would have incurred a command to collect them no more” (Life 411). Sherwood goes on to observe: “Had he excited them to make any noise or tumult, he would undoubtedly have incurred the same reproof. He, therefore, was compelled to be very careful of what he said to them, and on this account he kept much to discussions upon the moral law” (Life 411). And Sherwood’s critique of the watchfulness of the East India Company and its aversion to any form of proselytizing—which comes across in her autobiography—is also plainly present in Little Henry, one of the earliest children’s texts to make the case for an evangelical empire.

Contagion and Death in Little Henry John Barrell, Leask and others have shown how the belief that the Orient was infecting and debilitating the British begins to grow in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by drawing attention to the fact that the anxiety

(En)countering Conversion • 43 of Oriental infection is pervasive in the literary works of the period. Echoing historian Percival Spear’s observations in The Nabobs, Kate Teltscher, for example, cites Samuel Foote’s comedy, The Nabob (1772), as the “most famous exposition” of the “idea that the Company and the nation had been infected by the ills of the Indian government” (168). Barrell, in his in-depth study of Thomas De Quincey’s writings, argues that “De Quincey’s life was terrorized by the fear of an unending and interlinked chain of infections from the East, which threatened to enter his system and to overthrow it, leaving him visibly and permanently ‘compromised’ and ‘orientalized’ ” (15). This is evident in De Quincey’s graphic accounts, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), of torturous opium-induced dreams in which he is plagued by a violent Malay, a “fearful enemy,” who nightly “transported [him] into Asiatic scenery” (137). He sensationally states that it would be difficult for his readers to “enter into . . . these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon” him in which he was “stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, [and] by cockatoos” (138). India, in particular, becomes a “seat of awful images and associations” for De Quincey because of its “ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions” which, in his view, “overpowers the sense of youth in the individual” (137). Similarly, Mr. Smith seems to imply that Boosy is dangerous to Henry, as he has the potential to infect and destabilize the young boy’s thoughts and actions. Although Henry has been able to shrug off the Indian manners and customs that he had imbibed from his bearer, Boosy still has the power to orally articulate his resistance to Henry’s proselytizing. One can, however, also make the counter-argument that Boosy (and by implication, Bengal) is infected by Henry (and by implication, the British) and that he actually dies as a result of his encounter with the little boy. In the sequel, The Last Days of Boosy, we see the consequences for Boosy who becomes parasitically dependent on his English masters, and is shunned by his own community. We see an abject Boosy first by Henry’s graveside and later in his own village of Kali Ganj, where he seems to wither away rather rapidly. All he has left with him is the memory of Henry and the vitriolic attacks of his own family for his loss of caste. The association of Christianity not only with contagion (especially when it is bound to the colonial project), but also with death is thus compellingly documented in Little Henry, and, as I have noted earlier, this is hardly unexpected since the book emerges from the deaths of Sherwood’s own children in India. In fact, there is a lifeless and tomblike quality to Sherwood’s descriptions of all English children living in India in her autobiography: “The English children are deathly white, white as the whitest marble, till there is not even a tincture of colour in their lips” (Life 494). Thus, the risk of the fictional Henry (and other Britons who live in India) ‘going native,’ the contagiousness of India, and the weakness and fatigue of the English (for example, Martyn) when they take on the noble cause of Christianizing India is intricately recorded in this children’s story. Henry (especially once he gives up his Indian ways and takes

44 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature on the challenge of converting Boosy) is a “pale” (Little Henry 23) and sickly child who suffers a great deal of pain due to an unidentified illness. He is only eight when he dies and his tomb, which is initially “white and fair” like the little boy himself, is gradually “defaced . . . and blackened” by the “damp of . . . [the] climate” in India (34–35). However, Henry is not the only one to die suddenly. In the concluding paragraph of Little Henry we are informed that very soon after Henry’s funeral, Boosy is “received into Mr. Smith’s family, . . . where, shortly after, he renounced caste and declared himself a Christian” (35). Boosy is baptized and renamed John, and “continued till his death (which happened not very long after [Henry’s]) a sincere Christian” (35). In The Last Days of Boosy, we are given a more graphic account of the tragic consequences of Boosy’s conversion and how he is spurned by his own family and friends. Boosy cannot be fully assimilated by the British (even the more sympathetic and benevolent ones like Mr. Smith cannot accept him as an equal) and this leads to a life of terrible isolation and rejection for Boosy. As Viswanathan has argued in her analysis of religious conversions in colonial India, even the law, “while seeming to protect the rights of converts,” was complicit in separating “Christian converts from the larger communion of Christians to which native converts erroneously believed they had been admitted” (Outside the Fold 14). Thus, by converting, Boosy finds himself caught between two worlds and cannot fully belong to the either. In a short span of time, his health breaks down and, like Henry, he dies of an unidentifiable illness that quickly weakens both his body and his spirit. Although missionary activity in India got a boost with the Charter Act of 1813, it continued to be regarded with deep suspicion by the East India Company and by Indians, and the influence of Christianity in India was never widespread. As Viswanathan asserts: “The official promotion of missionary activity was especially perilous in British colonies like India, which had entrenched religious traditions and laws that derived in turn from these traditions” (Outside the Fold 3). This is evident when, a hundred years later, E. M. Forster describes the liminal spaces occupied by British missionaries in A Passage to India (1924). They are excluded from British society, and hover in the margins of existence as they “lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came up to the club” (Forster 37). However, the volatile and divisive theological debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were historically momentous as they disrupted the economic and political monopoly of the East India Company in India, attempted to interfere with the traditions and religious practices of Indians, brought to the fore the issue of responsible and ‘civilized’ governance in the colonies, gave British imperialism its much flaunted vocabulary of reform, and enabled the British Parliament to have a greater say in Indian affairs. It also paved the way for Macaulay to obviate the issue of religious interference in 1835 by introducing an educational policy that would create a group of interpreters who would act as intermediaries between the colonizers and the

(En)countering Conversion • 45 colonized. More significantly, however, these burning and topical colonial issues find their way into a little children’s book, which seemingly narrates a tale about love and devotion, and recounts the attachment of a pious English boy to his dedicated Indian bearer.

Chapter Two Resisting Tipu Taming the Tiger and Coming of Age in Barbara Hofland’s The Captives in India

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the British Parliament becomes a stage, as it were, for Edmund Burke to make fiery speeches against the East India Company’s avaricious and plundering ways in India. From his December 1783 speech before the House of Commons in support of Fox’s East India Bill, in which he decries the rapacious and adolescent nature of British rule in India, to his fervent speeches made during the impeachment of Warren Hastings, in which he condemns Hastings for indulging in unspeakable acts of corruption and despotism, Burke dramatically outlines for his audience the grave dangers that Indian possessions pose for the British. As Burke proclaims in his May 1789 speech, the impeachment proceedings are not merely about “punishing a delinquent and preventing this and that offence, but a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose of preserving the manners, characters and virtues, that characterize the people of England” (Bond 208). He goes on to elaborate on the perils of Indian wealth and its pernicious influence on the English character: “The situation in which we stand is dreadful. These people [India-returned Englishmen] pour in upon us every day. They not only bring with them the wealth which they have, but they bring with them into our country the vices by which it was acquired. . . . Our liberty is as much in danger as our honour and our national character” (Bond 208–09). The line of reasoning that Burke employs in this speech can be summed up as follows: the possibility of acquiring limitless wealth in India not only contaminates the behavior and mannerisms of Englishmen and makes them dissolute and despotic, but, if such greedy conduct is left unchecked, India-returned Englishmen also have the potential to contaminate the very fabric of English society. As he cautions: “To-day the Commons of Great Britain prosecute the delinquents of India; 47

48 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature to-morrow the delinquents of India may be the Commons of Great Britain” (Bond 209). Burke’s parliamentary speeches thus reflect a central anxiety that emerges from this seminal period of British empire-building: the corrupting and transformative influence of India on the English. Written in peacetime, during a period in which the colonial agenda was fashioned by the reforming zeal of Lord Bentinck, governor-general from 1829 to 1835—whose policies included declaring the practice of sati (widow immolation) illegal in Bengal—rather than by aggressive territorial acquisitions, Barbara Hofland’s The Captives in India takes its readers back to late eighteenth-century India, and revisits the Burkeian concept of the subcontinent as a source of corruption and contamination.1 In this juvenile bildungsroman, set against the backdrop of the legendary Tipu Sultan’s encounter with the British, Hofland explores the notion that India can ‘spoil’ and somehow contaminate the English, especially English children who come in contact with India at an early age.2 The novel opens with the arrival in England of Olivia, a young Anglo-Indian girl from India, whose father Francis Falkland, a widower and private trader in Bombay, sends her to live with his brother’s family in the English countryside so that she can “imbibe the instruction” (8) that will help her shed her Indian mannerisms. On her arrival, her English relatives are shocked by her autocratic behavior and her lack of manners, so much so that one of them declares that “in India, every body is spoiled, great and little” (12). The pampered and imperious little Anglo-Indian girl, however, as a result of what is seen as a superior English education, eventually transforms into a well-mannered young English lady. The emphasis of the narrative, I suggest, is, therefore, pedagogic, as Hofland subtly instructs her young readers, in particular, how to outgrow, resist, and survive India without getting tempted by its wealth and excesses. This chapter also explores how, in Captives in India, a cautionary tale about imperial adventuring, the notion of a despotic and opulent India is embodied most strikingly by Tipu, the mighty late eighteenth-century ruler of Mysore. Percival Spear has noted that the nabob becomes a disparaging title given to the Orientalized East India Company officials in the second half of the eighteenth century, so called due to their considerable wealth and display of despotic behavior patterns perceived to be similar to Indian potentates or nawabs. And, arguably, nobody personified the idea of a tyrannical Indian ruler with infinite resources more fearfully for the British than Tipu, who put up a fierce resistance to the British in 1780s and 1790s. As Amal Chatterjee remarks in his study of depictions of India between 1740 and 1840: “No other subcontinental ruler enjoyed the terrifying reputation that Tipu did. He was at once the bogeyman, the proof that Indian rulers were duplicitous tyrants and proof that, . . . any powerful Indian ruler was ultimately an evil despot” (173). Although Tipu makes a brief appearance in the novel, he is the cause of the terrible misfortunes suffered by the Falkland family, starting with Francis Falkland, Olivia’s father, who is held captive by him in the dungeons

Resisting Tipu • 49 of his capital, Seringapatam, for several years. Furthermore, when Olivia, on the brink of womanhood, returns to India in search of her father, she is held in captivity by Suder Cawn, an agent of Tipu, along with her cousin, Frank Falkland, and the two young people have to endure tremendous emotional and mental distress before they find their way back to British society. In this coming-of-age novel, Tipu is cast as an Eastern despot, an Oriental tyrant, and a fearsome resistor with few scruples. He is the embodiment of excesses and willfulness that cannot be moderated, and these qualities make him the perfect anti-hero in a colonial pedagogic book that is aimed, to a large extent, at young adults. In a sense, he is particularly useful for a juvenile bildungsroman since he can be portrayed as the emblem of tyranny, and as someone lacking in self-restraint and inner discipline. He can, therefore, not only stand in as a historical bogeyman for British children (much in the same way Napoleon was for a while), but can also be deployed to embody a potent and pernicious Oriental figure who should not be emulated.

Hofland and Empire Although Hofland is barely read today, her obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine attests to both her popularity at home and abroad as well as the profuseness of her literary output: “about seventy works have proceeded from her pen; of which in this country alone an aggregate amount of nearly 300,000 copies have been sold! In addition to this is to be calculated the several translations into the continental languages; and immense numbers circulated in America” (Urban 101).3 The obituary goes on to note: “When this immense circulation is considered in connexion with the fact that her works were successfully devoted to improve the heart by pleasing powerful lessons, we may form some idea of the debt of gratitude and esteem that is her due” (Urban 101). More recently, in Mistress of our Tears, Dennis Butts characterizes Hofland as a popular early nineteenth-century children’s writer with world-wide appeal who, due to financial insecurities and a troubled marriage, was compelled to “produce two or three books a year: children’s tales, textbooks, essays for the Annuals, anything that would bring in money” (6). Her works, according to Butts, were influenced by a crop of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury didactic children’s authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Mary Sherwood, and Sarah Trimmer, and thus reflected the “need to provide” young readers “with a literature intended to be . . . serious and [morally] sustaining” (Mistress 11). However, unlike Sherwood, Edgeworth and others, whose books “tended to be didactic, written in the form of Moral Tales to propagate contemporary moral, social, and religious values,” Butts proposes that Hofland’s novels for children displayed “a much greater awareness than her contemporaries of the hard economic facts of life, and her apparently simple stories of domestic life often ask[ed] questions about Family, Work

50 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature and the Role of Women in ways which anticipate the later novels of Dickens, the Brontës and Mrs Gaskell” (Mistress 1). He notes that although many of her stories follow the typical plot popularized by Sherwood and Edgeworth, in which “a young child encounters a dilemma of some kind, perhaps even hardship or death, and has to cope with the crisis, usually with the help of a sympathetic but not necessarily tender-hearted parent or friend, who emphasizes the moral or the religious implications of the situation to the child and to the reader” (Butts, Mistress 12), Hofland was able to downplay and control the moral and didactic elements in her writing. Thus, it is Butts’s contention that, as a children’s author, Hofland was able to balance the inescapable evangelism and didacticism of her contemporaries with a more practical awareness of social and economic hardships in a manner that makes her a precursor to the Victorian novelists. While Butts’s little monograph on Hofland is informative, as it gives us a succinct introduction to her life and writings (including a chronological listing of all her published works), he situates her work exclusively within the domestic realm of late eighteenth- and early to mid-nineteenth-century England, and primarily views her as a novelist whose “great concerns” were “Religion, the Family, Education and Work” (Mistress 27). In doing so, Butts overlooks the fact that several of her children’s books grapple with issues and incidents that come directly out of Britain’s colonial experiences in India, the Caribbean, and Africa. In exploring the ways in which Hofland sought to maintain “her popular appeal through a variety of forms and genres” (“The Case of Barbara Hofland” 105), a more recent essay by Butts briefly mentions her attempts at writing geography textbooks with titles such as Africa Described in its Ancient and Present State (1828), travelogues in which young heroes recount their journeys eastward, and Robinsonnades which anticipate Captain Marryat’s popular adventure tales; however, once again, he misses the opportunity to reflect on how such texts might shed light on Hofland’s engagement with the British Empire. While Hofland’s literary endeavors can be seen—as Butts does—in the context of the vicissitudes of her personal circumstances and by her “attempts to re-invent herself as popular writer as her career developed and her sales fluctuated” (“The Case of Barbara Hofland” 105), I propose that one must also be attentive to the ways in which her works address Britain’s colonial aspirations. While two of her books are set in India: The Young Cadet, or Henry Delamere’s Voyage to India (1828) and Captives in India, other novels such as The Barbadoes Girl (1816), Alfred Campbell, The Young Pilgrim; Containing Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land (1825), The Young Pilgrim, or Alfred Campbell’s Return to the East (1826), and The Young Crusoe; or, A Boy’s Adventures on a Desolate Island (1829) unambiguously allude to Britain’s global reach in the early nineteenth century. Thus, not only was Hofland overtly writing about empire, but one can also make the case that early nineteenth-century British women writers such as Sherwood and her had begun familiarizing young readers with colonial concerns long before

Resisting Tipu • 51 Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, and Rudyard Kipling—their more famous mid- to late nineteenth-century male counterparts—had popularized the imperial adventure story. In fact, Hofland’s opinion on the benefits of British rule in India can be observed very explicitly in The Young Cadet when the hero, Henry Delamere, is given a brief history lesson by his father prior to the former’s departure to India. Mr. Delamere proudly proclaims to his son: “The sense of justice, the rights which spring from good laws and good government, are so entirely unknown in that unhappy country, save by the British population, that one can scarcely consider any circumstance which introduces a new order of things, in any other light than a blessing” (18–19). Hofland, unlike Sherwood, never traveled overseas, and ostensibly wrote “stories of domestic crises and triumphs” (Butts, Mistress 27), but it is evident from her body of work engaging with empire that she was implicated in the colonial project and grappled with some of Britain’s most disquieting moments in the colonies. In Captives in India, in particular, Hofland unmistakably responds rather patriotically to the fact of Indian resistance as the memory of the colonial encounter with Tipu is invoked, and the narrative demonizes him as a fearsome Oriental tyrant.

Why Tipu? It is perhaps useful to consider why Tipu attracted so much British interest and fascination, so much so that a children’s author writing three decades after his death recalls for her readers how potent and threatening his presence was for the British colonial enterprise in India. Hyder Ali, Tipu’s father, regarded by his contemporaries as one of the wiliest and most competent rulers in eighteenth-century India, began life as a soldier in the Mysore army and eventually became the ruler of the predominantly Hindu state of Mysore by 1761. Thus, Hyder’s eventual title as the Sultan of Mysore was not inherited, but a self-proclaimed one, which he assumed after successfully dethroning the original rulers of Mysore with canny brilliance. Once he had consolidated his position as the leader of Mysore, Hyder proved to be a formidable foe of the British until his death in 1782. A total of four Anglo-Mysore Wars were fought between 1767 and 1799, initially by Hyder, and subsequently by his son Tipu. In the first of the Anglo-Mysore Wars, fought between 1767 and 1769, the British were trounced; Hyder reached the British settlement in Madras and forced them to negotiate a humbling treaty on his terms. However, it is not Hyder, but Tipu who achieved cult status during the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries among the British in India as a merciless and oppressive captor. Tipu became a prominent player in the five-way battle (fought between the British, the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad, Hyder, and the French) for territorial aggrandizement in the Carnatic during the second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–84). Initially, Hyder was in charge of the

52 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Mysore offensive, but after his sudden death mid-battle, Tipu took complete control of his father’s troops and simultaneously became the second Sultan of Mysore. It is during this war that Tipu’s infamous reputation as an Oriental despot began to circulate among the British, and by the time of his death in 1799, his name was synonymous with so-called Oriental cruelty, malevolence, carnality, and depravity. A significant reason for Tipu’s fearful reputation was the tales of captivity and imprisonment that began to capture the imagination of the British public, first through rumor and hearsay, and subsequently through the publication of captivity narratives written by actual survivors. In Denys Forrest’s estimation, “Tipu’s evil repute rests in a great part on the reminiscences of a group of English soldiers and sailors who were his prisoners” (45). These narratives contributed towards establishing and consolidating Tipu’s reputation as a “ ‘sanguinary tyrant’, gloomy, fanatical and cruel, the very type of Oriental despotism” (Forrest 45), and clearly influenced the way he was perceived by the British. So entrenched is this image of Tipu in British popular imagination by the early nineteenth century that Hofland—who was always on the lookout for financially viable topics—is inspired to write a captivity narrative in which Tipu and his allies are vilified for their hostage-taking methods. According to Forrest, three narratives, in particular, made a lasting impact on the British imagination and sealed Tipu’s fate, as it were, as an Oriental tyrant: an anonymous account entitled The Journal of An Officer of Colonel Baillie’s Detachment (1788), James Bristow’s The Narrative of James Bristow, Private in the Bengal Artillery (1792), and James Scurry’s The Life of James Scurry, Seaman (1824).4 It is noteworthy that while the first two narratives are published during the peak of Anglo-Mysore rivalry, Scurry’s account of his captivity is published as late as 1824, a testament to the mythologizing of Tipu that continued well into the nineteenth century. Although captivity narratives were central in establishing Tipu’s reputation as an Oriental despot, three equally salient factors contributed towards the prolonged vilification and demonization of Tipu by the British. Firstly, Tipu’s close association with the French in the late eighteenth century, especially at a time when relations between Britain and revolutionary France were fraught, made it necessary (and convenient) to cast him as an Indian Napoleon. As Linda Colley astutely observes, “when a loyalist reaction emerged in Britain in opposition to the threat from Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, it also became directed against Tipu himself. . . . British propaganda. . . . aligned him with the prime Christian, European enemy. Tipu and Napoleon . . . became two sides of the same coin” (Captives 297). Secondly, Tipu was not only able to challenge the British militarily over a long period of time, but, like his father Hyder, was also the architect of alliances with other southern Indian rulers and the French, which in turn frustrated British attempts to control the Carnatic. Thus, the ever-increasing realization that Tipu was not going to disappear from the political scene without putting up a strong

Resisting Tipu • 53 resistance, and that the conquest of the Carnatic was not going to be as bloodless and quick as the defeat of Bengal had been, made it inevitable that Tipu began to take on fearful proportions in the minds of the British. Thirdly, the growing British fear of becoming the ‘other,’ in this case, an Eastern nabob or potentate, conveniently finds its most perfect and terrible manifestation in Tipu, a cultural icon who comes to symbolize all that is supposedly imperfect, lascivious, deviant, and monstrous about India. He is, therefore, a potential type of the corrupted English self and the embodiment of what the English most fear they could become during their stay in India. It is not improbable that in writing Captives in India, a text in which she alludes to the aforementioned British fears about Tipu, Hofland might have succumbed to the effects of what Forrest refers to as “Tipuism” (334), or the obsession with the man that makes him a larger than life figure in the nineteenth-century British consciousness. Drawing on Mildred Archer’s classic monograph, Tippoo’s Tiger, Bernard Cohn has documented how objects pillaged from Seringapatam in 1799, as a result of wide scale “Individual and state-managed looting,” which included “Tipu’s tiger, his helmet and cuirass, a golden tiger’s head from his throne, a howdah, and one of his ‘royal carpets’ ” (Cohn, Colonialism 102), found their way back to England, and were transformed into enduring symbols of British ascendancy in India. In fact, according to Cohn, these trophies of war were prominently displayed in the East India House for the public viewing, and popular London guidebooks published between 1820 and 1860 regularly made mention of the Company’s collections. Forrest, too, has meticulously shown how the popular obsession with Tipu continued long after his death, as is evident in the number of children’s toys, paintings, theatrical performances, ballads, engravings, books, and prints that were produced well into the nineteenth century, all invoking a recurrent theme: the defeat of Tipu and the triumph of a resilient British army.5 For instance, the early decades of the nineteenth century, as Forrest notes, witnessed public exhibitions of large paintings that depicted various scenes from the Anglo-Mysore encounter, which included the handing over of Tipu’s children to Lord Cornwallis at the end of the third Mysore War—a scene that is described by Hofland in some detail—and the final storming of Seringapatam.6 As Hofland was married to a landscape painter, it is, perhaps, not too far-fetched to hypothesize that she may have been aware of these popular displays of grand-scale paintings illustrating the humbling of Tipu by the British.7 Daniel O’ Quinn, in his nuanced study of Orientalist dramas staged in London between 1770 and 1800, has demonstrated how pivotal Tipu and the Anglo-Mysore wars were in producing a number of jingoistic theatrical performances in the 1790s. In fact, as Forrest observes, the theatrical obsession with Tipu continues well into the 1820s with a series of Tipuinspired productions such as J. H. Amherst’s Tippoo Saib, or The Storming of Seringapatam staged at the Royal Coburg Theatre in 1823, and The Storming of Seringapatam, or The Death of Tippoo Saib performed at Astley’s in 1829.8

54 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Again, one can speculate that Hofland might have known about these theatrical productions as she was a friend of the author and dramatist Mary Russell Mitford, whose plays were produced at the Covent Garden in the 1820s, and with whom she corresponded regularly. In literature, Tipu’s legendary status captured the imagination of nineteenth-century writers as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Thomas De Quincey, Walter Scott, Philip Meadows Taylor, and Wilkie Collins; predictably, he is characterized by all of them in as a tyrannical oppressor who needs to be brought to heel. In Edgeworth’s story, “Lame Jervas” (1804), published only five years after Tipu’s death, the Sultan of Mysore is complexly deployed as a despotic slave-owner as well as a man with a keen scientific vision for his kingdom: his interest in innovative gadgets and machinery is foregrounded as he wants young Jervas to construct a water-mill in order to better drain the famed Golconda diamond mines. However, any redemptive attributes—such as intellectual and technological curiosity—that Tipu exhibits in Edgeworth’s tale are entirely missing from subsequent Tipu-centered texts published in the nineteenth century. John Barrell, among others, has drawn attention to the fact that, as a result of the third and fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars, the “tiger had become the especial symbol of an India imagined as ferocious and in need of taming by means justifiably violent” (50), and, arguably, no one epitomized this feral image of India more splendidly than Tipu, the self-proclaimed ‘Tiger of Mysore.’9 De Quincey liberally uses the “notion of the tiger as the quintessence of oriental ferocity” (Barrell 51) in his writings, and refers to Hyder as a “ ‘rabid tiger’ ” and Tipu as a“ ‘very tiger, more than tiger-hearted’ ” (quoted in Barrell 51).10 In The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827), Scott narrates the tragic downfall of Richard Middlemas, whose blinding ambition leads him to India, a country “where gold is won by steel; where a brave man cannot pitch his desire of fame and wealth so high but that he may realise it, if he have fortune to his friend” (47). Echoing popular colonial fantasies of the late eighteenth century, Middlemas foolishly perceives India to be a land of limitless possibilities and immeasurable wealth, where one can be “surrounded by Oriental wealth and Oriental luxury, which dimmed even the splendor of the most wealthy of the British nobility” (51). Although Middlemas initially goes to India as a lieutenant in the East India Company, he disgraces himself in Madras, and finds himself seeking his fortune at the court of a native prince. The ruler is none other than Tipu, who is the embodiment of Oriental despotism and lasciviousness; in fact, so uncontrollable desire is his desire for Menie Gray, a surgeon’s daughter and Middlemas’s fiancée, that he is willing to hand over the control of his city gates to an unscrupulous and devious Middlemas in order to possess her. In Tippoo Sultaun (1839), Meadows Taylor portrays Tipu as a fearful and vengeful captor who causes endless suffering to noble Britons languishing in his dungeons. Collins writes The Moonstone as late as 1868, and it is evident that the legend of Tipu continues to persist, since the narrative commences with a dramatic account of the storming of Seringapatam in

Resisting Tipu • 55 1799. The large yellow diamond, one of Tipu’s personal possessions, is brought back to England with menacing repercussions for all the people who come into contact with it. Thus the memory of the encounter with Tipu not only endures in the nineteenth century, but it is also invoked at regular intervals by an array to writers as a testament to his Oriental malevolence and to emphasize the justness of British governance in India. Tipu makes periodic appearances in children’s literature as well and, in Forrest’s words, “become[s] firmly embedded in the nursery folklore of the nineteenth century” (322). So familiar was he to British children that, as C. A. Bayly records, “Expatriate children in the Caribbean acted plays on the theme of his death in battle at Seringapatam in 1799. Even a generation later the mild and learned Hindu reformer Ram Mohun Roy was pelted by urchins on the streets of Bristol who shouted ‘Tipu! Tipu!’ ” (114). Tippoo Saib, or The Storming of Seringapatam is adapted by London publisher, Orlando Hodgson, for his popular Juvenile Drama Series in the 1820s and, as Barrell documents, a rendering is even sold to children in the form of toy theaters (50). G. A. Henty, who pens a great number of jingoistic tales for children about Britain’s military campaigns in the colonies, writes an adventure novel entitled The Tiger of Mysore; A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib (1895) almost a century after Tipu’s death in which a young and dashing lad named Dick Holland rescues his father from the Seringapatam dungeons. In fact, the saga of Tipu’s stubborn resistance and subsequent defeat becomes such an integral part of British storytelling about the conquest of India that it is easy to conclude why Hofland—perennially in search of popular and profitable topics—would be inclined to cast him as a central villain in one of her books, and why Forrest would ask a whimsical question like “who but ‘Tippoo’ should be the hero of a children’s tiger story written more than half a century later still?” (3) when referencing the publication of Tippoo, A Tale of a Tiger, an illustrated children’s tale about a mischievous and unruly tiger written by William Ralston and C. W. Cole in 1886. An obvious reason for Hofland to draw on the Tipu story is that she bases her novel on the captivating journeys of Eliza Fay who, according to Ketaki Kusari Dyson, made “four separate voyages to Calcutta, first in 1779 with her husband, then in her own right in 1784, 1796, and 1816” (126). Fay—who separated from her dissolute barrister husband in the early 1780s, and thereafter made several valiant attempts at becoming economically self-reliant by establishing a dressmaking business in Calcutta—is most remembered for the lively letters she wrote to her sister and friends about her voyages and impressions of India between 1779 and 1815. These personal letters, a valuable source of information about Anglo-Indian life, were subsequently published posthumously as Original Letters from India in Calcutta in 1817.11 What interests me, in the context of this chapter, is the fact that the letters written during Fay’s first voyage to India—which included a brief period of imprisonment by Hyder—form the basis for Hofland’s captivity narrative. The letters

56 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature written during her confinement were not only read by Hofland, but also, selfadmittedly, some of the events and incidents described in Captives in India come directly from Fay’s account of her captivity in Calicut. Interestingly, in Fay’s letters there is no mention of Tipu; it is his father, Hyder, who is presented as the adversary of the British in India. This is because her detention takes place during the initial stages of the second Anglo-Mysore War, and Hyder, not Tipu, commanded the Mysore army for most of this war up until his death in 1782. As Forrest detects, although the first British prisoners of war during the second Anglo-Mysore War (whose captivity narratives were to become the touchstone for Tipu’s fearful reputation) were taken by Hyder, and there is very little evidence to suggest that Tipu had anything to do with their initial imprisonment, paradoxically, Tipu—rather than Hyder—becomes the embodiment of the fearful hostage-taker. It is, therefore, not unexpected that although Hofland lifts events from Fay’s letters, she casts Tipu, and not Hyder, in the role of the villainous tyrant who instigates the imprisonment of Olivia’s father, and later of Frank and Olivia herself. The second discrepancy in Hofland’s tale is that chronologically, Francis Falkland’s imprisonment would have occurred during the second Anglo-Mysore War, and Olivia and Frank’s captivity would have occurred during the third Anglo-Mysore War (1790–92), yet she uses Fay’s accounts of the second Anglo-Mysore War to describe the hardships suffered by the cousins, thereby making her narrative historically inaccurate and unreliable. Such glaring chronological inconsistencies echo the various historical, fictional, and personal accounts of Tipu that continue to circulate long after 1799, and by the time Hofland writes her novel, the legend of Tipu has been rewritten and retold so many times (mostly inaccurately) that the lines between fact and fiction have blurred to create a terrible monster. And by writing yet another sensational and unsubstantiated story about Tipu, Hofland does her share, as it were, in contributing towards the process of collective yarn-spinning that the British seem to indulge in for many decades after Tipu’s death.

Outgrowing India and Growing Up English In Captives in India, Hofland charts the growth and maturation of Olivia and Frank, cousins and friends, who overcome terrible misfortunes in India, and are able to emerge as stronger and wiser people with a keen awareness of the many dangers that one can encounter in India. As children, however, both cousins are deeply influenced by India; Olivia is born there and spends the first seven years of her life in Bombay in the company of a retinue of Indian servants. Frank, who is born in England and has never traveled abroad, is nevertheless fascinated by Britain’s eastern possessions. As I have noted in the previous chapter, the influence of India (and Indian servants), especially on young English children who lived there, was a recurring anxiety for the

Resisting Tipu • 57 British in the formative years of empire-building. When Olivia, a “spoiled, rude child” (11)—in many ways a successor to Sherwood’s Lucy and a precursor to Mary Lennox in Frances H. Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911)—arrives in England in the spring of 1783, she is accompanied by Lalee, her Indian nurse, with whom she has an intense bond. Her English family quickly realizes the need to ‘civilize’ Olivia and familiarize her with English customs, especially since she seems disinclined to give up her Indian habits. In fact, “the perpetual sounds of “ ‘Lahee! I say, Lahee! bring this;’ ‘reach that;’ ‘run with me there;’ or, ‘come here, this moment;’ ” (11), alarm them greatly, and it is therefore decided that Olivia has to be separated from Lalee and sent to an English school for a proper upbringing. Of course, Olivia, inordinately fond of her nurse, is grief-stricken by the news, and exclaims: “I thought nothing but death could take you [Lalee] away from poor little Livy. [ . . . ] I think every thing in England is trouble, and I don’t like trouble” (13). As shown in my reading of Little Henry, the powerful attachment of English children to their native nurses gives rise to a chronic British fear that their little ones will not only become captivated by India, but will also pick up Indian habits and customs that will alter them forever. Thus, in these early texts of empire, English children undergo a process of de-Indianization, as it were, to rid themselves of their misplaced loyalties and their affection for their native servants. If, in Little Henry, Henry resists the temptation to fall in line with Boosy’s way of life, and, more significantly, reverses the pattern of influence, in Captives in India, Olivia has to be literally separated from her nurse, Lalee, before she can take her place in civilized English society. The first step in the process of deIndianization, as visualized by her English relatives, is to insulate Olivia from the influence of Lalee, who is seen as the baleful source of the young girl’s imperious and aberrant behavior. Once Lalee is sent back to India and Olivia is sent off to school, the latter begins to rapidly metamorphosize into a proper young English lady. However, Hofland warns her young readers that a child does not have to travel to India to become entranced by it, as is evident in Frank’s fascination with the East. Interestingly, Frank, a “daring and somewhat fiery spirit” (11), is named after his uncle, Olivia’s father, who, as the younger son, has had to leave England in order to make his own fortune; thus, while Frank’s father is the “possessor of an ancient estate”(6), Olivia’s father journeys eastward to become a merchant in India. As a young boy Frank, Francis Falkland’s nephew and namesake, has a great admiration for what he perceives to be his uncle’s independent spirit and sense of adventure, and as he grows older, begins to study Arabic and yearns to travel to India. When Olivia, who begins to shed her Indian traits soon after Lalee’s departure, asks: “But what could make you study Arabic, when you used to be so averse to Latin, and gave Mr. Bransby so much uneasiness?” (22; emphasis in the original), Frank replies: “Oh! because I didn’t like Latin, and I always thought it nonsense to learn dead languages. Now there is some sense in Arabic, . . . knowing it gives a

58 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature man a great lift in certain cases” (22). Olivia is astute enough to guess what is on Frank’s mind since she exclaims disapprovingly: “Surely, Frank, you don’t think of going into the army? I remember two officers in our house, in Bombay, learning Arabic of a man with a long beard and a huge turban” (22). This exchange between the cousins, in particular, Olivia’s gentle rebuke of Frank’s linguistic endeavors, nicely illustrates the shift in British colonial policy that occurs in the early 1830s. As Gauri Viswanathan documents in Masks of Conquest, the Orientalist/Anglicist debate reaches its culmination with the appointment of Macaulay as the Law Member in Governor-General Bentinck’s Council in 1833. Macaulay, a James Mill-inspired utilitarian with an ambitious program of reform, seeks to alter colonial legal and educational policies by vilifying all things Indian, as is evident in this infamous declaration in his “Minute” on Indian education: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabic” (165). Thus the rejection of the Warren Hastings model of governing India using Indian laws and Oriental languages, which had been set in motion in part due to the efforts of Charles Grant, reaches its culmination in the Bentinck/Macaulay era, and Frank’s passion for Arabic seems pointless and anachronistic when read in the context of Macaulay’s “Minute.” It is also worth noting that although Frank diligently learns Arabic, he keeps the reason for his interest in the language a secret from his parents, and is surreptitious about his India-bound plans, since he is aware that his mother, in particular, does not want him to leave England. His parents’ disapproval of colonial adventuring, however, does not prevent Frank from looking for opportunities to further his personal ambitions, and his fascination and identification with India is fully realized when he gets a writership in the East India Company. Ironically, unlike his uncle, Frank is the eldest son and heir to his father’s estate, and does not need to travel to India to become financially self-sufficient, but does so only because he is fascinated by the subcontinent. Ultimately, Hofland shows us how much of a price Frank has to pay for his enthrallment with India, his dismissive attitude towards his privileged status in England, and for his willful desire to get a writership at all costs, when Olivia and he are held hostage by Suder Cawn, Tipu’s deputy in Calicut. Furthermore, as I will argue later in this chapter, it takes captivity instigated by a ‘tyrant’ and an ‘infidel’ to make Frank realize how arrogant, headstrong, and overbearing he was prior to his imprisonment in Calicut, and to recognize how deviant and fanciful some of his notions about India were.

Tipu and the British Captivity Narratives In 1929, A. W. Lawrence edited a volume entitled Captives of Tipu: Survivors’ Narratives—which brings together three of the most well-known captivity narratives to emerge from the second Anglo-Mysore War—because, in his words,

Resisting Tipu • 59 “their intense human interest will always find them readers” (18). While Lawrence’s claim may not be borne out in the twenty-first century, I offer a brief overview of the three captivity narratives compiled by him—the very same ones which subsequently receive a notable mention from Forrest—in order to contextualize the types of stock Mysore captivity texts Hofland would have had access to while composing her own fictionalized account of incarceration in India. The Journal of An Officer of Colonel Baillie’s Detachment begins rather luridly with a scene of suffering and privation in the closing stages of the Battle of Pollilur (1780): While the enemy’s horse and elephants marched again and again in barbarian triumph over the field of battle, the wounded and bleeding English, who were not instantly trodden to death by the feet of those animals, lingered out a miserable existence, exposed in the day to the burning rays of the vertical sun, and in the night to the ravages of foxes, jackalls and tygers, allured to that horrid scene by the scent of human blood. Many officers, as well as privates, stripped of all they had, after protracting hour after hour, and day after day, in pain, miserably perished; others rising, as it were, from the dead, after an incredible loss of blood, which induced for a time the most perfect insensibility and stupefaction, found means to rejoin their friends in chains, with whom they were destined to share, for years, the horrors of the gloomy jail, rendered still more dreadful by frequent apprehensions of that assassination which, they had the most undoubted proofs, had been practised on numbers of their fellow-prisoners, dispersed in different places of confi nement, throughout the dominions of a barbarous enemy. (101) The Battle of Pollilur was regarded as, to cite Sir Hector Munro, the commanding officer who failed to bring reinforcements to the British on time, “the severest blow that the English ever sustained in India” (quoted in Stronge 14). Colonel William Baillie—leading a force of little under 3,000 men—was trounced and taken to Seringapatam where he, from all accounts, died a natural death. The resounding defeat at Pollilur was a setback to the British campaign to control the Carnatic and, in the ensuing years, Baillie’s capture and death were renarrated in a manner that made Tipu look like a deliberate and vengeful murderer.12 Ironically, the anonymous writer of one of the earliest published captivity narratives does not mention Tipu in a negative light, but goes on to describe the sadistic pleasure that Hyder gets from the spectacle of British suffering: “Hyder Ally, seated in a chair in his tent, enjoyed at Damul, six miles from the scene of action, the sight of his prisoners, and the heads of the slain [British soldiers]” (Journal 101). In fact, Tipu is a source of succor since the British prisoners in his camp are treated with “great humanity” and are “invited . . . into his tent” and given “biscuit[s]” and “five pagodas”

60 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature (Journal 102). However, as Tipu’s resistance to the British swelled in the 1780s and 1790s, the survivors’ tales grew increasingly sensational, and Tipu, rather than Hyder, came to embody the very essence of a barbarous foe. In The Narrative of James Bristow, James Bristow—a private in the Bengal Artillery—produced an account of captivity that is striking for the graphic descriptions of his forced deployment in Tipu’s infamous cheyla (slave) battalions, and the cruel and unpatriotic tasks he is required to perform as a member of this brigade: The task imposed upon us, (those who refused being cruelly flogged), was to instruct these chaylahs [slave battalions] in the manual exercise. Our situation consequently became worse than before; we were obliged to perform an office, which however small the benefit we took care the practitioners should derive from it, could not but cause the deepest affliction, when we reflected they were the detested enemies of our country whom we were compelled to instruct in that very art which would prove destructive to our countrymen. (34–35) Bristow’s narrative is infused with his attempts to overcome his despondency at not having any free will or agency of his own, particularly since his characterization of himself as a British subject is further undermined by his forced circumcision and his Indian clothes. As he narrates in pitiful tones: “robbed of liberty, I found myself in the clutches of barbarians, who treated me with cruelty and scorn, and kept me in suspense with respect to my life” (Bristow, Narrative 28). Kate Teltscher and Colley have offered compelling interpretations of the experiences recounted by Bristow during his decade-long captivity in Mysore. Teltscher underlines a key reason for the demonization of Tipu as the embodiment of Oriental cruelty and despotism in captivity accounts such as Bristow’s: “The real threat represented by Tipu resulted from his blurring of distinctions between East and West in his appropriation of European ideas, tactics and individuals. . . . By erecting a wall of difference between East and West, the rhetoric of oriental despotism helped conceal the similarities between the two powers’ policies: the British were freed from the recognition of disturbing correspondences with their enemy” (238). Colley, in her extensive exploration of captivity narratives as the “underbelly of British empire” (Captives 4), perspicaciously notes that despite being “captured, forcibly circumcised, and driven into one of Mysore’s slave regiments . . . [Bristow]—in this dictated account at least— remains faithful at heart and eventually escapes the clutches of Tipu and returns to his own kind,” thereby foregrounding the “agonies and determination of an embattled individual” (Captives 302) who attempts to stay committed to his Britishness against all odds. By the time Scurry’s narrative, The Life of James Scurry, is published, Tipu’s reputation as a tyrant is firmly ingrained in the British imagination. Scurry,

Resisting Tipu • 61 who, in Forrest’s words, “specialises in the picturesque and horrific” (232), describes at some length a torture device allegedly used by Tipu: Amongst the numerous other instruments, he had a wooden horse, of a full size, resembling those adopted for his cavalry, curiously and infernally contrived, on the saddle of which were nine rows of sharp spikes, about three-quarters of an inch long. The machine was moved by springs; and as soon as the victims mounted, the horse, by some mechanism, would rear his hind legs, and then, falling with a jerk on his forefeet, the spikes would enter the posteriors of the rider. (200) However, after giving his readers such an intricate description of this device, Scurry goes on to admit that he had never actually witnessed anyone being tortured in this manner, and Forrest speculates that this apparatus might have been yet another one of his “cheerful fabrications” (233). What Scurry’s readers seemed to devour was the rousing sensationalism of accounts such as “death by the elephant’s feet” as the “most common method of punishment” (201), which in turn went a long way in reinforcing what they already believed about Tipu’s proclivity for ruthless behavior, so much so that it can hardly be a coincidence that in Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter, Middlemas is trampled to death by one of Tipu’s elephants. Scurry also alludes to the brutish jeers of the prison guards—“The taunts and insolence of the guards were no small addition to our misery. We had the feelings of Englishmen, and we suffered from their insults more severely than from their punishments” (217–18)— and to the “idea of every hope being marred of ever seeing our country or friends again” (217) during his ten years of captivity. Intriguingly, the barbarity and derision displayed by the guards, the sheer despondency that is often experienced by Scurry and others, as well as their defiant definitions of themselves as Englishmen in the face of immense adversity are themes explored by Hofland when she describes Olivia and Frank’s captivity. While Tipu did have British prisoners of war, Forrest, Teltscher, and Colley have concluded that the piteous conditions described in these accounts may have, for several reasons—such as financial gain and the desire to not come across as cultural assimilators and collaborators of the enemy—often included exaggerations and embellishments on the part of the survivors. Teltscher cites a Calcutta Gazette announcement from 1792—which proclaims that Bristow’s narrative would be published for “the sole benefit of James Bristow and his family” (quoted in Teltscher 234)—as a marketing tool with the intention of turning the Bristow family into “deserving objects of charity” (Teltscher 234). Thus, in Teltscher’s view, the more melodramatic the tale, the more sympathy and money it generated for the survivor, and very often these tales exhibited an unreliability that make them highly entertaining, but not entirely credible. Forrest points out that men like Scurry, who “straggle[d] back to British India, experienced the usual fate of ‘odd men out’ at the hands

62 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature of the bureaucracy” (235). Scurry and four of his fellow-sufferers, although assured of financial support by Cornwallis himself, were eventually given a meager “subsistence allowance of ‘3 single fanams’ a day,” and a parsimonious Madras Council after much deliberation “authorized an additional grant of £2 per head to these much-tried mariners” (Forrest 235). However, despite the material realities that moulded, tinged, and shaped the hysteria and paranoia of survivor memoirs, there is no denying that these narratives were avidly read as authentic accounts of the excesses of Tipu and his guards, as is evident in Hofland’s tale for adolescents. In Captives in India, the first Falkland to fall prey to Tipu’s sinister hostage-taking methods is Francis Falkland, Olivia’s father. A few years after Olivia begins to settle into an English way of life, she gets the disturbing news of her father’s imprisonment in Mysore. Her father’s friend and agent Mr. Orme—perhaps not unintentionally named after Robert Orme, the East India Company historiographer and author of the voluminous History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763)—informs her uncle that “the unfortunate merchant [Francis Falkland], traveling in the Mysore for some especial purpose of commerce, . . . had yet been waylaid, and either taken prisoner or killed on the spot” (13–14). Further, there is a sense of uncertainty in the conflicting reports that Olivia receives from India, and while it is assumed by Mr. Orme, based on reports from East India Company officials, that Francis Falkland has been ambushed by the Sultan of Mysore’s troops who were “likely to be thus nefariously employed” (14), it remains unclear whether he is imprisoned or dead as a result of this catastrophe. As Colley documents, Tipu’s captives comprised not only prisoners of war, but also civilians such as Henry Becher, “a trader held captive in Mysore between 1790 and 1792, whose story became the first ever English-language text published in Bombay” (Captives 277). In addition, Bayly has shown how trading practices played a crucial role in fueling the Anglo-Mysore wars since Tipu and Hyder “put themselves into the demonology of British imperial rhetoric by trying to exclude European trade and by acting as universal monopolists” (59) at a time when the Company was engaged in its “own relentless drive for a monopoly of force, labour and revenue in the sub-continent” (60). Thus, in Bayly’s view, they became “examples of ‘oriental despotism’, ‘Muslim tyranny’ or ‘the spirit of self-sufficiency’ ” (59) in large part due to their competitive and effective fiscal policies. He concludes: “By the early 1790s it had become clear that the Company could never coexist with such more vigorous Indian régimes which sought to face down European power with its own weapons, exclusions of rivals from trade and a strong mobile army” (60). The sudden reversal of her father’s fortunes results in Olivia, an Indian heiress with a considerable fortune, becoming, for all practical purposes, a penniless and destitute orphan. Olivia is taken out of her “grand London school” (Captives in India 14) and sent off to an inexpensive boarding school where she is given a basic education and loses all trace of the autocratic behavior she had displayed

Resisting Tipu • 63 as a child in the company of Lalee. Olivia has to literally lose all the conspicuous Indian influences in her life—her wealth and her native servant—before she can be fully reabsorbed into English society. At school, she often wonders if her father is alive, and has fits of sadness on his account. There is an indescribable fear in her that her father may be infected, diseased or infantilized by his encounter with Tipu, and she dreams of restoring to him his equanimity and health. The dread of India as debilitating and enfeebling to the English mind—as envisioned by Burke in the last years of the eighteenth century—is a theme that is repeatedly invoked by Hofland in Captives in India. Hofland suggests that India can be both mentally and physically incapacitating to the English when Olivia tells Adelaide, her only friend in school: “Oh! Adelaide, if I could be so happy as to find my own [father] restored to me, were he as imbecile as palsy might render him, as wayward as idiocy might induce, or as tyrannical as eastern despotism might teach” (30). Adelaide, who has never set foot outside the shores of England, and is unfamiliar with the potency of India and the living conditions in Tipu’s dungeons, asks rather naively: “but by what process can the human mind be led to forgo the dictates of its own inherent intellect, or acquired knowledge, and accept the dictum of ignorance and weakness? the thing is utterly impossible!” (30). Her naïve assumption that the “human mind” is incorruptible is not only challenged by Olivia, but also validated towards the end of the narrative, when Francis Falkland is rescued and is recovering from his terrible ordeal; he speaks of the horrors of captivity in the dungeons of Seringapatam in the most chilling terms. According to him, once he is captured by Tipu’s soldiers, he becomes “a prisoner loaded with fetters—the inhabitant of a dungeon, unvisited by the light of heaven, and surrounded by the victims of a tyranny endured already so long as to preclude all hope for the future on any principle of reasonable expectation” (247). He tells Olivia and Frank that he is unable to “reveal the ‘secrets of my prison-house’ ” since it would be impossible “to speak of the frantic madness, the paralytic idiocy, the pining inanity of those around me, or to tell one of the many pitiable histories that met my ear in that den of misery” (247; emphasis in the original). Thus, Hofland suggests—contrary to the evidence provided by the very existence of the numerous captivity narratives—that there is an unspeakable quality about what can happen to an Englishman’s mind when he falls prey to Eastern tyranny and malevolence of the kind typified by Tipu and his guards.

The Indian Napoleon It has been well documented by Bayly, Colley and others that Tipu’s association with revolutionary France—as well as his efforts to befriend Napoleon—made him, in the eyes of the British, an especially dangerous enemy. Even prior to 1789, Tipu, in an attempt to form alliances against the British,

64 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature modernize his army using European technology, and cultivate commerce, sent ambassadors to the court of Louis XVI at Versailles and had close ties with the French representatives in India and Mauritius. Susan Stronge has noted that delegations were sent to France—and to Turkey—to “request military assistance . . . generate ambitious international trade routes, and to attract craftsmen and new technologies to Mysore” (20). Tipu, as Stronge lists, was most interested in acquiring “cannon founders, gunsmiths and experts who knew how to make glass, mirrors and china,” and, from Louis XVI in particular, he requested “barometers, spectacles, clocks and clockmakers, as well as seeds, plants and people to cultivate them” (20). While contemporary historians have largely viewed such measures as evidence of Tipu’s innovativeness as a ruler, the British demonization of the Mysore ruler—in part due to the French connection—flourished well into the early twentieth century, as is borne out by this passage in Lawrence’s introduction to Captives of Tipu: “In 1798 a Jacobin club in Seringapatam planted a Tree of Liberty; and the autocrat, wearing a red cap, was evoked as Citizen Tipu Sultan” (11–12; emphasis in the original). As Bayly wryly observes: “the timely black symbolism in which the Sultan planted a republican ‘liberty tree’ at his capital and donned a cap of liberty was a gift to [British] propagandists” (114). Propaganda notwithstanding, it is a fact that, in the 1790s, Tipu did, indeed, actively pursue a friendship with the revolutionary government, and the British became increasingly worried about such developments as the Jacobin club and the correspondence between the sultan and Napoleon, especially after they were able to intercept a letter in which the Mysore ruler is addressed as “the most Magnificent SULTAUN, our greatest friend, Tippoo Saib” (quoted in Forrest 276) by Britain’s greatest foe. Written in February 1799 from Cairo—a few months before Tipu’s death and during Napoleon’s disastrous campaign in Egypt—the letter (which never did reach Tipu as it was intercepted in Jeddah) reads: “You have already been informed of my [Napoleon’s] arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible Army, full of the desire of relieving you [Tipu] from the iron yoke of England” (quoted in Forrest 276). It ends with a wish inimical to the British: “May the Almighty increase your Power and destroy your enemies” (quoted in Forrest 276); such intimate contact with Napoleon, especially at a time when Anglo-French relations were severely strained, made the British even more wary of Tipu. In fact, Colley—basing her argument on Bayly’s thesis about the relations between Mysore and revolutionary France—goes so far as to suggest that in the 1780s and 1790s, “despotism was not a characteristic attributed to Tipu solely or primarily because he was an Indian or Muslim ruler. It was rather—in the British propaganda version—something he shared with Napoleon, yet another usurper” (Captives 297). Inevitably, then, at several points in her story, Hofland collapses the fear of the French and the threat of Tipu, and both are viewed as natural enemies of the British. In fact, en route to India, the cousins briefly visit, of all places,

Resisting Tipu • 65 revolutionary France and witness a mob scene that is an omen of things to come.13 They are barely able to escape the terrors of a revolution gone amok, and the language used to describe the scene is similar to their account of suffocation and claustrophobia suffered in Tipu’s Calicut. In France, their maid barges into their apartment “in all the agony of terror, declaring that they were beset as aristocrats and would be torn to pieces, or hanged in five minutes, as “the people” were proceeding to destroy the dwelling of a rich Commissionaire, and would take that of the English Milord in their way back” (Captives in India 39). As a result of this dramatic declaration, “the very prospect of instant death was before them all,” and when the mob passes their hiding place without discovering them, “the hearts which had stood still from terror and surprise, again beat or rather throbbed tumultuously, with that blended sensation of fear and hope which proved their relief to be still partial” (39). The unspeakable fear of being mutilated by a mob as frenzied as the French is revived when the cousins arrive in Calicut and find their ship swarming with sepoys who, in their minds, are ferocious enough to maliciously dismember and disfigure them. The helpless agitation that Frank feels is reminiscent of their conflicting emotions during their French ordeal: “The anger of Frank kept him in a state of perpetual fever, whilst his sense of the misfortune they suffered, and the evils too likely to ensue, by turns subjected him to the most heart-sinking sensations he had ever experienced during their disastrous expedition” (130). He realizes, to his dismay, that although they survived the horrors of revolutionary France, they are now “to await the examination or abide the sentence of this eastern despot [Suder Cawn], the vicegerent of one only more terrible than himself [Tipu]” (130). To add to his agitation, the captain of the ship requests them to pass as French citizens, since Mysore is an ally of France. It is a plan that appalls Frank: “But for her sake [Olivia’s] he could not even for an hour have personated one of that disloyal and fantastic people, who in his opinion united cruelty with frivolity, the ferocity of the savage with the vanity of the coxcomb” (127). Although Frank still has a little way to go before he sheds his fascination for India, it is apparent that he has begun the process of questioning his boyhood enchantments and dreams. Olivia—who has no delusions about India—not surprisingly, is even more terrorized than Frank by their predicament: Every step increased the difficulty with which she proceeded, and at the same time the ill humour of her conductors, who urged them to hasten by menaces and insults, which it was as unmanly to inflict as useless to resent, but which placed their situation in a more deplorable light in Olivia’s eyes than she had hitherto held it to be, and forcefully recalled to her memory every description of eastern tyranny she had ever heard, together with a full conviction that if her poor father had become the prisoner of people like these, he had long since been their victim also. (130)

66 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Mirroring her horror of the French mob, Olivia is further mortified to realize that they have become a public spectacle as her “pitiable appearance excited the risibility of many who came out of their houses, in spite of the still pelting rain, to gaze upon the captives as on enemies whom it was right to punish and natural to despise” (130–31). One of my framing arguments in this book is that colonial children’s fiction offers opportunities for pedagogic narratives. For instance, in Little Henry and Little Lucy, Sherwood tells her young English readers unequivocally that it is their duty to prompt a moral and religious rebirth in their native bearers. In Captives in India, on the other hand, Hofland acknowledges that young people are “both blessed with minds eager to increase knowledge, and imaginations stimulated with curiosity” (26), which is, arguably, why Frank is so enamored of India. At the same time, Hofland is quick to warn her readers that there are behavioral boundaries that one should not attempt to cross, and holds up Tipu’s—and his agents’—tyrannical excesses as supreme examples of aberrant conduct. In this bildungsroman, Tipu and his men are constructed by Hofland as the antithesis of the English: cruel oppressors who should not be imitated by English children under any circumstances. Although Tipu has the kind of power and potency that a boy as fanciful as Frank might initially find attractive, ultimately the ruler of Mysore is seen as an Indian Napoleon whose deviancy and despotism must be curbed. Thus, partly because of his French links, and partly because of his historical reputation among the British as a willful despot, Tipu becomes a particularly convenient anti-hero for a juvenile bildungsroman. A few decades later, Henty, for example, prefaces The Tiger of Mysore with a description of Tipu which is clearly meant to forewarn children about his wicked ways: “Tippoo . . . revelled in acts of the most abominable cruelty. It would seem that he massacred for the very pleasure of massacring, and hundreds of British captives were killed by famine, poison, or torture, simply to gratify his lust for murder” (9). And, as Hofland cautions her readers in Captives in India, it is not the four-legged tigers but the “two-legged ones” (69) that are the source of grave danger for the young travelers. Undoubtedly, this is an obvious reference to Tipu and his identification with the tiger, an animal that becomes synonymous with his name. Raised in a princely state where tiger-wrestling was a popular court sport (Plotz, “Imaginary Kingdoms” 135), and where tigers were revered and feared by its subjects, Tipu consciously presented himself as a majestic and royal tiger-king. As Veronica Murphy points out: Tiger motifs adorned most of his possessions, from his magnificent throne to the uniforms of his guards. Among the most important objects to be decorated in this way were arms and armour. Much of his ordnance (for example, cannon and mortars), was cast in the form of tigers. The hand weapons . . . were generally embellished with gold and silver tiger motifs, the animal in some

Resisting Tipu • 67 instances shown devouring a prostate human figure or vanquishing the double-headed eagle of Hindu Mysore. They were also inlaid with Koranic or other pious Islamic inscriptions, in which the calligraphy was arranged to form tiger masks. . . . While the tradition that Tipu’s own name means ‘tiger’ in Canarese (a South Indian language) cannot be substantiated, he undoubtedly saw himself as the royal tiger, appointed to devour God’s enemies, and became known as the Tiger of Mysore. (187) Archer, in Tippoo’s Tiger, and, subsequently, Stronge have described in great detail the sensational and lasting impact of the most legendry of all Tipu’s tigerthemed possessions: the infamous ‘Tippoo’s Tiger,’ a large wooden musical toy, now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which shows a prostrate British soldier being mauled to death by a tiger.14 Citing a passage from Hofland’s A Visit to London (1814), in which Emily, the heroine of the novel, is petrified upon seeing ‘Tippoo’s Tiger,’ Stronge notes that ‘Tippoo Saib’ was a very recognizable name in Britain by around 1814 (73). Stronge’s observation is of particular interest to me, as it shows that Hofland—like most Britons of her time—had a deep awareness (and abhorrence) of Tipu and his musical toy tiger. Hofland describes ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ at great length in A Visit to London: “ ‘This thing, sir,’ said the librarian, ‘was made for the amusement of Tippoo Saib; the inside of the tyger is a musical instrument; and by touching certain keys, a sound is produced resembling the horrid grumblings made by the tyger on seizing his prey; on touching others, you hear the convulsive breathings, the suffocated shriek of his victim’ ” (150).15 In fact, one of Emily’s male companions, during the visit to the East India House, is repulsed to the point where he feels that “nothing less than existing proof of such depravity could have led one to believe human nature was capable of such absurd and hateful passions as that which possessed the tyrant in question” (151). More significantly, however, it has a terrifying effect on Emily, who is left “pale and trembling” (151) after her encounter with ‘Tippoo’s Tiger,’ and asks to be taken home immediately. Another of her male companions on this unfortunate visit declares: “the extraordinary and disgusting spectacle of human depravity we have just witnessed has deranged her nerves very naturally” (152). The Englishwoman’s position, it would seem, is far more perilous than the Englishman’s upon encountering Tipu and his tigers, even if it is in the form of an inanimate object. In Captives in India, Olivia, too, notes rather ominously early on in their journey: “If the tiger would lie still I might aim aright; but if he sprang, it would be all over with me” (69). Undoubtedly, then, the image of an English person being sprung on by a tiger not only has its conceptual roots in the large toy that was shipped all the way to England after the storming of Seringapatam, but, more importantly, it is also gendered by Hofland in two of her novels and reproduced as a specific threat to young Englishwomen. And, as I will argue a little further on, although Olivia is not literally attacked by a tiger in southern India, Hofland suggests to her readers that she meets with a fate far more hazardous when she resists the enfeebling,

68 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature

Figure 2.1 ‘Tippoo’s Tiger.’ Reproduced with kind permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

harrowing, and highly sexualized nature of Oriental captivity instigated by Tipu’s subordinates.

Captive in Calicut As noted earlier, some of the events described in Captives in India are taken directly from Fay’s account of her captivity, which are then embellished by Hofland. In her letters, Fay vividly describes the conditions of their confinement once she and her husband arrive in Calicut and are taken to an abandoned English factory where they are supposed to await an audience with the Governor of the province: “But here I cannot describe the horror which seized me on finding, we were totally in the power of wretches, who, for, aught I knew, intended to strip and murder us: why else were we sent to an empty house?” (120). Inside the factory she looks for a spot where she “might crawl, and lie down unseen by the Seapoys,” but when she wakes up, she discovers to her consternation that the room is infested with little creatures: “the place was found to be swarming with venomous reptiles; perhaps a hundred scorpions and centipedes—happily I slept too soundly to feel them, and I remained unmolested; but had I moved hand or foot, what might have been the consequence!” (121). The other incident that Fay highlights, which is retold by Hofland with suitable exaggeration, is an unpleasant encounter with a prison guard upon returning from a walk: “At the moment I turned round to fasten

Resisting Tipu • 69 the heavy door, he ran into it, pushing it against me, with such a violence that the large key which had unfortunately a very long shank, was by this means struck directly against my right breast, and gave me the most excruciating pain. I fainted through excessive agony, and was with difficulty recovered” (126). Although it is left unclear if there is a deliberate attempt on the guard’s part to strike her, Fay is, typically, able to invest the moment with appropriate tension when she declares rather dramatically: “Much I fear the consequences of this accident will embitter my future life” (126). By all accounts, the Fays’ detention was a brief one as they were able to correspond with the British Governor in Tellicherry and reach Mysore before hostilities between the British and Hyder commenced. In Hofland’s version, too, the cousins are taken to an abandoned house where they spend the initial stages of their captivity. Like Fay, Olivia fi nds herself in a room crawling with vile creatures, which leads Frank to exclaim with horror: “Why! the whole place is swarming with scorpions, centipedes, and all the horrible plagues of the country” (Captives in India 135). However, Hofland noticeably—and ominously—heightens the pitch of Olivia’s meeting with the guard as the latter is shown to deliberately and maliciously harm the young girl: “the man was so angry that he struck her a deep and violent blow with the key he held in his hand” (152). There is apparently nothing accidental about this incident and the assault weapon is described by Hofland in great detail: “The instrument, like all others then in use in the East, was made of a hard wood, about a foot in length, and, from the way in which it was held, inflicted a severe wound from the shoulder to the elbow” (152). While it is clear that Hofland cherry-picks events from Fay’s letters, it is equally evident that the tenor of Frank and Olivia’s imprisonment resembles the more well-known Mysore captivity narratives such as Bristow’s and Scurry’s in which guards are routinely presented as menacing and threatening figures. Scurry, for example, is unequivocal about how much he loathes his guards by proclaiming that he “despised those wretches, who so far swerved from the dictates of every honorable and manly principle, as to treat us with such baseness” (218). Bristow also makes several references to acts of cruelty displayed by his guards, described as “our villains,” who exhibit a “singular species of cruelty that had no object in view than wanton malice” and take “barbarous delight . . . in tormenting and insulting the English prisoners” (Narrative 46).16 Frank, who is thoroughly chastised by his ordeal—especially after Olivia’s confrontation with the guard—grows up, as it were, in the prison cells of Calicut. Although young Frank dreamed of Oriental splendor and riches in the English countryside, his impetuousness and willfulness are brought under control and replaced by a pious and calm demeanor in India. Interestingly, it is Olivia’s sweet temperament and unwavering faith in God at a time of adversity that are partly responsible for the changes in his character. Towards the end of the narrative, he tells his uncle (who has, in fact, survived his own captivity in Tipu’s dungeons) how much he has improved as a person:

70 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Had you known, dear sir, what a coxcomb I used to be—yes! a vain conceited coxcomb—had you any idea how passionate, nay, even furious my temper was—how decidedly I was a mere man of the world, delighted with its lowest frivolities—how unequal to bearing with common fortitude the evils of imprisonment, desiring continually rather to brave death than learn the duty of resignation; in short, did you know, could you conceive even one half of my faults, then might you be aware with what kindness and wisdom, what gentleness and forbearance, she [Olivia] ameliorated the ferocity and consoled the despondency of my nature. (Captives in India 243) One of the ways in which Olivia tames the “ferocity” in Frank is by introducing him to the power of daily prayer in the prison cells. One of the few things that survives the tumultuous journey is Olivia’s prayer book, and the cousins are consoled by reading aloud from it. In fact, at one point in the narrative, when Frank fears that a drugged Olivia might be forced to enter Suder Cawn’s harem, in order to make her aware of the precariousness of her position, he attempts to send her “a few words torn from her Prayer-book” (179) in the hope that she is able revive from her drug-induced stupor. It is noteworthy that the religious overtones of Hofland’s text mirror attempts by the Mysore captives—at least in their narratives—to position themselves unwaveringly as British Christian subjects in the face of what they perceive as Eastern Islamic despotism. For instance, Lawrence records that Captain John Lindsay—captured during the defeat in Pollilur—lists, among his prized secret possessions, a Prayer Book, and the much-read anonymous Journal was written “within a very small compass, on a slip of Indian paper, in such a hand as that in which innocent idlers write out the Lord’s Prayer within the circumference of the halfpenny” (quoted in Lawrence 14). Bristow, too, declares that English prisoners lost no opportunity to show “contempt for the religion of our tormentors” (Narrative 35) and, despite his trials and tribulations, which include circumcision and conversion, claims to remain devoted to his original faith and country. Hofland is also cognizant of the fact that there are, in the dungeons of Mysore, Englishmen who have joined forces with Tipu and have, irreversibly, imbibed all of his so-called deviant traits. It is striking that such individuals have been treated with particular contempt in British appraisals of Mysore captivity accounts, as is apparent in Lawrence’s veiled criticism of “European renegades” (16) over a century later. Lawrence makes special mention of John Dempster, a former officer of the Bengal Artillery, who shows up in both Bristow’s and Scurry’s narratives, as a most vile example of an Englishman: “Most conspicuous among the English deserters was Dempster, universally detested by his compatriots. To Scurry and Bristow and their like he never disguised his baseness” (Lawrence 16). Subsequently, Teltscher has analyzed why crossover figures such as Dempster—whose rejection of his English identity is so

Resisting Tipu • 71 complete that he oversees the circumcision of his fellow-countrymen—have proved so troubling to the British imagination: “The deserter who voluntarily transfers his allegiance from Britain to Mysore embodies that appropriation of the West by the East which constitutes the most threatening aspect of the sultans’ rule” (243). Hofland presents her readers with Sullivan—her own version of Dempster—a traitor who goes so far as to thwart the cousins’ attempts to escape from their prison house. Nigel Leask, among others, has shown that a “presiding anxiety” at the heart of the British colonial project in the East in the early nineteenth century is the belief that an Englishman “reduces the imperialist Self to a level with its oriental Other” (4); an apprehension, as Judith Plotz detects, which is voiced openly by Sir James Mackintosh, who asserts in his memoirs that, “every Englishman who resides here very long, has, I fear, his mind either emasculated by submission, or corrupted by despotic power” (quoted in Plotz, “Imaginary Kingdoms” 135). Mackintosh had strong links with India: he became Recorder (judge) of Bombay in 1804, a post which earned him a knighthood, and, subsequently, returned to England in 1811, to become a Member of Parliament in 1813 and a professor at Haileybury— the training-ground for Company recruits—from 1818 to 1824. Unabashedly citing examples from his acquaintances and fellow-countrymen in India, he goes on to state that Englishmen inevitably become “Brahminized” (weak and devious) or “sultanized” (despotic) (quoted in Plotz, “Imaginary Kingdoms” 135; emphasis in the original) as a result of living in India. The tremendous anxiety expressed by Burke during Hastings’s trial—about the dangers inherent in an Englishman negotiating a colonial identity for himself—thus continues to be voiced in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as is evident in Mackintosh’s melodramatic declaration. And Hofland is not impervious to such colonial stereotypes, as is evident in her delineation of Sullivan, a deceitful and tyrannical Tipu aficionado. Like Dempster, Sullivan has been monstrously transformed by his stay in India; not only is he a great admirer of Tipu, but he has also willingly—and irredeemably—relinquished his English traits and attire. When Olivia and Frank meet him for the first time, they are struck by his non-English appearance: “His dress was that of the country, and so splendid as to communicate the idea of Suder Cawn himself being their visitant; but his gait did not accord with their ideas of eastern viceroyalty, and a reiterated glance showed that his features were not of the eastern character” (Captives in India 154–55). Although they are initially delighted to hear an “English tongue in a strange land,” they “shrank intuitively from the forward bearing and bold eye of their visitor” whose “apparel conveyed an idea of his being in the service of their captors” (155). Olivia is convinced that Sullivan is as treacherous and untrustworthy as the people he serves: “every recollection she had of his manners and conversation, as well as the belief that he had taken service against his country, and with the tyrant who held their fate in his hands, induced her to regard him as a dangerous person” (158). His desertion becomes further evident

72 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature when he tries to flatter Frank into supporting Tipu’s cause by telling him that he is the “born to be a hero, and turn the fate of empires; and it would be a thousand pities he should ever return to the wile countries of wicious Europe” (164). The idea that India offered an expansive space for British heroism—to be voiced by Benjamin Disraeli later on in the century when he famously views the East as a career—is being invoked by Sullivan, but, in the nascent years of colonial rule, it is largely devoid of the sense of security and stability that it represented in Victorian England. Frank steadfastly rejects the opportunity to “take service in Tippoo’s army” and amass “Indian wealth” (165) as by now he has fully realized how foolish and faithless it would be for him to abandon his English principles for Indian glory. His captivity has thus matured him to a point where he is able to easily resist the temptation of unlimited wealth and Oriental splendor. If Frank, the young Englishman on the brink of adulthood, is in danger of falling prey to India’s allure of wealth and seamless power, Olivia, the young Englishwoman, is literally in danger of being seized, seduced, and raped during her stay in India. Jenny Sharpe has shown that the figure of an Englishwoman becomes highly sexualized in post-Mutiny Anglo-Indian fiction and is deployed as the object of an Indian man’s rapacious desires; thus, the idea of rape—of an Englishwoman by an Indian man—becomes a governing allegory of empire after 1857. I suggest, however, that the sexually vulnerable Englishwoman of adult colonial fiction, whom Sharpe delineates so brilliantly, finds her way into pre-Mutiny juvenile colonial literature as well. Colley cites a sexually charged recollection of Tipu’s corpse by a high-ranking British army officer, who asserts that “A promiscuous intercourse with the [female] sex had left its effects on the Sultan’s body” (quoted in Captives 298), which clearly suggests that the Sultan of Mysore was not only regarded as despotic, but was also becoming an increasingly lustful and debauched individual in the British imagination. Thus it is not surprising that the sexual potency of Tipu and his associates and the seemingly defenseless position of a young Englishwoman in India are explored in this colonial bildungsroman written in the mid-1830s, by which time, Tipu’s alleged excesses—both sexual and political—have become firmly established in the British consciousness. In other words, Hofland creates a narrative of ravished womanhood when Olivia, who is separated from Frank after their failed attempt to escape, is drugged, mentally incapacitated, and made to wear elaborate Indian clothes by Tipu’s agents. Unlike Frank, Olivia, once she is estranged from Lalee, is unwavering in her belief that English principles are superior to Indian ones; however, upon being drugged in Calicut, she loses her power of reason and seems to be in a state of “apparent insensibility” (Captives in India 182). Frank, who by now is suspicious that Olivia will be forced to join Suder Cawn’s harem, balks at the idea of her being “consigned by hellish arts to the dullness of apathy and the imbecility of premature and unnatural decay” (179). If, in the 1780s, Burke warns of young English boys prematurely atrophying away in India, by the 1830s, Hofland layers—and genders—this anxiety of empire

Resisting Tipu • 73 by suggesting that young English girls are also equally at risk. Miraculously, however, Suder Cawn (described as evil oppressor) makes her appear before him dressed in opulent Indian clothes, but changes his mind about possessing her, and both Frank and she are returned to their prison cells. And although Olivia “knelt before him [Suder Cawn] whom she was expected henceforth to acknowledge as her ‘bosom’s lord’ ” (182), Suder Cawn does not take advantage of her groveling condition. In fact, once her veil is removed, “Suder Cawn started from his seat; disgust, disappointment, almost terror, were observable in his expressive features. Waving his hand, and giving a hurried command to the soldiers near him, he instantly left the place, and the veil of Olivia was thrown over her” (182). Olivia is thus saved from what is regarded as a terrible ordeal for a Christian Englishwoman. As Frank exclaims: “I say the Christian woman dies ere she is compelled to enter the harem of this detestable infidel” (179). The cousins believe that the reason for this sudden decision can be attributed to the fact that Suder Cawn, intimidated by the news of a British offensive on Seringapatam, realizes that the enemy troops are too close at hand for him to get away with such a rapacious act. While this may be the literal reason, I propose that Captives in India is written with a dual audience of adults and adolescents in mind; thus, Hofland attempts to sublimate the sexual tension inherent in such an encounter by simultaneously acknowledging the sexual threat that Tipu and his henchmen pose, and diffusing it before it can be consummated. However, by introducing a highly sexualized encounter between Olivia and Suder Cawn, but stopping short of the actual act of rape, Hofland is nevertheless able to create the fiction of seduced English womanhood and allude to the unmentionable dangers facing a young Englishwoman in the colonies. It is evident, then, that the pre-Mutiny texts of empire by Sherwood and Hofland consciously (and unconsciously) foreground the hazards faced by British youth—both male and female—in India, and are extremely attentive to the insecurities and pitfalls inherent in the colonial project. However, as I will argue in the next two chapters, once the British Raj becomes increasingly muscular and, indeed, more confident of its own strengths, the children, too, become undaunted about the perils of living and working in the subcontinent. Far from being threatened or intimidated by India, Duncan and Kipling present us with Indian-born English children who are robustly certain of their place in the subcontinent as leaders and empire-makers. In fact, consider, as an example of this discernible shift, the upbeat mood of Henty’s The Tiger of Mysore, which is starkly different from Hofland’s Tipu narrative; there is hardiness and cheerfulness about Dick Holland, even during his bleakest moments in Mysore, that is noticeably absent in the more embattled Falkland cousins. That said, it is not all doom and gloom in the pre-1857 texts; it is significant that Sherwood and Hofland, who are indubitably alert to the grave misgivings that inevitably accompany the task of empire-building, still insist on wrapping up their narratives on a seemingly bullish note. If, ultimately, in Sherwood’s texts, the Indian bearers are shown to be morally redeemed by

74 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature their embracing of Christianity, in Hofland’s text, the need to diminish and defeat India—in the form of the ‘despotic’ sultan—is equally palpable; the novel presents us with several characters who are influenced by and deeply connected to Tipu (most notably Suder Cawn and Sullivan), and although each of them is built up to embody the very essence of the Mysore ruler’s tyranny, they are rendered impotent and powerless at key moments in the text. And, as I will argue in the following section, even Tipu, the most fearful of all Indian opponents, is transformed into a piteous and vanquished figure in the concluding moments of Captives in India.

Storming Seringapatam Although the text resonates with Tipu’s presence and constantly alludes to the threat he poses to the colonial mission, the Sultan of Mysore himself makes a brief appearance, and, significantly, it is at a moment of defeat. In keeping with events in Fay’s letters, Frank and Olivia are rescued from their prison house in Calicut and find themselves heading towards Seringapatam. As it is the closing stages of the third Anglo-Mysore war, Cornwallis, too, is victoriously marching towards Tipu’s capital in order to storm it. Hofland, significantly, chooses to end the novel with the culmination of the third Anglo-Mysore War, which is most remembered for Tipu handing over two of his young sons to Cornwallis as hostages and freeing the prisoners of war, whose captivity narratives I have alluded to earlier in this chapter. Although the fall of Seringapatam in 1799 is the more famous historical date, in its day, the 1792 victory, masterminded by Cornwallis—which reduced Tipu’s territory in half and required him to pay a huge war indemnity—was, as P.J. Marshall observes, well documented by English newspapers such as the London Gazette and the Morning Chronicle. Marshall, in his illuminating article on the impact of the third Anglo-Mysore War on the British public, proposes that this event captured the imagination of the nation in a manner that was unprecedented for a battle fought in India, in part because Britain was not engaged in fighting a war in any other part of the world between 1790 and 1792, and, consequently, “there were no other campaigns to compete for attention” (58). The press, keen to milk this event, generated a huge amount of information about the war from sources as varied as authorized reports released by the East India Company and the British government to more informal news garnered from recently-returned Englishmen from India and personal correspondences (Marshall 58). The Morning Chronicle, for instance, patriotically claimed that it made it its “daily pursuit to obtain every possible light on a subject so interesting to our country” (quoted in Marshall 59). In addition, several books were published shortly after the third AngloMysore War to “gratify current public curiosity” and included elaborate “maps and plans of sieges or battles” (Marshall 60). The most widely circulated among them, in Marshall’s estimation, were James Rennell’s Marches of the British

Resisting Tipu • 75 Armies in the Peninsula of India During the Campaigns of 1790 and 1791 (1792); an anonymous Narrative of the Operations of the British Army in India: From 21st April to the 16th July 1791 (1792); Alexander Dirom’s Narrative of the Campaign in India, which Terminated with the War with Tippoo Sultan, in 1792 (1793); and Roderick Mackenzie’s Sketch of the War with Tippoo Sultan (1793). According to Archer and, more recently, Stronge, the events of this war, especially the handing over of Tipu’s sons to Cornwallis, also inspired a large number of paintings, prints, engravings, porcelain pieces, and commemorative memorabilia such as “tin tea trays or Chinese glass paintings” (Archer, India and British Portraiture 424). Furthermore, in Marshall’s opinion, the third Anglo-Mysore War was perceived by the British as a “national one fought for national objectives, not a local Indian one in which the arms of the state were helping the Company to further its own particular interests” (67), and the “way in which Tipu was portrayed made it easy for the eighteenth-century public to identify him as a national enemy” (70). The invasion of Seringapatam by Cornwallis, the spectacle of Tipu’s defeat, the liberation of the captives held in the dungeons, and the relinquishing of Tipu’s sons are described in intricate detail by Hofland. It is apparent that she must have been aware of the sequence of events, as interpreted by numerous British commentaries such as Dirom’s Narrative of the Campaign in India,

Figure 2.2 A painting (c. 1793) by Robert Home depicting Tipu’s captive sons being received by Cornwallis. Courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London.

76 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature and was, as a result, able to produce a spectacular victory scene in her book that parallels contemporary accounts of the outcome in 1792. Cornwallis is portrayed as a conquering hero who is able to inspire his men to fight against a cruel despot: “Earl Cornwallis, as a master spirit, subjected the refractory, persuaded the weak, and allured the ambitious, binding all in such a spell as rendered them not only obedient to his will, but complaisant to each other, and firm in the purposes of their alliance” (Captives in India 192). Frank, too, stirred by feelings of nationalism and the belief that his uncle is a victim of Tipu’s tyranny, is energized into joining the war effort: “all he had seen of the east led him to believe that his uncle had long been the victim of despotism so universally prevalent, and which he sincerely hoped his own country would be the happy medium of fi nally destroying. Under this view of the case, he entered into his journey with sanguine hopes and buoyant spirits, inwardly trusting that by some fortunate circumstance he should himself be enabled to lift his arm against the foes of his country” (189). The overwhelming desire to destroy Tipu is evident when Frank proclaims rather patriotically: “I owe Tippoo Saib reprisals on my own account, and also as a British subject” (193). Finally, Frank’s maturation from a willful boy seduced by the opulence of India to a loyal “British subject” is fully realized. However, the British are not the only people who are portrayed as victims of Tipu’s oppression for “surrounding the British encampment, lay the gay and splendid tents of the native princes, allied to punish the encroachments and revenge the injuries they had suffered from the mighty tyrant” (192). British historians, up until the early twentieth century, had a standard script for Tipu: they built him up as a usurper under whose reign non-Muslim Indians were oppressed, only to be magnanimously liberated and rescued by righteous British intervention. In fact, as W. H. Hutton declares in The Cambridge History of India, published in 1929: “He [Tipu] ruled, as a convinced Muhammadan, over a population of Hindus, whose ancient sovereigns his father had dispossessed and whom he had bitterly persecuted. The district around Mysore abhorred him, and though the English found signs of prosperity within his domains these were certainly due to no inspiration of his own” (341–42). Thus, a motley and mismatched group of Indian allies bent on revenge, along with the British army commanded by Cornwallis, are able to successfully penetrate Tipu’s defenses and storm Seringapatam in a surprise attack conducted in the middle of the night. On entering the citadel, they discover Tipu’s famous captives (including Francis Falkland), and Hofland, clearly drawing from the myriad British accounts of captivity, describes them in the most pitiful and abject terms: “a prison had been forced in which were found no fewer than twenty-seven Europeans, not only cruelly laden with chains, but reduced by famine to such a degree that every countenance was frightfully cadaverous, every form that of a living skeleton” (Captives in India 195). The soldiers who liberate these prisoners are astounded at “such evidence of the tyrant’s wickedness, such proof of unimaginable cruelty” and

Resisting Tipu • 77 are initially “frozen” after witnessing such a “scene of protracted suffering,” but are quickly galvanized into “dealing death to the captors” (195). And as a result of this determined effort to destroy Tipu, the British army and its allies are able to gain control of Seringapatam. Hofland describes in great detail the spectacular handing over of Tipu’s young sons to Cornwallis that inspired so much iconography in Britain. The Madras Courier recorded on March 8, 1792—to be quickly reprinted in such British publications as The Gentleman’s Magazine (Marshall 60)—the ceremonial surrender of Tipu’s sons which concluded with a paternalistic Cornwallis “leading a prince in each hand to the extremity of the rich carpet which was spread on the ground, and embracing them with the utmost cordiality” (quoted in Marshall 59). However, it is Dirom’s account of this seemingly benign and benevolent post-battle encounter, in particular, which resonates with Hofland’s: “The Princes were dressed in long white muslin gowns, and red turbans. They had several rows of large pearls round their necks, from which was suspended an ornament consisting of a ruby and an emerald of considerable size” (Dirom 229). Dirom notes that Cornwallis not only “received the boys as if they had been his own sons” (229), but also that “his Lordship presented a handsome gold watch to each of the Princes, with which they seemed much pleased” (230). Hofland similarly describes Tipu’s sons—“arrayed alike in red turbans, and flowing dresses of white muslin, ornamented in every part with emeralds, rubies, and pearls”—as being warmly received by Cornwallis and, more significantly, shown to be happily and comfortably “seated on either hand of the victor [Cornwallis], gazing with delight on the glittering watches with which he had presented them” (Captives in India 205). Thus, in keeping with Dirom’s descriptions in Narrative of the Campaign in India, the fluttering tents, the magnanimity of Cornwallis, and the rich costumes worn by the young princes are vividly portrayed in Hofland’s novel. More fascinatingly, however, the look of abject suffering on Tipu’s face as he watches his sons leave—which is absent in Dirom’s version—is inserted by Hofland: “the keenest sorrow had pervaded the breast of the Sultan, when he contemplated parting with these his bosom’s dearest treasures” (204). It is significant that although Hofland’s narrative makes repeated references to Tipu and the atrocities that he has committed, his single appearance is at a moment of defeat, in which he is presented as a humbled and grieving parent. Significantly, it is Tipu’s children who become the true captives in India. Hofland, therefore, ends her novel with what she perceives is the right sort of captivity. In other words, while it is perilous and undesirable for English children to come in contact with the appalling potency of Indian captivity, it is appropriate for the British to take Indian children hostage and insulate them from the horrors of Indian tyranny (even if the tyrant is their own father). In doing so, Hofland is able to reverse the pattern of cultural contact that the British feared so much, since the Indian child is held by his British captors, while the English child is freed from the enfeebling conditions of Indian captivity.

78 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Hofland’s Tipu-inspired narrative has a rather neat resolution: Tipu’s captives (Francis Falkland, Frank, and Olivia), restored in health and spirits, are happily reunited after their terrible ordeal. Frank and Olivia fall in love with each other and, upon returning to England, get married. Frank, who was unable to join the East India Company due to his captivity, abandons his dreams of pursuing an Indian career; instead, he is content to lead the life of an English country gentleman. Thus, not only is the young cousins’ dreadful captivity over and they can return to what is regarded as the comparative peace of the English countryside, but the British, after several unsuccessful attempts, have also gained supremacy and control over a large portion of the Carnatic. The British obsession to control, subjugate, and demolish Tipu is realized yet again by the simple act of writing a novel in which the Sultan of Mysore is portrayed as a tigerish villain who can be tamed. More notably, the adolescent English boy and girl, who are initially ‘spoilt’ by Britian’s colonial encounter with India, are able to resist Indianization and mature into responsible British subjects.

Chapter Three The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero Bridging Cultural Divides in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib

On March 29, 1857, Mangal Pandey, a sepoy in the Bengal Army stationed in Barrackpore—a cantonment town near Calcutta—entered the annals of Indian history by firing at his British officers as a mark of protest against the newly introduced Enfield rifles whose cartridges were allegedly greased with cow and pig fat. Not only were the greased cartridges—which had to be bitten off before they could be loaded—viewed by Hindu and Muslim sepoys as an affront to their religious sentiments, but it also helped fuel suspicions that the British wanted to despoil their religion and caste in order to convert them to Christianity. Although Mangal Pandey was swiftly court-martialed and hanged by early April, his actions triggered further episodes of disobedience in army cantonments across northern India, and, by May 10, the Meerut seopys went so far as to kill their British officers, march to Delhi, and, on May 11, proclaim Bahadur Shah Zaffar, the aging Mughal emperor, the Emperor of Hindustan. The growing discontentment of the sepoys not just with the issue of the greased cartridges, but also with other official measures—such as pay cuts and new employment rules passed in 1856 due to aggressive expansion in Burma, Sind, and Afghanistan, which required them to serve abroad, and the annexation of the princely state of Awadh in 1856 (a region from where a large number of sepoys in the Bengal Army were recruited)—transformed Mangal Pandey’s sole act of defiance into a more widespread mutiny. Furthermore, the events which had commenced in Barrackpore in the spring of 1857 rapidly became much more than just a sepoy mutiny, as other elements of Indian society dissatisfied with British rule—such as oppressed peasants, disenfranchised local landlords, and dispossessed feudal rulers—also joined in the attempt to overthrow their British masters. The civilian rebellion, which 79

80 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature cut across class lines, gained momentum as peasants—burdened by harsh revenue demands, taluqdars (landlords)—smarting from land settlement policies, and feudal factions—discontented with Lord Dalhousie’s ‘Doctrine of Lapse,’ concurrently found ample cause to revolt against British rule.1 In fact, large parts of central and northern India effectively ceased being under British jurisdiction, and, as Lord Canning, the governor-general from 1856 to 1858 and, subsequently, the first viceroy of India from 1858 to 1862, writes on June 19, 1857: “In Rohilcund and the Doab from Delhi to Cawnpore and Allahabad the country is not only in rebellion against us, but is utterly lawless” (quoted in Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt 49).2 It was in the spring of 1858, after a brutal crackdown and counter-attack by an avenging imperial army— which included gory public executions of rebels and the torching of Indian villages—that British authority in upper India was restored. Although persistently classified as a sepoy mutiny by the British administrators who ruled India, which, as Thomas Metcalf has suggested, reveals a “determination to preserve British reputation as an imperial power” (Ideologies of the Raj 45), more recent historical explorations—especially those undertaken after India’s independence in 1947—have largely characterized it as a more extensive revolt or rebellion as the sepoys were joined by large sections of the civilian population.3 In any case, the Revolt (or rebellion) of 1857—also referred to as the Mutiny of 1857—was a watershed event that changed the nature of colonial rule in India.4 Once the Mutiny was quelled, the East India Company no longer had political or administrative powers, and these functions were taken over by the British Crown in 1858. India thus became part of the British Empire and was under the direct control of the British monarch. More significantly, as Francis Hutchins suggests, by quelling the Mutiny, the British also began to believe in the permanence and rightness of their rule in India far more than they ever had in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Hutchins’s view, the post-Mutiny British administrator in India “was likely to be a man excited by the desire to rule rather than reform, concerned with British might, . . . a man to whom the permanent subjection of India to the British yoke was not a repugnant thought” (xi). Metcalf, too, has similarly shown how central the Mutiny was in transforming the governing ideologies of empire: if in the past, the British—influenced by Evangelism and Utilitarianism—conceptualized the civilizing mission in terms of conversion and reform, whereby Indians could be “transformed into something resembling a facsimile of themselves [the British],” the post-Mutiny agenda was governed not only by notions of “India’s ‘difference’ ” (Ideologies of the Raj x), but also by an unwavering belief in the justness and legitimacy of their governance in the subcontinent. As Bernard Cohn writes: “To the English from 1859 to the early part of the twentieth century, the Mutiny was seen as a heroic myth embodying and expressing their central values which explained their rule in India to themselves—sacrifice, duty, fortitude; above all it symbolized the ultimate triumph over those Indians who had threatened properly constituted authority and order” (“Representing Authority in Victorian India” 179).

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 81 The Story of Sonny Sahib, Sara Jeanette Duncan’s only attempt at writing a children’s book, seeks to represent what is, arguably, the most troubling moment in colonial history: it begins with the birth of Sonny, an English boy, during the Indian Mutiny at Cawnpore (Kanpur).5 Although he is born in the midst of chaos and insurrection, he miraculously survives the betrayal, violence, and trauma experienced by the British during the Mutiny of 1857.6 In historian Stanley Wolpert’s estimation, the most far-reaching consequence of the Mutiny was the “psychological wall of racial distrust it raised between Britain’s white and India’s native “black” populations. The bitter legacy of countless atrocities committed in 1857 remained to poison the memories of Englishmen and Indians alike decades after the dust of battle settled” (244). In this chapter, however, I suggest that Duncan seeks to rewrite the Mutiny storyline of mutual suspicion and hatred as Sonny is smuggled away unscathed from Cawnpore, a city under siege, by loyal native servants.7 For the first ten years of his life he is raised as an Indian child before he can be united with his English father, who is a soldier in the British-India Army. Thus, Sonny is a country-born mutiny-child who is saved from the slaughter by faithful Indians and he grows up with an ability to understand and adapt to customs of his adopted country.8 I will read Sonny’s story of survival against great odds as an allegory of the empire saved, greatly improved, and reborn from the Mutiny that threatened to end British rule in India. Further, the Mutiny made the British realize the fragile nature of colonial authority and the potency of native resistance. This realization, in turn, necessitated—at least in juvenile Anglo-Indian literature of the 1890s—the deployment of a new kind of post-Mutiny British hero—one who was imagined to be able to better understand Indians and bridge the cultural gap between the colonizers and the colonized in order to prevent another Mutiny from occurring in India. I suggest that the ideal post-Mutiny hero is the Indian-born English child who is not only a location of agency, but also has the ability to consolidate British authority in the colonies.9 Sonny is the consummate post-Mutiny survivor; he is a unifier and consolidator of British and Indian relations, which were severely damaged by the Mutiny. Because he is brought up by Indians, he is acutely in tune with their cultural habits and customs, and because he is English by blood, he is inherently superior to the natives who raise him. A precursor to Rudyard’s Kipling’s Indo-Irish Kim, who is considered the “Little Friend of all the World” (67) by British and Indians alike, Sonny is equally beloved of both cultures.10

Duncan as an Anglo-Indian Author Although Duncan wrote several novels about Anglo-Indian society, she has most often been discussed as a Canadian author, and almost all of the scholarship on her views on British imperialism has been through a Canadian lens.11 Duncan, a professional journalist from Canada who arrived in India for the first time in her late twenties, however, spent a significant part of her adult

82 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature life in Calcutta as the wife of Everard Cotes, an entomologist at the Indian Museum. A keen observer of Anglo-Indian society, she was both an outsider (as a Canadian journalist) and an insider (as a Memsahib of the Raj), which gave her a unique and insightful perspective on British colonial life in India. In the most well-known of her Anglo-Indian novels, Set in Authority (1906)—a precursor to E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, as the events revolve around a trial (in this instance an English soldier is charged with the murder of an Indian)—and The Burnt Offering (1909)—which describes the attempted assassination of a British official by militant nationalists—Duncan takes an astute look at some of the weaknesses of turn-of-the-century AngloIndian society in the face of an increasingly vociferous and belligerent Indian national movement.12 In Set in Authority, for instance, Indian characters are given some amount of subjectivity as Duncan delineates the manner in which they are forced to mimic the superficial codes of behavior that dictate AngloIndian life in India. For instance, at a garden party—not unlike the bridge party described in A Passage to India—Sir Ahmed Hossein, an Indian judge, has to delicately negotiate his way around the snobbery of Anglo-Indian society: “Those among whom he had come were not his people; his ways were not their ways nor his thoughts their thoughts. . . . The drift and change in the tide of events had brought him there, and he had to make the best appeal he could. In every eye he saw the barrier of race, forbidding natural motions. . . . He acquitted himself with every propriety, but relief came where he moved away, and perhaps he knew it; he walked about curiously alone” (115). In The Burnt Offering, she hints that there may be a legitimate reason for the rise of Indian nationalism in the early years of the twentieth century: the novel ends with Sir Kristodas Mukerji, a judge and a staunch supporter of British rule in India, who “would have laughed at the idea that such achievement [colonial rule] could withdraw itself, or even question itself” (45–46) showing his discontentment as he returns “the decoration of the Order of the Indian Empire” (317) to the Foreign Office in Calcutta. As Teresa Hubel has observed, in Duncan’s depictions of Anglo-Indian society “an insightful [British] woman protagonist is usually surrounded by people who, though they may proclaim loudly their superiority over the indigenous population, are nevertheless ordinary and dull” (46). In fact, Hubel suggests that her novels tend to “challenge the stereotypes that had become entrenched in the British imagination, stereotypes about English heroes and heroines bringing civilization and cultural enlightenment to the darker races of India” (46). What is important to remember, however, is that despite Duncan’s stringent criticism of the complacency of Anglo-Indians—who are out of touch with the bourgeoning nationalistic sentiments of the people they govern—she is deeply sympathetic to the ideologies of empire, and never imagines the possibility of colonial governance being replaced by native rule. In his biography of Duncan, Thomas Tausky offers a fairly straightforward narrative of her attitudes to British rule in India over the course of her career, moving

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 83 from believing in its aims while criticizing their implementation to defending the position of the British as necessary and efficient rulers of a chaotic and undisciplined country. Misao Dean concurs, suggesting that, in the course of her life, Duncan “depicted the Empire as an ideal of human striving” (119). Nowhere is Duncan’s validation of the inherent superiority of the British rule and the inadequacy of native leadership more evident than in Sonny Sahib. It is in this children’s tale that one also sees her true horror of native insurgency, a notion that particularly haunted the post-Mutiny Anglo-Indian community, as well as her belief in the right kind of British rule(r).

Invoking the Mutiny at the End of the Nineteenth Century In “The Indian Mutiny in Fiction,” an article written in 1897 for Blackwood’s Magazine, Hilda Gregg proclaims: “of all of the great events of this century, as they are reflected in fiction, the Indian Mutiny has taken the firmest hold on the popular imagination” (quoted in Brantlinger 199). In more recent literary appraisals of the Mutiny, Patrick Brantlinger declares that “No episode in British imperial history raised public excitement to a higher pitch than the Indian Mutiny of 1857” given that “at least fifty [Mutiny novels] were written before 1900, and at least thirty more before World War II” (199), while Christopher Herbert describes its “epochal” importance not so much as a “geopolitical event,” but as a “literary” and “fictive” narrative which caused national trauma and was repeatedly retold by the British (3).13 In fact, several important Anglo-Indian writers such as Philip Meadows Taylor and Flora Annie Steel give us fictional accounts of the Mutiny, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century.14 Predictably, these Anglo-Indian narratives offer a colonialist understanding of the revolt; Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896), for instance, suggests that the British fought against a few aberrant and misdirected Indians rather than against the “millions of [Indian] peasants plowing their land peaceably in firm faith of a just master who would take no more than his due” (307). In the preface, Steel elaborates on why she chose the title for her novel, an explanation which is clearly meant to emphasize the anomalous and inexplicable nature of the uprising: “I have chosen it because when you ask an uneducated native of India why the Great Rebellion came to pass, he will, in nine cases out of ten reply, ‘God knows!’ He sent a Breath into the World.’ From this to a Spirit moving on the face of the Waters is not far” (vi; emphasis in the original). Similarly, Meadows Taylor’s interpretation of the Mutiny in Seeta (1872)—which traces an interracial relationship between an Indian woman and an Englishman—minimizes the scope of the Mutiny by casting its chief instigator, Azráel Pandé, as an erstwhile thug who lacks the redeeming qualities to be seen as an individual with legitimate grievances against the British. As Meadows Taylor acknowledges in his introduction to Seeta: “In Azráel Pandé I have endeavoured to depict the character of the rebel

84 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature and treasonable emissaries of the time. Malignant and persistent, they were led on by blind hatred and religious fanaticism, to the instigation and commission of crimes at which humanity shudders” (ix). One can certainly conjecture as to why the Mutiny became the focus of Anglo-Indian literature in the late nineteenth century. By the end of the century there was a certain distance from the moment of historical trauma that perhaps made it possible for influential Anglo-Indian writers like Duncan and Steel to tackle a subject that had bitter memories for both the British colonizers and the colonized Indian subjects. In other words, these authors were not directly affected by what Denis Judd has referred to as the “terrifying Indian rebellion” (70), and were thus able to reflect on and write about the uprising that shaped colonial negotiations after 1857. In a sense, as Metcalf argues in Ideologies of the Raj, colonial India cannot be understood without looking at the Mutiny as the defi ning event that informed the prevailing attitudes of the British Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century. Authors like Duncan and Steel certainly seem to recognize its significance as they invoke the Mutiny in their writings. Further, the rise of Indian nationalism and the changing relations between the British and the Indians towards the end of the nineteenth century—which I will explore in detail in the next two chapters—perhaps made it imperative, especially for Anglo-Indians, to revisit the Mutiny to understand how and why there was a breakdown of British authority in colonial India in order to prevent a repeat performance of such a violent colonial insurrection. Not only was the Indian National Congress, a national association for dissenting Indians, established in 1885, but also the discontent of the Indian nationalist with British rule was palpable by the 1880s. As Rajah Nil Krishna, one of the leaders of this nascent movement, declares in 1884, “Why did they [the British] teach us to read about liberty and justice and self-government, if after all we are to have none of these things?” (quoted in Hutchins 186). The restlessness and displeasure of the Indian nationalist could hardly be ignored by the Anglo-Indian community that had been scarred just a few decades ago by a bloody rebellion stemming from dissatisfaction with British rule. Thus, it was, perhaps, necessary to return to that insurgent moment in colonial history at a time when history could have potentially repeated itself. As suggested in earlier chapters, British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature typically attempts to seal the historical cracks that could potentially thwart Britain’s imperial ambitions in India and, in doing so, it seeks to establish the superiority of both the English child and British rule in India. Duncan not only adheres to the conventions of this conservative genre, but, by writing a narrative which alludes to 1857, she also seems to avow that the Mutiny needs to be represented, contained, and made accessible for her young audience. In Duncan’s version of the Mutiny narrative, an English child is saved from the bloodbath that erupts in Cawnpore rather than destroyed and mutilated by it. Like the old soldier in Kipling’s Kim (1901), who “rode seventy miles with an

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 85 English Memsahib and her babe” (101) in order to save them from being massacred by the blood-thirsty mutineers, Sonny, too, is protected by loyal Indian servants who will have nothing to do with the madness and insurrection that surrounds them. Further, the English child not only survives the Mutiny, but also becomes a savior and cultural bridge-builder, showing immense compassion and valor when interacting with Indians. Interestingly, in G.A. Henty’s In Times of Peril (1881), an example of nineteenth-century juvenile Mutiny fiction by a British author, it is noteworthy that the boy heroes, Dick and Ned Warrener, do not display the kind of empathy and understanding that Sonny demonstrates towards Indians. In fact, Henty describes, with characteristic relish, numerous combat scenes in which the Warrener brothers slay Indian mutineers; for instance, in one such encounter “Dick found himself engaged in a hand-to-hand contest with Aboo Raab, the rebel leader. He was a powerful and desperate man, and with a swinging blow he beat down Dick’s guard . . . but Dick leapt forward, and ran him thorough the body, just as the bayonet of one of the British soldiers pierced him in the side” (336–37). On the other hand, as an Anglo-Indian writer, Duncan, like Steel and Kipling, perhaps felt particularly compelled to rewrite the Mutiny in a manner that was conciliatory rather than adversarial in its tone and intent. Thus, one (or all) of these reasons may have inspired Duncan, who believed in the correct kind of imperial governance, to have written a Mutiny-inspired narrative for children almost four decades after the event.

Reconstructing the Mutiny at Cawnpore Duncan begins the narrative with the birth of Sonny in Cawnpore, a city that was enshrined forever in the memory of the British in India as the location where British innocence and purity were defi led.15 As the eminent nineteenth-century historian, John Kaye, charges in his magisterial account of the Mutiny: “There was no misery which humanity could endure that did not fall upon our English women [in Cawnpore]” (244). Cawnpore was, arguably, the only city that provided the right kind of raw material, as it were, for the British to compose a horrifying tale of ravishment, mutilation, and murder. The principal player to emerge during the mutiny at Cawnpore, which began late at night on June 4, 1857, was the Indian leader Nana Sahib of Bithur, whose name became synonymous with treachery and lasciviousness in the popular British imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Brantlinger writes: “Nana Sahib, “the Demon of Cawnpore,” figures again and again in Victorian writing about India as the treacherous monster who deserves no quarter” so much so that his “villainy is . . . the most vivid feature in many British [Mutiny] accounts” (201). A casualty of Dalhousie’s ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ policy, Nana Sahib, the adopted son of Peshwa Baji Rao II, the erstwhile Maratha ruler of Poona whose kingdom had been annexed by

86 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature the British, found himself deprived of a substantial pension from the East India Company as a result of this measure. Nana Sahib, who may have been governed by a strong desire to destroy the British for personal reasons as his petitions for the restoration of his pension went unheeded after the death of the peshwa in 1851 (he could as well have been motivated by patriotic sentiments and a legitimate need to unyoke himself from colonial rule) was soon to become one of the main leaders of the Mutiny and played a crucial role in the rebellion at Cawnpore.16 Allegedly, on June 27, Nana Sahib reneged on a promise to allow the besieged English at the Cawnpore barracks safe passage on boats; instead, his soldiers opened fire on them at a place called Satichura Ghat, which led to a terrible bloodbath. The 200 women and children who survived the massacre at the ghat (landing stage) were imprisoned in the infamous Bibighar (House of the Ladies). There was a popular belief among the British that Nana Sahib wanted these helpless women to join his harem, and that his sepoys had raped and maimed them as well. On receiving news of approaching British troops, Nana Sahib is also believed to have issued orders on July 15 to execute the women and children who had survived their confinement at the Bibighar and have their bodies thrown into a well. As George Trevelyan asserts in Cawnpore (1865), one of the earliest and most widely read Victorian histories of the Mutiny: The great crime of Cawnpore blackens the page of history with a far deeper stain than Sicilian Vespers, or September massacres: for this atrocious act was prompted, not by diseased or mistaken patriotism, nor by the madness of superstition, nor yet by uncontrollable fear that knew not pity. The motives of the deed were as mean as the execution was cowardly and treacherous. Among the subordinate villains there might be some who were possessed by bigotry and class-hatred: but the chief of the gang [Nana Sahib] was actuated by no higher impulses then ruffled pride and disappointed greed. (57) Duncan suggestively alludes to the horror and suffering that the British had to undergo at the hands of the “mutinous natives” (Sonny Sahib 9) in Cawnpore. The narrative begins on the morning of the Satichaura Ghat incident when an English doctor informs Tooni, who is frightened senseless by the chaos around her, to prepare a sick Evelyn Starr and a newly born Sonny for a journey authorized by Nana Sahib. Duncan drives home the extent of Nana Sahib’s deception by suggesting that the British (represented by noble men like the doctor), who always keep their word, accepted his gesture in good faith. It is Tooni, the native servant, who has doubts about Nana Sahib’s intentions: There would be no more shooting, and the Nana Sahib would let them get away in boats; that was good khaber—good news. Tooni wondered, as she put the baby’s clothes together in one bundle, and her own few posses-

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 87 sions together in another, whether it was to be believed. The Nana Sahib so hated the English; had not the guns spoken of his hate these twentyone days? Inside the walls many had died, but outside the walls might not all die? The doctor had said that Nana Sahib had written it; but why should Nana Sahib write the truth? The Great Lord Sahib, the Viceroy, had sent no soldiers to compel him. (7) By suggesting that he is not trusted by people from his own country, Duncan makes Nana Sahib even more unreliable, which in turn makes Sonny’s loyalty to his Indian nurturers at the end of the narrative all the more notable. Furthermore, by emphasizing Nana Sahib’s deceitfulness to her young readers, especially at a moment when Indians were aspiring for self-governance, Duncan is able to establish the weaknesses inherent in native leadership. The pitiful scene of the bedraggled English walking towards the Satichaura Ghat is described in some detail in Sonny Sahib. The English are surrounded by a volatile yet surly crowd who seem to relish the spectacle before them: “the mutinous natives stood in sullen curious groups to watch the train go by. . . . through the narrow streets, choked with the smell of gunpowder and populous with vultures” (9). So tremendous was the impact of this incident on the British imagination that even Christopher Hibbert’s popular account of the Mutiny—written over a century later—is unable to deconstruct the images of British suffering and privation: “Crowds of people swarmed out of the city to watch the sorry procession go by, looking, mostly in silence, at the dirty, half-dressed memsahibs clinging to the ropes on the elephants; at the wounded figures in the palanquins, . . . [and] at the thin children in the bullock carts” (191). Furthermore, Duncan’s reference to the “vultures” is particularly suggestive since it indirectly alludes to the fact that there are dead bodies—presumably British—lying about for the birds of prey to hover over. As Graham Dawson notes, it was a widely circulated belief that the British who attempted to go into hiding in the non-European sections of cities like Lucknow, Delhi, and Cawnpore were dragged out and killed in large numbers. In fact, the British press played an important role in creating these unsubstantiated rumors, by describing rather graphically the indignity and brutality that was infl icted upon these unfortunate British victims of the Mutiny.17 For example, Dawson cites a press report published in the Times on September 17, 1857, in which the so-called atrocities committed by the mutineers are delineated in great detail: The history of the world affords no parallel to the terrible massacres which during the last few months have destroyed the land. Neither age, sex nor condition has been spared. Children have been compelled to eat the quivering flesh of their murdered parents, after which they were literally torn asunder by the laughing fiends who surrounded them. Men in many instances have been mutilated and, before being absolutely killed,

88 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature have had to gaze upon the last dishonour of their wives and daughters previous to being put to death. (quoted in Dawson 87; emphasis in the original) In another instance, the Times published a letter on August 25, 1857, written by a clergyman, who, writing from “the safety of Bangalore” (Spiers 126), describes the following scenario:18 They took 48 females, most of them girls of [sic] from 10 to 14, many delicately nurtured ladies,—violated them and kept them for the base purposes of the heads of the insurrection for a whole week. At the end of that time they made them strip themselves, and gave them up to the lowest of the people to abuse in broad daylight in the street of Delhi. They then commenced the work of torturing them to death, cutting off their breasts, fi ngers, and noses, and leaving them to die. One lady was three days dying. (quoted in Sharpe 66) However, Duncan attempts to tone down the more graphic images of the Mutiny for her young readers—popularized not only by the press, but also by early historical accounts such as Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny (1859), which describe startling scenes in which “Infants [were] . . . actually torn from their mother’s arms, and their little limbs chopped off with tulwars yet reeking of their father’s blood; while the shrieking mother was forcibly compelled to hear the cries of her tortured child, and to behold, through scalding tears of agony, the death-writhings of the slaughtered innocent” (quoted in Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny 37). Duncan gives us an intricate description of the nature of Nana Sahib’s treachery, but only hints at the bloodbath that takes place at the ghat. Written accounts by the few British survivors of the Satichura Ghat massacre—such as Amelia Horne and Mowbary Thomson—of how events unfolded at the riverbank typically emphasized the panic and desperation of the British at the carnage they witnessed. As Horne writes: The air resounded with the shrieks of the women and children, and agonized prayers to God for mercy. The water was red with blood, and the smoke from the heavy firing of the cannon and muskets and the fire from the burning boats lay like dense clouds all around us . . . My poor little sister . . . moaned piteously, crying out the while: ‘Oh, Amy, don’t leave me!’ A few yards away I saw the boat containing my poor mother slowly burning, and I cowered on the deck overwhelmed with grief, not knowing what horrible fate the next moment had in store for me. My heart beat like a sledge hammer, and my temples throbbed with pain; but there I sat holding my little sister’s hand, while bullets fell like hail around me, praying fervently to God for mercy. (quoted in Hibbert 192)

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 89 And, as Thomson records, “Grape and round shot flew about us from either bank of the river, and shells burst constantly on the sandbanks . . . A bullet struck the side of my head, and I fell into the boat, stunned by the wound” (quoted in Hibbert 193). However, in Sonny Sahib, Duncan chooses not to describe the Satichura Ghat incident at any length; Abdul and Tooni, believing the worst of Nana Sahib, stealthily move away from the crowds and because of this precaution are able to save Sonny Sahib from the “riotous crowd” (10) gone amok and from the massacre that ensues at Satichura Ghat. Even the death of Evelyn Starr is neither heroic nor bloody like the other women trapped in Cawnpore since she rather conveniently dies before reaching the ghat. Duncan writes: “As to Sonny Sahib’s mother, she was neither shot in the boats with the soldiers that believed the written word of Nana Sahib, nor stabbed with the women and children who went back to the palace afterwards. She died quietly in the ox-cart before it reached the ghat” (10). Thus, Evelyn Starr dies because she is sick and weak, and not because she is shot at or raped and killed by the blood-thirsty mutineers led by Nana Sahib. Jenny Sharpe has described how the Bibighar became “a kind of museum” for the British troops to visit after they had recaptured Cawnpore and reports of what occurred there were “reconstructed from the remains of the dead women” (64–65). In his multi-volume history of the Mutiny, Kaye reproduces a letter written by Brigadier-General James Neill—infamous for the severity of his punishments at Allahabad and Cawnpore—who was so enraged by what he saw at the Bibighar that he vowed brutal retribution: “Ladies’ and children’s bloody torn dresses and shoes were lying about, and locks of hair torn from their heads. The floor of the one room they were all dragged into and killed was saturated with blood. One cannot control one’s feelings. Who could be merciful to one concerned?” (299). Acknowledging that “Other narrators have described the scene in similar language” (299), Kaye also includes Major North’s account: “Vaulting, eager, maddened, we sped onward to the dreary house of martyrdom, where . . . the clotted gore lay ankle deep on the polluted floor, and also long tresses of silken hair, fragments of female wearing apparel, hats, books, children’s toys, were scattered about in terrible confusion” (quoted in Kaye 299). In a similar vein, Trevelyan, whose account of the mutiny at Cawnpore was highly regarded by the Victorians, describes how the British troops found rooms in the Bibighar which were “ankle-deep in blood” (299), and conjectures that “Strips of dresses, vainly tied round the handles of the doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping out murderers” (Cawnpore 300). He goes on to mention in pitiful and tragic terms the objects and clothes belonging to British children that are strewn around the Bibighar: “Broken combs were there, and the frills of children’s trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latches, and one or two daguerro-typecases with cracked glasses” (300). So iconic were these Bibighar images by the early twentieth century that one can find echoes of these heart-wrenching

90 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature descriptions even in popular children’s history books such as The Great Victorian Age for Children, written by M. B. Synge in 1908: “When Havelock and his men entered the room where their fellow-countrywomen had been butchered so lately, the scene was both horrible and pitiful. The floor was strewn with relics: there were pinafores, little shoes and hats, the fly-leaf of a Bible, and some children’s curls—all speaking of a time of anguish unspeakable” (“The Indian Mutiny” 551). Interestingly, although Sonny Sahib resonates with the treachery of Nana Sahib, Duncan chooses not to dwell too much on the atrocities committed in the Bibighar. While Duncan alludes to the slaughter at the Bibighar by referring to the marble statue of an angel at Cawnpore, commissioned by Canning to commemorate, glorify, and sanctify the dead women and children, she only hints at the possibility of rape and murder by suggesting that there is an “awful, pitiful sorrow” that “nobody cares to try to touch . . . with words” (11). Bratlinger has shown how significant the well at the Bibighar became in historical and literary representations of the Mutiny; for instance, commenting on Trevelyan’s Cawnpore, he notes: “Everything in Trevelyan’s reductive epic verges toward one spot, the well at Cawnpore. Looking into the depths of the well, the reader is meant to understand the absolute villainy of the Mutineers and the heroic purity of their victims” (203).19 One of the earliest instances of the prominence of the well in British narratives can be found in the diary jottings of Captain Gordon, who entered the Bibighar very soon after the massacre took place. As was the case with other British eyewitness accounts to emerge from Cawnpore, he makes the well a focal point of his observations: “All the way to the well was marked by a regular track along which bodies had been dragged, and the thorny bushes had entangled in them scraps of clothing and long hairs” (quoted in Hibbert 209). Duncan, on the other hand, maintains a discreet silence on what Trevelyan—and numerous others before and after him—termed as “the well of horror” (Cawnpore 302). Thus, even though Duncan touches upon events that had achieved mythic proportions by the time she writes her little book, and includes the inscription at the Bibighar in memory of the slaughter, she downplays the images of bloody and mutilated British women and slain children for her young audiences. In keeping with what I regard as the sanitizing and cleansing impulse of colonial children’s literature, and in a gesture similar to Barbara Hofland’s in Captives in India, in which there are no explicit or lurid descriptions of Olivia’s imprisonment by Sunder Cawn, Duncan, too, attempts to sublimate the more sexualized and disturbing aspects of the colonial encounter during the Mutiny of 1857. Furthermore, by killing off Evelyn Starr before she reaches the ghat or the Bibighar, the principle sites of debasement and death for the British, she makes the Mutiny less revolting and much more controllable and comprehensible for the child reader. In addition, by not over-emphasizing the Bibighar atrocities, Duncan seeks to point her young readers towards a more hopeful and conciliatory future for colonial India. Thus, even though

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 91 the horrifying events at Cawnpore are alluded to in Sonny Sahib, they leave no mark on the three-day-old Sonny, who is saved by Abdul and Tooni and taken to Chita, an independent princely state, far removed from the turbulence that was sweeping through India, where “talk of greased cartridges would not have been understood” (12) by the local population. Writing just a few years after the Mutiny, Trevelyan laments that the besieged English children at Cawnpore “sorely missed the fond and patient bearer, that willing playmate and much-enduring slave, whom Mrs. Sherwood’s charming tale has rendered a household word in English schoolrooms” (Cawnpore 150). However, such is not Sonny’s lot at Cawnpore; far from being unloved and forsaken, he is, in fact, rescued by his bearers with Boosy-like devotion. In a sense, he is snatched from the terrible fate that awaits the British at the ghat and at the Bibighar, and is reborn, as it were, as an Indian child.

The Country-born English Boy Among Indians In Kim, Kipling presents us with a young British boy who spends his early life in the native bazaars of Lahore and is so at ease with the local languages and customs that he can pass undetected as an Indian. Still, Kipling constantly reminds us that although Kim is “a poor white of the very poorest,” he is, nevertheless, “white” (49), and this fact ultimately makes him a loyal citizen of the British Raj who works towards maintaining imperial dominance in India. In fact, Kim’s position of superiority is evident in the very first paragraph of the novel when he sits “in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun ZamZammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher” (49)—or the Lahore Museum—successfully warding off the other Indian children who are clamoring to sit on top of the gun. And, in Kipling’s view, the justification for Kim’s assertive behavior and elevated position is quite simply that “the English held the Punjab and Kim was English” (49). Published seven years before Kim, Duncan’s Sonny Sahib, similarly, invokes the belief in British superiority and pure blood, and that eventually British blood will win out. Sonny—like his successor, Kim—lives among Indians as a child and is thoroughly Indianized in the process. At the same time, even though Sonny wears Indian clothes like the not-yet-saved Henry and Lucy, the orientalized Olivia, and, indeed, Kim, and has not “inherited his mother’s language with his blue eyes and white skin” (Sonny Sahib 19–20), significantly, he does have one trait that he has inherited from his father. Unlike his Indian playmates, who “always wanted to sit round in a ring” and listen to his “tom-tom, which made a splendid drum,” Sonny is a natural-born soldier who has a thirst for adventure and the unknown, so much so that Duncan regards his great fondness for “making believe soldiers” as “his birthright to pretend, in a large active way” (21–22). Thus, what sets Sonny apart from his Indian companions—which includes the young prince of Chita—is his searing desire to be an imaginary soldier. In an article which

92 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature

Figure 3.1

The frontispiece of an 1895 D. Appleton edition of Sonny Sahib.

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 93 traces the rise of mid-century Victorian Christian militarism, Olive Anderson has pointed out that it was during the Mutiny that soldiers like Major-General Henry Havelock (who recaptured Cawnpore) achieved cult status in Britain and were regarded as national heroes who had been able to protect British interests in India.20 Instead of viewing soldiers as impoverished cads, they were re-imagined by the British reading public, especially in imperial juvenile literature, as heroic saviors. I will elaborate on this aspect of Sonny Sahib a little further on, but it is evident that Duncan is keenly aware of this stock character in juvenile literature as Sonny’s boyhood games and aspirations are always martial and soldierly. It is also worth noting that while early Anglo-Indian children’s authors like Mary Sherwood accentuate how susceptible English children are to the hot climate in India, post-Mutiny Anglo-Indian authors such as Duncan and Kipling foreground the boundless energy, agility, and sheer vitality of English children living in the subcontinent. Further, in her portrayal of Sonny’s Indian playmates—and these particular images will get discussed in greater detail in the next chapter—Duncan draws on the stereotype of the lazy and inactive Indian who prefers to chatter, unlike the more action-oriented, energetic, and enterprising Briton. By the end of the nineteenth century, British masculinity (constructed as martial, strong, silent, and manly) was set off against an Indian masculinity that was indolent, torpid, yet gratingly vociferous. According to Hutchins, there was a common belief among the British in India that although Indians “possessed precocious verbal facility, [and were] adept at memorization, [they were] . . . thought to falter when something more was required [of them]” (76). In fact, the conceptual roots of such attitudes can be detected as early as 1838 in On the Education of the People of India, when Charles E. Trevelyan, an ardent advocate of Anglicist educational policies and Macaulay’s brother-inlaw, remarks: “Native children seem to have their faculties developed sooner, and to be quicker and more self-possessed than English children. . . . When we go beyond this point to the higher and more original powers of the mind, judgment, reflection, and invention, it is not so easy to pronounce an opinion. It has been said, that native youth fall behind at the age at which these faculties begin most to develop themselves in Englishmen” (111–12). Thus, in Sonny Sahib, while the little Indian boys could narrate fascinating and mesmerizing stories about “princesses and fairies and demons,” Sonny could “only tell the old one about the fighting” and, much to Sonny’s consternation, “it[storytelling] was the single thing they could do better than he did” (23). However, while the Indian children, not unlike the Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth century, are verbally gifted, they are not action-oriented and do not have the ability, when it really counts, to translate their endless words into deeds. They narrate rather than enact, unlike Sonny, who acts instead of prattling on ceaselessly like his Indian counterparts. In Sonny Sahib, Duncan also suggests that the colonial rule is necessary for the moral and social improvement of India. As she explains to her young

94 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature readers: “Perhaps nobody has told you why the English are called Sahibs in India. It is because they rule there” (41). Chita, however, is still ruled by a kind yet misguided Maharajah who is dependent on advice from greedy and malevolent native advisors. If Nana Sahib represents the malignant face of Indian leadership, the Maharajah is portrayed as the naïve and injudicious manifestation of it. The Maharajah halfheartedly attempts to introduce English principles by allowing Dr. Roberts, a “medical missionary” (45)—sent by the British to improve living conditions and simultaneously keep a lookout for seditious activity—to practice in Chita. Although Dr. Roberts advises the Maharajah to build a new drainage system and hospital, in keeping with the British impulse, especially after 1857, to regard themselves as agents of modernization and technological advancement, not all of his suggestions are altruistic as he also recommends constructing roads that connect Chita to “the great highways that led to the Viceroy’s India” (59). The inaccessibility and relative independence of some of the princely states in Rajputana (Rajasthan) were a perennial source of worry for the British in India—especially in the late nineteenth century when Russian imperialism was on the ascent in Central Asia, threateningly close to the borders of the Raj—and Dr. Roberts’s suggestion to build roads is, arguably, an indication of an apprehensive colonial government’s desire to have greater access to these more remote territories.21 Like the young lady in Sherwood’s Little Henry, who is able to de-Indianize Henry in an astonishingly brief period of time, Dr. Roberts also becomes the medium for nine-year-old Sonny’s prodigious linguistic and cultural transformation. Although Sonny’s introduction to his own culture is short-lived—Dr. Roberts is poisoned by a jealous native advisor—the few short months spent under Roberts’s tutelage is enough for Sonny to realize that it is time for him to return to his own people. Like Kim, he realizes that there is a part of him that will always be British. Kim, for instance, is repeatedly tortured by the question: “And what is Kim?” (331). By the end of the narrative, Kim hears “an almost audible click” and his world becomes “perfectly comprehensible” (331) as the practical and efficient (and, by inference, the British) side of him takes control and stems his emotional breakdown. Sonny’s remarkable story is also similar to the tale narrated in Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (1910), a novel set in 1890s Bengal, in which a country-born Irish boy and a “foundling at the time of the Mutiny” (405) is raised as an Indian by a Bengali family. Intriguingly, Tagore, a renowned Indian author and Nobel laureate, also conceives of an Indian-bred British child as the most suitable type of Anglo-Indian. Tagore’s Gora, who believes almost fanatically in Indian nationalism, is aware—while growing up in an Indian environment—that he is in some way different from the people around him. When he is informed by his Indian foster family that he is a mutiny-child, who is saved from slaughter because his Irish mother takes refuge in their home and dies that same night giving birth to him, Gora, devastatingly, finds himself in the middle of an “extraordinary dream” (402). However, once he acknowledges and makes his peace with his British heritage,

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 95 he is miraculously delivered from “emptiness” and is able to “enter into a new [and productive] life” (406). Sonny fully embraces his British identity when Dr. Roberts is murdered. Not only does he mourn deeply for the doctor, but he also begins to feel an increasing desire to leave Chita, and even asks Tooni if “she knew the road to Calcutta” (Sonny Sahib 68). He does not have to wait long as the death of the doctor and the belief that the Maharajah may be buying weapons from the Russians brings John Starr, a soldier in the British-India Army who survived the Mutiny and Sonny’s father, to Chita to quell any treasonable activity. John Starr’s presence in Chita enables Tooni to recognize her former master, and she eventually reunites Sonny with his biological father.

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Soldier In Stalky and Co. (1899), Kipling suggests that it is Stalky—a fearless soldier battling against great odds to preserve and maintain Britain’s imperial boundaries in India—who is the “Great Man of his Century” (358), rather than the bureaucrats, administrators, and policy makers who lead comfortable and sedentary lives and parley with Indian nationalists at roundtable conferences. A practical reason for valorizing the imperial soldier in the manner Kipling does in Stalky is quite literally that Britain needed the military to sustain and uphold its status as a colonial power in the nineteenth century. From the sixteenth century onward, the navy had been glorified by the British since Britain saw itself as a maritime nation that derived its clout from spectacular naval victories dating back to Elizabethan times, and also because it had been pivotal in furthering British commercial interests abroad by transporting cargo, spices, and traders to and from its shores. However, as Britain’s overseas empire expanded in the nineteenth century, the emphasis began to shift, since the army played a far more significant role than the navy in actually maintaining colonial dominance in far-flung colonies. In fact, the number of military battles that were fought to preserve colonial rule greatly outnumbered the number of naval battles that took place after 1800. Thus, the army, which had traditionally lacked the glamour and prestige enjoyed by the navy, began to undergo an impressive image change in the eyes of the British public in the nineteenth century and, by the mid-century, as Anderson puts it, “the British public . . . cease[d] to regard the army as a shelter for black sheep of various breeds” (47).22 And, arguably, one of the events most instrumental in effecting this turn-around was the Mutiny, which jolted the British into realizing that they had to become more reliant on their own soldiers—rather than on local recruits—if they were to quell future insurgencies and maintain their supremacy in the colonies. Kenneth Ballhatchet documents that while there were around forty thousand British soldiers in India prior to the Mutiny, they were severely outnumbered by the sepoys who were six times more numerous than their British officers (3). This lopsided ratio was redressed immediately

96 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature after the Mutiny, whereby there were “some sixty thousand British troops and only twice as many sepoys” (Ballhatchet 3). The Mutiny had not only shaken British faith in the sepoys, but had also helped strengthen the perception that “British rule now seemed all the more dependent on the British soldier” (Ballhatchet 3). The British soldier, who had hitherto been regarded as somewhat dubious, shadowy, and lascivious in the British imagination, as is evident in such Jane Austen novels as Pride and Prejudice (1813), becomes, as Dawson has argued, a heroic figure after 1857 and, more importantly, is recast—due to the turn of events at Cawnpore and other besieged towns—as a valiant defender of imperial borders and English womanhood. The lionizing of the British soldier—especially the soldier of Empire—that occurred in Victorian England during and after the Mutiny is hardly surprising: it was the British soldier who, after all, was efficiently able to recapture Indian towns like Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Delhi, restore British domination, and, more significantly, avenge the deaths of British women and children. As Private Mackintosh writes in his diary: “I wanted to have some share in revenging the horrid atrocities committed there on our women and children by those fiends” (quoted in Spiers 130; emphasis in the original). Colonel John Nicholson, who retook Delhi from the rebels—and is described by Kaye as having a “heroic character” (301)—wished to have an act passed in order to authorize more brutal forms of execution: “Let us . . . propose a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi. The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening” (quoted in Kaye 301). However, it was Neill, left in charge of Cawnpore after it was recaptured by British troops led by Havelock, who executed a most merciless order: I wish to show the Natives of India that the punishment inflicted by us for such deeds will be the heaviest, the most revolting to their feelings and what they must ever remember . . . The well . . . will be filled up, and neatly and decently covered over to form their grave . . . The house in which they were butchered, and which is stained by their blood, will not be washed or cleaned by their countrymen [but by] such of the miscreants as may hereafter be apprehended, who took an active part in the Mutiny, to be selected according to their rank, caste and degree of guilt. Each miscreant, after sentence of death is pronounced upon him, will be taken down to the house in question under a guard and will be forced into cleaning up a small portion of the blood-stains; the task will be made as revolting to his feelings as possible, and the Provost Marshal will use the lash in forcing anyone objecting to complete his task. After properly cleaning up his portion, the culprit is to be immediately hanged. (quoted in Gardner 268) Dawson and Sharpe have suggested that the British were able to justify, sanction, and excuse certain kinds of behavior—such as the violent post-Mutiny

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 97 reprisals—by refiguring soldiers as men trying to do their duty—in memory of the deceased British women and children—in adverse and harrowing conditions. By justifying colonial violence as a necessary and almost sacrosanct act carried out by the solider, the British were able to suppress the horror of the bloody punishments handed out to the Indians and, at the same time, idealize the soldier as an honorable man and victorious hero. As noted earlier, the British press played an important role in transmitting reports of carnage, rape, and murder supposedly perpetrated by the sepoys during the Mutiny and newspapers such as the Times and News of the World printed chilling tales—often unverified—for their reading public. Sharpe cites a piece published on July 19, 1857, in News of the World, describing the alleged murder of fifty women and children at the palace in Delhi as an example of the “strong desire to represent rumor and hearsay as fact and information” (62): “We know little of the exact scenes which transpired, and imagination hesitates to lift the veil from them. We hear, however, that about fifty helpless women and children who had hid themselves in the palace on the outbreak were subsequently discovered, and the whole murdered in cold blood” (quoted in Sharpe 62). Such stories undoubtedly helped contribute towards the outrage and anger that was experienced by the Victorian reading public, to which the press added further fuel by demanding that such acts be avenged. In Edward Spiers’s opinion, the desire for revenge which seemed to engulf Victorian England was greatly spurred on by the press: “ ‘Retribution’ became the rallying cry of Printing House Square. Chastizing these ‘infamous assassins’, it declared, was now a duty, a burden which Britain must discharge in the cause of self-preservation” (127). This retaliatory impulse, in turn, resulted in British soldiers being embraced as saviors since the public looked to them to right the perceived wrongs of the Mutiny. As Spiers notes: “The nation expected vengeance, and wished the military to administer that vengeance as swiftly and firmly as possible” (127). The overwhelming national craving for vengeance and the thrill of it being delivered by the army are noted with some discomfort by Thomas Macaulay, son of the abolitionist and Clapham Sect member, Zachary Macaulay: The cruelties of the sepoys have inflamed the nation to a degree unprecedented within my memory. Peace Societies, and Aborigines Protection Societies, and Societies for the Reformation of Criminals are silenced. There is one terrible cry for revenge. The account of that dreadful military execution at Peshawar—forty men blown at once from the mouths of cannon, their heads, legs, arms flying in all directions—was read with delight by people who three weeks ago were against all capital punishment. (quoted in Hutchins 85) Although largely unremembered today, one of the most compelling heroes of Victorian England (as Anderson and Dawson have shown) was Henry

98 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Havelock, a soldier of Empire, who was responsible for recapturing Cawnpore with a small force—and although he did not live to see the eventual relief of Lucknow—had participated in the campaign to repossess the besieged city.23 After his death on November 24, 1857, he became a national icon and, more significantly, was regarded, as Dawson points out, as a saint and martyr by the British. In comparison to the fiendish Nana Sahib and his lustful band of mutineers, whom he vanquished with an insufficient force before triumphantly entering Cawnpore, Havelock—a deeply religious man—was imagined by a British public, roused by unsubstantiated reports and unparalleled and sensationalized press coverage, as a savior and an avenger of heinous crimes. And although he had served for over four decades in the army, it was the events of the last few months of his life that led to his canonization by the British public. In fact, Anderson detects that while all the British military generals during the Mutiny received adulation—it was Havelock—due to his middle-class origins, spiritual leanings, exploits in Cawnpore, and subsequent death in Lucknow—who became a “major national hero” (49). In My Diary in India (1860), William Howard Russell—the famous Victorian war correspondent for the Times—characterized Havelock as: “the soldier who seemed to have started up suddenly in the midst of a great calamity which has befallen us, to avenge our wrongs” (21–22). So lasting was his impact on Victorian England that Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, hails Havelock for his heroism and bravery in “The Defence of Lucknow” (1879) two decades after his death: “Saved by the valor of Havelock, saved by the blessing of heaven! . . . / And ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England blew” (545). Up until the summer of 1857, Havelock, a career soldier who had arrived in India for the first time in 1823, and had taken part in the colonial wars against the Sikhs, Burmese, and Afghans, was just another unknown and ordinary army-man with a large family who had periodically struggled with fi nancial and health issues. Married to Hannah Marshman, the daughter of Joshua Marshman, William Carey’s colleague and one of the earliest Baptist missionaries in India, Havelock, became a practicing Baptist soon after his nuptials in 1829. A firm believer in Baptist principles, Havelock, braving disdain from his fellow-officers, attempted to introduce missionary ideals into the army by distributing Bibles and holding Bible study classes and religious services. As I have argued in the first chapter, the issue of missionary endeavors in India had always been fraught with tension, and the East India Company—which continued to have considerable clout in such matters even after 1813—had never fully been comfortable with any form of proselytizing, so Havelock’s spiritual endeavors (even though they were directed at fellow-Britons) were at odds with Company policy. In his biography, Memoirs of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, KCB (1860), one of several written after his death, John Clark Marshman, Havelock’s brother-in-law, recounts Havelock’s early days in India:24

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 99 Havelock . . . visited the missionaries at Serampore, and took a special interest in their pious and energetic labours. From the period of his arrival in India, he was thus identified with the most eminent members of the religious community, and took a high position as the bold and unflinching champion of Christian truth. There were some who did not hesitate to jeer him as a religious enthusiast, but he stood so high in public estimation, from his sterling attainments, and his strength of character, that contempt for the methodist was lost in admiration of the soldier. Having experienced the blessings of religion on his own mind, he was anxious to communicate them to others. During his residence of eleven months in the fort, he assembled as many men of his own regiment, the 13th, as chose to attend for religious instruction. He was thus enabled to acquire a beneficial influence over the well-disposed men of the corps, and attach them to himself by the strong ties of respect and affection, and to diffuse among them the leaven of piety and temperance. (14–15) Although well-respected and admired, it is evident from the subtext of the above excerpt that Havelock was the butt of some amount of censure and ridicule from peers due to his religious leanings. However, the “jeers” and “contempt” of his compatriots towards his spiritual undertakings in the initial years of his military career, as recorded by Marshman, were to be resoundingly and unequivocally replaced by adoration and praise by the middle of the century. Anderson has drawn attention to a unique outcome of the Mutiny, which is that it generated the “quite distinct view that Christians made the best soldiers” (49; emphasis in the original), and she pinpoints Havelock’s devoutness as one of the principle reasons that piety came to be seen as such an important component of a British soldier’s psyche. Havelock proved to be the perfect example of a soldier who was governed by Christian impulses, and was, at the same time, courageously capable of commanding a crucial military campaign. An example of the manner in which Havelock invoked God during active combat can be seen in an order that he issued to his troops on July 13, 1857, in the aftermath of a successful battle with the mutineers en route to Cawnpore. In it, he writes: “General Havelock thanks his soldiers for their arduous exertions of yesterday. . . . To what is this astounding effect to be attributed? To the fire of British artillery . . . to British pluck, that great quality which has survived the vicissitudes of the hour, and gained intensity from the crisis; and to the blessing of Almighty God on a most righteous cause, the cause of justice, humanity, truth, and good government in India” (quoted in Marshman 296–97). Marshman, in fact, marvels at the order: “It was a singular novelty in India, to see an order of the day ascribing victory to ‘the blessing of Almighty God’ ” (297). Havelock’s faith can also be observed in a letter he writes to his wife around the same time: “One of the prayers oft repeated thorough out my life since my school days has been answered, and I have lived

100 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature to command in a successful action. . . . But away with vain glory! Thanks to Almighty God, who gave me victory. . . . I now march to retake Cawnpore, where, alas! our troops have been treacherously destroyed; and to succor Lawrence at Lucknow” (quoted in Marshman 296). During this campaign, Havelock also roused his troops with stirringly patriotic speeches, which went on to become the stuff of Victorian lore: “There is work before us. We are bound on an expedition whose object is to restore the supremacy of British rule and avenge the fate of British men and women” (quoted in Hibbert 203). Upon receiving news that Havelock had routed the Indian resistance at Cawnpore, the press, predictably, hailed him as a conquering hero and savior of empire; Lloyd’s Weekly, for instance, on September 4, declares: “In the midst of the blood, and outrage, and disaster—in the worst darkness of the storm, towering as a giant above all other fighting men, stands gallant Havelock! . . . People begin to talk more confidently of our fate in India, seeing that a second Clive has arrived. [Other] brilliant deeds pale before the forced marches and hourly battles of Cawnpore’s lion-hearted hero” (quoted in Dawson 98). As John MacKenzie suggests: “In him [Havelock] was discovered Christian justification of imperial rule and the personification of the reconciliation of religious observance and military action” (“Heroic Myths” 121). Dawson concurs, suggesting that Havelock was constructed as a Christian soldier hero since he was a virtuous military man who prayed daily and was unafraid of invoking God to rally his troops, and such images served to evangelize (and by inference, elevate) the figure of the soldier in the popular imagination. Further, his ability to restore colonial authority in Cawnpore—the town where it had been most violated in the minds of the British—helped catapult him into the realm of Victorian superstardom. Havelock died at the age of sixty-three in an army tent from, in the words of the telegram which arrived in London on January 7, 1858, announcing his death, “dysentery, brought on by exposure and anxiety” (quoted in Marshman 454) a few months after his triumphant march through Cawnpore—and just before the British were able to fully reestablish control over Lucknow. In Memoirs, Marshman invests the death scene with suitable piety and sentimentality by including the words that Havelock is believed to have said to his son: “See how a Christian can die” (445)—which in turn came to be reproduced in an endless number of Victorian texts, especially in those celebrating British heroes. Marshman, further, reinforces the idea of a soldier-saint by relating Havelock’s sincerest wish: “It was his constant aim to adorn his religious profession, and to demonstrate that spiritual-mindedness was not incompatible with the energetic pursuit of a secular calling—that ‘a saint could be a soldier’ ”(451). So impactful were Havelock’s actions during the Mutiny that news of his death, as Marshman records, instigated a prolonged period of national mourning: “The national hopes were at once quenched in death, and one common feeling of grief pervaded the whole land, from the royal palace to the humble cottage. There had been no example of so universal a mourning since

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 101 the death of Nelson. . . . It was the tears of a nation which bedewed his grave” (454). Marshman concludes Memoirs with excerpts of Havelock’s obituaries drawn from a range of publications—from newspapers such as the Times, the Examiner, the Daily Telegraph, and the New York Times; to periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, the Quarterly Review, and even Punch—which, unfailingly, attest to his remarkable military and spiritual accomplishments and salute him as a British hero. Anderson, writing over a century later, concurs with Marshman about the profound effect Havelock’s death had on Victorian England: “Funeral sermons, lectures, odes and ‘Memorials’ of all kinds down to sixpenny ones ‘for the Million’, all appeared in abundance. . . . Streets, babies and public houses were named after him, the press was full of his praises. . . . It seemed only fitting that the government should present a site for his statue beside Nelson’s in Trafalgar Square, where it still stands” (50). Thus, to sum up, inspired to a great extent by Havelock’s example both in life and in death, the intermeshing of Christian faith with military service became a common Victorian trope for imagining a soldier’s conduct and character in the second half of the nineteenth century. Given the adulation that the army received after the Mutiny, in large part due to soldiers such as Havelock, a stock character to emerge in juvenile literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, as Jeffrey Richards demonstrates in “Popular Imperialism and the Image of the Army in Juvenile Literature,” was that of a brave, heroic, noble, and patriotic British soldier of Empire. Authors of juvenile literature such as G.W. Steevens and Henty—the latter wrote “nearly eighty historical adventure tales” (Dunae 19)—had formulaic plotlines revolving around military campaigns in India, Africa, and other colonial locations. With geographically catchy titles such as With Clive in India, or the Beginnings of an Empire (1884) and With Wolfe in Canada, or the Winning of a Continent (1887), just to name a couple of novels which reference Britain’s colonial campaigns, Henty glorified and highlighted the role that the British soldier played in these military excursions. For example, Henty prefaces Through Three Campaigns (1904)—which dramatizes the relief of Chitral and Coomassie, and the Tirah campaign—by praising the fortitude and courage of the imperial British soldier: “Our men are called upon to bear enormous fatigue and endure extremes in climate; the fighting is incessant, the peril constant. Nevertheless they show a magnificent contempt for danger and difficulty, and fight with valour and determination worthy of the highest praise” (5). In addition, the profusion of boys’ magazines published from the 1870s onward—such as the Boy’s Own Paper, launched by the Religious Tract Society in 1879, and Chums, first printed in 1892, to mention a couple of penny weeklies with a large readership—also played their part in celebrating and venerating the armed forces and its personnel serving in the colonies.25 John Springhall cites a brochure for the Union Jack, a popular boys’ weekly in print from 1894 to 1933, which declares, for instance, that it “contains stories relating to many phases of the British Empire” such as “how we obtained our

102 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature various Colonies and stories of England’s prowess on land and sea, and of her great naval and military heroes” (quoted in Springhall 113), and boasts that, along with Pluck and Marvel—two other journals printed by Harmsworth Publications—it does “more to provide recruits for our Army and Navy and to keep up the estimation of these two services in the eyes of the people of this country than anything else” (quoted in Springhall 114). Thus, in keeping with the martial tenor of juvenile literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, Duncan, not surprisingly, explores the importance of the imperial soldier and the role he plays in subjugating seditious and rebellious regions. Needless to say, it is the Christianized—and Havelockian—soldier of Empire, who is god-fearing, dependable, patriotic, and loyal that is held up by Duncan as an exemplary specimen of British manhood. Sonny Sahib’s father, John Starr, is the perfect embodiment of the post-Mutiny imperial soldier as he is devout and, at the same time, effective in dealing with native insurgencies and insubordination. The immediate presence of British troops in Chita commanded by John Starr upon getting news of Dr. Roberts’s death can clearly be attributed to the feeling of insecurity that the British experienced after the Mutiny. While there is no actual confrontation with the Maharajah, the British are shown to be ready and willing to brutally suppress any hint of unruliness: Colonel Starr had been sent to “arrange,” if possible, and to fight if necessary. Perhaps we need not inquire into the arrangements the Government had commissioned Colonel Starr to make. They were arrangements of a kind frequently submitted to the princes of independent States in India when they were troublesome, and their result is that a great many native States are governed by English political residents, while a great many native princes attend parties at Government House in Calcutta. The Maharajah of Chita had become very troublesome indeed. Twice in the year his people had raided peaceful villages under British protection, and now he had killed a missionary. It was quite time to “arrange” the Maharajah of Chita, and Colonel Starr, with two guns and three hundred troops, had been sent to do it. (Sonny Sahib 71) Although it is John Starr’s duty to “arrange” and curb the growing autonomy and insubordination of the Maharajah, he is also portrayed as a loyal and pious man who is mourning the deaths of his wife and son at Cawnpore. Thus, the violent and brutish nature of his profession is offset by a humane, religious, and gentle disposition. The dual facet of John Starr’s personality is highlighted, especially towards the end of the narrative when he is given a “small leather bound book” (110), preserved by Tooni, which had originally belonged to Evelyn Starr. Significantly, it is a book of “Common Prayer” (110) that he had presented to his wife a couple of years prior to the Mutiny, and it is an emotional and poignant

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 103 moment for John Starr when he looks inside it. In keeping with the postMutiny impulse to view soldiers as spiritual and devoted men of feeling who are dedicated and honorable towards Englishwomen, Duncan invests the discovery scene with suitable sentimentality: “His eyes fi lled as he read there, “Evelyn Starr from John Starr, December 5th, 1855,” and remembered when he had written that. Still the shadows crept eastward, the mynas chattered in the garden, the scent of the roses came across warm in the sun. The Rajputs looked at him curiously, but no one spoke” (111). Thus, John Starr is conceived of as an imperial soldier who is quick to confront Britain’s enemies and is, at the same time, a compassionate and morally upright man who is capable of displaying deep and lofty emotions. In other words, like Havelock, he is able to combine decisive—and often violent—military action with remarkable piety and goodness.

Bridging Two Cultures Ultimately, however, it isn’t the arrival of British soldiers, but the country-born English boy, Sonny, who saves the day for the British and the Indians, and is the catalyst that brings about a truce between the two sides. When the British army stations itself outside the gates of Lalpore, the capital of Chita, Sonny hears English bugles and “there came a brightness over his face as he listened, that had not been there since he was a very little boy” (79). He realizes that it is time for him to return to his countrymen. However, he is simultaneously aware that he owes the Maharajah his loyalty and does not wish to betray his Indian family. Sonny’s farewell letter to the Maharajah, in which he declares that he will “take [his] Honner in his hart to his oun country” (83; emphasis in the original), shows his steadfast devotion to his Indian nurturer. When John Starr tries to question Sonny about the Maharajah (and even threatens to kill the young boy), he flatly refuses to act as an informant for the British, and declares: “I am English, but the Maharajah is my father and my mother. I cannot speak against the Maharajah, burra sahib” (101). In contrast to Kim, who spies for the British government, and who is, perhaps, never so clear about his fidelity to his Indian acculturation and companions, Sonny remains resolutely faithful to his Indian benefactors. Thus, Duncan responds to Mutiny-inspired notions of Indian ‘treachery’ by presenting her young readers (and future rulers of India) with a new kind of Anglo-Indian imperial boy hero: one who is biologically English but whose allegiances to India never waver. Interestingly, although Sonny is looked after by his ayah, there is an absence of mother-figures (both English and Indian) in his life since her influence on him is insignificant and marginal. In a sense, one can argue that India replaces the absent English mother and the Anglo-Indian boy is able to shower his love and devotion on his adopted motherland instead. Thus, India can be mother (and when they reach adulthood, wife) to a new breed of dedicated rulers.

104 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Sonny Sahib begins with Nana Sahib’s treacherous betrayal of the British, but ends with a young English boy’s determination not to be disloyal to the people who have nurtured him. The Maharajah, believing that Sonny has defected to the British side, and would act as an informant, decides to surrender. At the durbar that the Maharajah holds to “hear the desires of the British Raj” (104), the native ruler is forced to accept the presence of a British Resident in Chita who would at all times be accompanied by a small army. This pact is sealed by a ceremonial “opium pledge” (107) where the British and the Rajputs drink out of each other’s palms. However, the humiliated Maharajah pointedly excludes Sonny from this ceremony as he proclaims that the “Rajputs do not drink opium with their betrayers” (107). Sonny, who is mortified by the Maharajah’s low opinion of him, exclaims: “Maharajah! . . . I did not tell; I did not tell” (107), thereby establishing how dearly he values being trusted by the Indians who have reared him from infancy. This show of tremendous loyalty by Sonny becomes the catalyst for the Maharajah to change his attitude towards the British. The uneasy truce reached at the durbar is replaced by a more genuine commitment on the Maharajah’s part to extend his goodwill towards the British. Thus, Sonny Sahib concludes with a display of loyalty and integrity on the part of a young country-born English boy, who is not only sensitive to both cultures, but is also mature enough to attempt to cultivate a mutual regard between colonized Indians and their British rulers. Ironically, by being English Sonny does not have to choose a fi xed and parochial Indian identity for himself; instead, he is able to do more good for India than the Indians themselves who, like the Rajput Maharajah, are still parochial and provincial in their allegiances. In 1873, Sita Ram Pande, an Indian sepoy during the Mutiny, published his memoirs entitled From Sepoy to Subedar, in which he writes: “Our learned men had told us that the Company’s rule would come to an end in 1857, since this was one hundred years after the Company’s first great battle [at Plassey], but they did not tell us that another kind of English rule would take its place. This rule was far harder and much harsher. The Company Bahadur and its officers were much kinder to the people of India than the present Government (173). The “present Government,” which was directly under the supervision of the British Crown, albeit severe and authoritarian, was in many ways—as I will discuss in the next chapter—more concerned about lawfully and rightfully governing over India than the East India Company had been. As Hutchins suggests: “The abolition of the East India Company and the establishment of Crown rule were the assurance the [British] nation required that India did indeed now “belong” to the nation, and not just to a handful of Englishmen” (86). This realization, along with the awareness that another mutiny could shatter the foundations of the British Empire in India, necessitated the deployment of—at least in juvenile literature—a new breed of Englishmen, who were constructed simultaneously as assimilators of divided cultures and sentinels of the Raj. And Duncan, in the tradition of nineteenth-century British and

The Post-Mutiny Imperial Boy Hero • 105 Anglo-Indian children’s literature that seeks to suppress native resistance and exalt British rule, rises to the challenge by creating Sonny, the country-born mutiny-child, who is able to connect and bring together two opposing worlds with grace, maturity, and wisdom.

Chapter Four ‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ The Mimic Men and the Subversion of Law in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books

In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, Mowgli, the man-cub raised by jungle animals, who ultimately becomes the “Master of the Jungle” (325), displays a strong fascination for the Bandar-log or the “Monkey-People” (58) and their way of life. Despite warnings by his mentors, Baloo, the bear, and Bagheera, the panther, to stay clear off the Bandar-log, Mowgli is unable to curb his attraction for them, especially when they pique his interest in joining them as the leader of their tribe. The principal reason why the Bandar-log are so despised by Baloo, Bagheera, and the other jungle animals is because the monkeys have no deference for the laws of the jungle. They dismiss the notion that although the laws of the jungle are unyielding, undemocratic, and arbitrary, they must be unquestioningly obeyed at all times. Furthermore, the Bandar-log—who have no laws of their own and repeatedly attempt to mimic the laws of the jungle—never seem to respect them enough to be mindful of the controlling principles that sanction these laws. In this chapter, I propose that, in the Bandar-logs’ peculiar and trivializing relationship to jungle law, an allegory of colonial law in late nineteenth-century India is being enacted. In Ideologies of the Raj, Thomas Metcalf asserts that “novel, and exceptional theories of governance” were devised by the British, whereby they “sought to justify, and thus legitimate, their rule over India” (ix). An excellent illustration of this practice can be seen in the manner in which one of the primary British justifications for colonial rule in India, especially after the tumultuous Mutiny of 1857, was the belief that the implementation of unwavering, if at times, authoritarian laws were necessary to maintain a sense of order and discipline in the subcontinent. Thus, moving away from their self-proclaimed roles of playing saviors and reformers in what was considered a spiritually bereft India in the 107

108 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature first half of the nineteenth century, the British redefined themselves as just and resolute lawgivers in post-Mutiny India. In doing so, however, the colonial state, ironically, set in motion a suppressive legal machinery in India that, in its attempt to consolidate authority, did not allow British interpretations of law to be questioned or challenged by its colonial subjects. Not surprisingly, then, in The Jungle Books, Kipling, a product of Anglo-Indian society and an advocate of British rule in India, propagates the idea that law, however oppressive, must be unquestioningly obeyed by the jungle animals at all times. At the same time, however, there is also a simultaneous acknowledgment, especially in the Mowgli stories, that this law can be subverted, mocked, and trivialized by the Bandar-log, which in turn make the monkeys potentially dangerous to the well-ordered world of the jungle. In “Kaa’s Hunting,” the Bandar-log are “forbidden to the Jungle-People” (59) because they have no laws. They are described as “evil, dirty, [and] shameless” (59), and are looked upon with horror by the other animals. The tremendous recoil from the Bandar-log seems to stem from their ability to acquire and distort the universal laws of the jungle and thus make it their own. They are able to appropriate the laws that govern jungle life and have the capacity to bend them to accommodate their own local and parochial needs. More significantly, the Bandarlog are also the mimic men of the jungle, since they are able to duplicate and reproduce the laws, behavior, and speech patterns of other animals. Therefore, in this chapter, I also suggest that the Bandar-log can be compared to the Indian intelligentsia who set in motion the Indian national movement in the late nineteenth century. These men were essentially products of Macaulay’s educational policy in India, and were to act as cultural interpreters between the British and the Indian masses they governed. However, they were able to use (and twist) their knowledge of British law and behavior to propagate their own nationalistic agenda. Thus, the Bandar-log, like “Macaulay’s minutemen” (Moor’s Last Sigh 165), to use Salman Rushdie’s phrase, a group of Westerneducated Indians who were fighting for a more democratic and representative system of government in colonial India, have the ability to learn, appropriate, and subvert the language and laws of others. While their behavior cannot be controlled or legislated, since they literally break no laws, it still has the potential to generate chaos and anarchy. The Bandar-log (like the “minutemen”) are also only ones who have the “stolen words” (59) to challenge and disrupt the hierarchical and codified world of the jungle.

Kipling and Colonial India Kipling was born in Bombay on December 30, 1865, just a few years after the Mutiny. He was the son of a government college art professor and spent the first five years of his life in this bustling city by the Arabian sea amidst, what he eloquently describes in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937),

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 109 as the “voices of night night-winds through palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs” (3). By his own account, Kipling’s earliest childhood memories comprise early morning strolls in the Bombay fruit market, abundant in “light and colour and golden and purple fruits,” and “evening walks . . . by the sea in the shadow of palm-groves” (3). Greatly reminiscent of Mary Sherwood’s Little Henry and Little Lucy, his deep affection for his Indian servants—his ayah and his bearer—is apparent in the opening paragraphs of his autobiography. Clearly, Kipling and his younger sister, Alice, like all Anglo-Indian children, spent a great deal of time in their company and were constantly regaled with “stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten” (4). So impactful was the linguistic influence of their Indian servants that the young Kipling children “spoke ‘English,’ haltingly [to their parents] translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in” (4). However, Kipling’s blissful childhood came to end when he was sent, along with his sister, to England in 1871 to receive an English education, where, upon arrival, he found himself in a “dark land, and a darker room full of cold” (5). Some of the bleakest passages in Something of Myself describe the years spent in the infamous “House of Desolation” (7), under the care of his English guardian, Mrs. Holloway, which stand out in sharp contrast to the warm and pleasurable recollections of his early childhood in Bombay. In 1878, to his great relief, Kipling joined the United Services College at Westward Ho!, a school primarily established to provide the sons of officers in the British-India Army with a relatively inexpensive education, and also prepare them for a future career in India. The seemingly happy years spent in United Services College, which Kipling describes as “The School before its Time” (15), and the lasting friendships he makes with some of his fellow-students are well documented in Stalky and Co. . Kipling returned to India—which he refers to as “a joyous home-coming” (25)—in 1882, initially as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette, a provincial newspaper published in Lahore. He then joined the more nationally renowned Pioneer of Allahabad in 1887. During his India years—which ended in 1889—Kipling, as has been richly detailed by numerous scholars, penned an exhaustive number of stories and poems that vividly portray Anglo-Indian life and society.1 What is of particular interest to me, in the context of this chapter, is, not so much the biographical details of Kipling’s life, but the manner in which the political climate in India had changed substantially from what it had been when he left for England as a boy, and the ways in which this transformation is reflected in the Mowgli stories. The Mutiny, as noted in the previous chapter, had been brutally and violently suppressed by the British and was subsequently represented as an anomalous and deviant incident. Indians were disarmed in large numbers because the British feared another revolt, and, as a result, there was a comparative political lull in the 1860s and early 1870s—a period which neatly coincided with Kipling’s idyllic childhood in Bombay. However, the Mutiny had also been successful in

110 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature laying the foundations of dissent, and the Indian national movement began to gather momentum in the early 1880s (partly in response to several discriminatory laws passed by the British in the late 1870s), which, coincidentally, is also when Kipling arrived in India as a young journalist. In tracing the rise of the Indian National Congress, C.F. Andrews and Girija Mookerjee describe the period between 1858 and 1885 as “one of stress and strain, wherein the gulf between the rising English-educated Indians and the British residents became wider” (44). From the late 1870s onward, several regulatory measures were passed at regular intervals by the colonial state. Some of the more severe laws included lowering the maximum age for taking the Indian Civil Service examinations from 21 to 19, enacted in 1876, which affected Indians who desired to join the civil service; the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which curtailed the freedom of Indian newspapers; and the Arms Act of 1878, which introduced a licensing system for the possession of firearms aimed exclusively at Indians. However, as I will touch upon later in the chapter, it was the infamous Ilbert Bill of 1883, which, paradoxically, was designed to give Indian magistrates and judges the authority to try Europeans in mofussil (provincial) towns, but was later withdrawn as a result of a ‘white mutiny’ or an Anglo-Indian backlash, that ultimately lead to the formation of the cohesive—and enduring—Indian National Congress in 1885. It is evident in Something of Myself, that Kipling was not only cognizant of the changing political landscape of colonial India, but was also deeply disapproving of such legislation as the Ilbert Bill, which sought to empower Western-educated Indians who were in the service of the British Raj. Devoting four paragraphs to the Ilbert Bill controversy in his autobiography—a sizable number given that he glosses over so many other significant moments in his life—Kipling mentions his consternation at being “hissed” (31) at by the Anglo-Indian patrons of the Club that he frequented in Lahore over his newspaper’s pro-government stance. He even goes so far as to suggest that the proprietors of his newspaper supported the government’s viewpoint in order to garner high favors and printing contracts. However, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, it is in the Mowgli stories in The Jungle Books—written in the American state of Vermont a few years after Kipling leaves the country of his birth for good—that one fully witnesses his endorsement of undemocratic and suppressive colonial laws, and his denunciation of the rapidly shifting political milieu of late nineteenth-century colonial India.

Colonial Law and Jungle Law Before exploring the ways in which the stringent laws of the Raj are mirrored in the Mowgli stories, it is useful to take a brief look at how the British, dating back to the East India Company days, systematically attempted to define and classify laws in India. In Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, Bernard Cohn has pointed out that the acquisition of Bengal by a private trading company

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 111 (rather than by the British state) inevitably led to debates about whether it was practical to superimpose British law on the newly acquired territory, especially since it already had an existing legal infrastructure inherited from the Mughal era. Robert Clive sidestepped the question by establishing a notorious dual government—whereby the East India Company reaped financial profits by becoming revenue collectors, but left the burdens of administration with the Nawab of Bengal. Warren Hastings more astutely stressed the necessity of using Indian laws for Indian subjects, and encouraged the work of such British Orientalists as William Jones, a self-described “Justinian of India,” whose “great object” was “to give our country [India] a complete digest of Hindu and Mussulman law” (quoted in Majeed 16). In fact, Jones’s lofty aspirations of bequeathing “a noble legacy . . . to three & twenty millions of black British subjects” (quoted in Majeed 16) was realized (a few years after Hastings’s tenure as governor-general) in the form of two influential legal digests: Al Sirajiyyah: or the Mohamedan Law of Inheritance (1792) and the Institutes of Hindu Law, or the ordinances of Menu (1796), which went on to become important legal touchstones in colonial India. However, late eighteenth-century British Orientalists and early East India Company administrators were not the only ones who attempted to grapple with questions of law in colonial India. In describing the Utilitarian impact on India, Eric Stokes has observed that a number of Britons sought to engage with its legal system in some form or another, including Jeremy Bentham, the driving force behind Utilitarianism, whose aspiration was to become the “law-giver of India” (English Utilitarians 140), and James Mill, a long-time employee of the East India Company, whose copious The History of British India contains several unflattering declarations about inchoate Indian laws. Stokes detects, for instance, that Bentham had “toyed with the notion of constructing an Indian constitutional code” and, while composing his important essay, On the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation (1793), was attentive to the ways in which English laws might be accommodated in Bengal (English Utilitarians 51). In Mill’s estimation, good government and laws were the distinguishing features of a civilized society, and his History, which was required reading for Anglo-Indian administrators, is predictably dismissive of Indian laws. In a chapter entitled “The Laws of the Hindus,” for instance, he declared that they lacked “Completeness” and “Exactness” (108; emphasis in the original) and, resultantly, what “[Hindu] judicature would pronounce was . . . almost always uncertain; almost always arbitrary” (111). The considerable influence of Bentham’s and Mill’s writings on future generations of colonial administrators in India, most notably, Macaulay, the first ever Law Member to be appointed to the GovernorGeneral’s Council, has been noted, among others, by Stokes in English Utilitarians and India and Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire. Although better known for his transformative “Minute,” which introduced English as the medium of instruction in higher education, Macaulay devoted a considerable portion of his time in India—which lasted from 1834 until

112 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature 1838—in creating a penal code with the express objective of codifying and, in his view, simplifying laws. As he declares on May 11, 1835: “I am firmly convinced that the style of laws is of scarcely less importance than their substance. When we are laying down the rules according to which millions are, at their peril, to shape their actions, we are surely bound to put those rules into such a form that it shall not require any painful effort of attention or any extraordinary quickness of intellect to comprehend them” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 199). By deemphasizing what he refers to as “the unnecessary intricacy and exuberance of . . . language” (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 199) when composing laws, Macaulay sets the tone for future legal measures in India: that laws—especially those being enacted for what he perceived as intellectually inferior masses—must be straightforward enough to follow and obey, which, in my opinion, is not dissimilar to the stance taken by Kipling a few decades later when he describes the nature of law in the Mowgli stories. It is also important to stress—and I have already noted this earlier— that the Macaulay (and Bentinck) era of the 1830s is also when colonial policy becomes decidedly intolerant of Indian customs and practices. The next significant attempts to tackle the legal infrastructure in colonial India were undertaken in the aftermath of the Mutiny when, ironically, Macaulay’s criminal law proposals—which had been shelved for over twenty years— were enacted in the form of the Penal Code (1860), along with the Code of Civil Procedure (1859) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1861). While the finer legal points of these acts—and others that were passed periodically in the last half of the nineteenth century—are beyond the scope of this study, what is significant about them, in light of this chapter, is that they were not only regulatory measures, but also aimed at showcasing the necessity of having an efficient, if somewhat authoritarian, British judicial presence in India. In this context, James Fitzjames Stephen, the Law Member of the Viceroy’s Council from 1869 to 1872, described by Stokes as “one of the most important figures of British Indian history in the later nineteenth century” (English Utilitarians 273), deserves a special mention due to the tremendous impact he had on the legal ideologies of the Raj. He unapologetically advocated that British rule in India was founded on force rather than on consent, and its primary objective and achievement was to impartially maintain law and order in the subcontinent. If Charles Grant, as I have noted in the first chapter, saw Christianity as the path to Indian amelioration, and Macaulay put his faith in the English language, Stephen, on the other hand, viewed law as the channel for Indian upliftment. As Stephen states: The establishment of a system of law that regulates the most important part of the daily life of a people constitutes in itself a moral conquest, more striking more durable, and far more solid than the physical conquest which renders it possible. It exercises an influence over the minds of the people in many ways comparable to that of a new religion. . . . Our

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 113 law is, in fact, the sum and substance of what we have to teach them. It is, so to speak, the gospel of the English, and it is a compulsory gospel which admits of no dissent and of no disobedience. (quoted in Hutchins 126) In a similar vein, in History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), Stephen justifies British presence in India in the following manner: If it be asked how the system works in practice, I can only say that it enables a handful of unsympathetic foreigners (I am far from thinking that if they were more sympathetic they would be more efficient) to rule justly and firmly about 200,000,000 persons of many races, languages and creeds, and in many parts of the country, bold, sturdy and warlike. . . . The Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the institutions they regulate, are somewhat grim presents for one people to make to another, and are little calculated to excite affection; but they are eminently well-calculated to protect peaceable men and to beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect, and to enforce obedience. (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 285) The parallels between the undemocratic and absolute nature of colonial law, as conceptualized by Stephen, and Kipling’s laws of the jungle are impossible to ignore, and have already been briefly noted by John Murray. In fact, in a historically sensitive reading of The Jungle Books, Murray points out that the “Mowgli stories contain more than forty direct references to the law, and the first of these stories, “Mowgli’s Brothers,” contains fifteen such references, repeatedly averting to the ‘Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason’ ” (1). Further, he argues that Kipling, who is “a child of his time in his imperialism” (3), did not aim to “make his readers good” (12), as has been suggested by Bonamy Dobrée and Shamsul Islam, but “intended to make them safe citizens at home and effective rulers in the colonies” (12). Thus, in Murray’s opinion, law, as Kipling conceives of it, is divorced from the concepts of ethics and morality since it is “designed to ensure self-preservation or the preservation of society” (6). In The Jungle Books, Baloo and Bagheera hammer the laws of the jungle into Mowgli since they realize that it is imperative for Mowgli, as an outsider, to know each and every one of them for his survival. As Baloo, the “Teacher of the Law” (55), tells Bagheera: “A man’s cub is a man’s cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle” (Jungle Books 56; emphasis in the original). For the animals in the jungle, these laws are sacred: “The Law of the Jungle—which is by far the oldest law in the world—has arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle People, till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make it” (173). Mowgli’s ability to master all the laws makes him an ideal survivor in a foreign, albeit adopted, land. Mowgli proudly boasts: “The Jungle has many tongues. I know them all” (57; emphasis in the original). Kipling thus describes the ability to intelligently understand and

114 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature imbibe laws of an alien culture as the highest achievement that a young boy can strive for. And, not unlike the late eighteenth-century British Orientalists, Kipling propagates the idea that complete mastery over and comprehension of the rules and laws that govern one’s environment, however foreign, is a desirable quality to possess. In fact, this theme of knowledge acquisition in an unfamiliar territory is reworked in a number of Kipling’s texts for and about adolescents, most notably in Kim and Stalky. Kim, for instance, is savvy and observant enough to learn the codes of how to survive in a multi-ethnic and often hostile environment and, Corkran, also known as Stalky for being “clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action” (Stalky 6), is admired by his schoolmates for his ability to master the mores of a distant and sometimes unfriendly land. As Tertius, an old classmate from the United Services College, declares: “Stalky is a Sikh. . . . He takes his men to pray at the Durbar Sahib at Amritzar, regular as clockwork, when he can” (360; emphasis in the original). Although Mowgli is often tired of cramming and reciting the laws of the jungle, Baloo continues to rigorously teach them to him, and Kipling repeatedly stresses that complete and unquestioned submission to the law is essential for survival: “But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!” (Jungle Books 191; emphasis in the original). In fact, Baloo is ready to use force to make sure that Mowgli listens to him. As he tells Bagheera: “Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets” (56). When Bagheera points out that Mowgli’s “face is all bruised” by Baloo’s blows, the bear replies: “Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance. . . . Is that not worth a little beating?” (56). Baloo’s propagation of the use of force as an inevitable and necessary means to an end, I suggest, resonates with the stance taken by some of the highest-ranking Anglo-Indian administrators in the second half of the nineteenth century who were not averse to the deployment of violent measures for the preservation of the Raj. John Lawrence, viceroy of India from 1864 to 1869, for instance, declares: “We conquered India mainly by force of arms . . . In like manner we must hold it” (quoted in Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt 281). Lord Lytton, viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880, also professes that “we [the British] hold India as a conquered country . . . which must be governed in all essentials by the strong, unchallenged, hand of the conquering power” (quoted in Seal 140). Stephen, in a similar vein, in a letter to the Times, written on March 1, 1883, in response to the Ilbert Bill, regards “conquest”—which is inevitably brutal and violent—as the cornerstone of the colonial state in India: It is essentially an absolute government, founded, not on consent, but on conquest. It does not represent the native principles of life or of government, and it can never do so until it represents heathenism and barbarism.

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 115 It represents a belligerent civilization, and no anomaly can be more striking or so dangerous, as its administration by men, who being at the head of a Government founded upon conquest, implying at every point the superiority of the conquering race, of their ideas, their institutions, their opinions and their principles,and having no justification for its existence except that superiority. (quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians 288) Stephen’s peculiar validation of a government based on “conquest,” its belligerence and ruthlessness notwithstanding, which ultimately seeks the well-being of its subjects, as Murray detects, finds one of its most chilling manifestations in the early twentieth century when, on April 13, 1919, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer commanded his soldiers to open fire on an unarmed and peaceful gathering at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. The rationalization of the necessity of using coercive tactics, in the manner of Stephen and other influential Anglo-Indians, in my view, also bears an uncanny resemblance to Baloo’s justification of physical intimidation in that he claims to hurt Mowgli only because he is concerned for the young boy’s welfare. And as I will show a little further on, Baloo’s dependence on brutal tactics to elicit total compliance from Mowgli is taken to even more alarming heights by Kaa, the snake, in his dealings with the irreverent and loquacious Bandar-log. While it is unquestionable that the laws in the Mowgli stories are a good introduction to the type of laws that propel Empire, there is also a simultaneous acknowledgment that they can be subverted and challenged by the Bandarlog, who seem to display an unnerving ability to disturb a well-regulated and law-abiding world. The Bandar-log use the laws of the jungle, but, in doing so, make a travesty of them and the governing principles that sanction these laws. One of the governing laws of the jungle states: “Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip, drink deeply, but never too deep; / And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep” (Jungle Books 189). The Bandarlog never seem to be considerate of the other animals as they “made the water all muddy and then . . . fought over it” (69). If they clean themselves, they do so in a manner that irritates the other jungle animals, and this leads Baloo to contemptuously proclaim: “We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die” (59). Further, the Bandar-log never seem to respect the fact that the jungle rests during the day. For instance, they carry Mowgli away in broad daylight when he is sleeping between Baloo and Bagheera: “they [the Bandar-log] followed Baloo and Bagheera and Mowgli through the jungle very quietly till it was time for the mid-day nap. . . . [and] The next thing he [Mowgli] remembered, was feeling hands on his legs and arms—hard, strong, little hands—and then a swash of branches in his face. . . . The Bandar-log howled with triumph and scuffled away to the upper branches where Bagheera dared not follow” (60–61). Thus, fully aware that the jungle animals prepare to hunt at night and are typically

116 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature caught unawares during the day, the Bandar-log make good use of this knowledge to whisk Mowgli away. In The Jungle Books, the only animal tongue that is barred to Mowgli, and is regarded with revulsion, is the Bandar-logs’. When Mowgli, after his initial encounter with the monkeys, is spellbound by their ways and weaves fantasies of having “a tribe of [his] own, and [of] lead[ing] them through the branches all day long” (58), Baloo and Bagheera recoil from the thought of Mowgli actually interacting with the Bandar-log. Bagheera, with eyes “as hard as jade-stones,” rebukes Mowgli for mixing with “the Monkey-People—the gray apes—the people without a Law—the eaters of everything,” who have “always lied” (58). Baloo’s response expresses greater abhorrence and, with a voice that “rumbled like thunder on a hot night,” he warns Mowgli of the consequences of interacting with the Bandar-log: I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all of the peoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcaste. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. . . . Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till today? (59) Thus, the Bandar-log are described as leaderless outcasts, with no tongue of their own, who steal the language and gestures of other animals. They have no memory but boast of their greatness all the time, and are great talkers who accomplish nothing. Their verbosity and their ability to mimic the tiniest of gestures are most unsettling for the jungle animals. And, this, rather than any overtly criminal actions displayed by the Bandar-log, becomes a source of immense discomfiture in the regulated world of the jungle. The menacing and disruptive power of mimicry in an authoritarian colonial space, as formulated by Homi Bhabha, can certainly be applied to the Bandar-logs’ ability to replicate the words and actions of the other animals. One of the ways in which Bhabha defi nes mimicry is as a “sign of the inappropriate” (122) which “poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (123). By this token, the capacity of the Bandar-log to imitate not only sets them apart from the other animals, but it also makes them more dangerous in the long run. Furthermore, the jungle animals have no control over the monkeys since the latter can observe them from the treetops and can “peep” at them whenever they please (Jungle Books 59). For instance, when Baloo and Bagheera reprimand Mowgli for interacting with the Bandar-log, the monkeys show their displeasure from their hiding place in the trees by pelting them with “a shower of nuts and

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 117 twigs” (59), and making rude noises. Bhabha has pointed out that liminal spaces, where the “cohesive limits of the Western nation” (213–14) begin to get blurred, provide a “place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent” (214). The treetops, then, in the Mowgli stories, become these liminal and subversive spaces since they are close enough to the ground for the monkeys to carry on with their surveillance of other animals without any fear of reprisal, yet high enough for the ground animals to “seldom look up” at them to show their displeasure (Jungle Books 59). Despite the absence of their own language and laws, the Bandar-log are great speechmakers, talkers, and debaters. In fact, they are the most vocal of all the jungle animals as they “howl and shriek senseless songs” (60), and make speeches all the time, so much so that Kaa describes them as “Chattering, foolish, vain—vain, foolish, and chattering” (66). Unlike Baloo, Bagheera, Kaa, and Akela, the wolf, who are essentially men of action, the Bandar-log are always “meaning to do great things” (66), but do not have the stamina, strength, or the memory to carry out any of their plans. They only seem to have the time, energy, and ability to chatter about their supposedly great past, which, paradoxically, they do not remember too well because of their lack of memory. The Bandar-log ask Mowgli if they can tell him about their wonderful past and, when Mowgli agrees to listen to them, he witnesses a scene that makes his head spin. Incredulous, Mowgli watches as “the monkeys gathered by hundreds and hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing praises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for want of breath they would all shout together: ‘This is true; we all say so’ ” (70). This display of self-pride by the Bandar-log is regarded as indulgent, pompous, and inconsistent, and lacks the preciseness and authority of the laws of the jungle. Thus, while the laws of the jungle are etched in the minds of all the animals, and cannot be meddled with or changed, the monkeys imaginatively reconstruct their past as they go along, and do not spend too much time bothering about the accuracy of their statements. Interestingly, the disdain that Mowgli and the other animals display towards the supposed greatness of the Bandar-logs’ past is very reminiscent of the contempt that Mill expresses towards India’s cultural antiquity in his History. For instance, in his chapter entitled “Ancient History of the Hindus,” Mill proclaims: “Rude nations seem to derive a peculiar gratification from pretensions to a remote antiquity. As a boastful and turgid vanity distinguishes remarkably the oriental nations they have in most instances carried their claims extravagantly high” (27). In the same chapter, he goes on to state that the “wildness and inconsistency of the Hindu statements evidently place them beyond the sober limits of truth and history” (33). In fact, Mill brushes aside Hindu legends precisely for the same reason Mowgli disregards the Bandar-logs’ boasts. As Mill writes:

118 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature The offspring of a wild and ungoverned imagination, they mark the state of a rude and credulous people, whom the marvelous delights; who cannot estimate the use of a record of past events; and whose imagination the real occurrences of life are too familiar to engage. To the monstrous periods of years which the legends of the Hindus involve, they ascribe events the most extravagant and unnatural: events not even connected in chronological series; a number of independent and incredible fictions. This people, indeed, are perfectly destitute of historical records. (33) And although the jungle animals would ideally like to dismiss the wildly imaginative nature of the Bandar-logs’ chatter in a manner similar to Mill’s disregard of Indians in the early 1800s, they are, for reasons that I will elaborate on in the next section, less able to do so in post-Mutiny India.

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ Although there has been no in-depth study of the subversive position the Bandar-log occupy in the codified world of the jungle, Daniel Karlin and John MacKenzie have briefly discussed what their presence might signify in the Mowgli stories. In Karlin’s opinion, critics tend to regard the monkeys “as the democratic mob, as the intelligentsia, as the politicians, or simply as all humankind” (24; emphasis in the original).2 While he is in broad agreement with these parallels, he qualifies them with a caveat: “But the terms in which the Bandar-log are so convincingly imagined are those of likeness, not sameness. And likeness is shadowed always by an incompletion, an inadequacy, a gap of interpretation; in the half-light we both see the object which is being represented, and sense its refusal fully to be illuminated and understood” (24; emphasis in the original). For this reason, in Karlin’s view, the monkeys can never be exactly like human beings “whose activities they mimic, but whose actual purposes and nature they are incapable of realizing” (24). In “Hunting and the Natural World in Juvenile Literature,” MacKenzie proposes that the animals that hunt, like the wolves or Kaa, are highly privileged over the animals that forage or prey. However, it is the monkeys in The Jungle Books—with their mimicking, leaderless, and squabbling ways—that are the most loathed animals because they neither hunt nor eat meat. As MacKenzie writes, “Above all, they do not hunt, but are vegetarian. There can surely be little doubt that Kipling was thinking of the ‘Bengalee baboos’, imitative educated Indians, but still vegetarian Hindus, whom he so disliked, when describing the monkeys” (“Hunting and the Natural World” 169). While both Karlin—who highlights the gaps inherent in the Bandar-logs’ act of mimicry—and MacKenzie—who draws a historical analogy—raise fascinating points about the monkeys, neither goes on to elaborate at any length on their intriguing comments.

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 119 Building on MacKenzie’s observation, I argue that Kipling could have had “Macaulay’s minutemen” in mind since this group of Western-educated Indians created by Macaulay’s decree to serve as interlocutors, in my opinion, share many of the characteristics of the Bandar-log. In the “Minute” on Indian education, Macaulay declares: I feel . . . that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern [-] a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave to refine the vernacular dialects of this Country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for the conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. (171) Regarded as a defining moment in the debate about the educational objectives of colonial rule, this minute, recorded on February 2, 1835, as I have noted earlier, called for the creation of a set of Indians, in the mould of Englishmen, who would function as intermediaries. Although the introduction of an English-centered higher educational system in India—aimed at a select few—was essentially meant to generate Anglocentric native collaborators, paradoxically, it lead to the formation of an urban, professional, middle class that became increasingly invested in the idea of self-government. Macaulay, during an address to the British Parliament in July 1833, just prior to his departure from England, outlines his vision for India’s future: It may be . . . that . . . by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand English institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. (quoted in Copland 24) Far from being a matter of pride, much to the vexation of the British, who by the closing quarter of nineteenth century had become invested in the notion of a permanent empire in India, the era of nationalism and their subjects’ desire for self-determination had come all too soon. Although, from the early nineteenth century onward, Western education and political institutions had been circulated by the British as the two most important catalysts of change in an allegedly moribund Indian society, as I have just noted, the post-Mutiny colonial state was not prepared to loosen its authoritarian grip or share power with its subjects. By the 1860s, there were a growing number of Indians, armed with degrees from the newly established

120 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature universities in the presidencies of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, whose aspirations for jobs, particularly, the higher-level bureaucratic positions, were thwarted by the British. Although, in theory, the civil service had been opened up to Indians by the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, the examination was held in London and, by 1876, the age requirements were designed to made it even harder for Indians to join. Surendranath Banerjea, one of the first Indians to qualify for the Indian Civil Service, was dismissed on fl imsy grounds, and his disaffection with the discriminatory attitudes of the Raj led him to form the Indian Association in 1876. Although it faded away after the formation of the Indian National Congress, it paved the way for an effective national-level organization for Western-educated Indians, who by now desired to play a greater role in the running of their own country.3 Thus, after the failure of the Mutiny, dialogue, debate, and written appeals—rather than armed revolt—became the more potent weapons for the middle-class Indian. The initial goals of the early Indian nationalists, also known as the moderates, were, in Sanjay Seth’s words, “very modest” as they demanded bureaucratic, administrative, judicial, and economic reforms that would be beneficial—rather than burdensome—to the Indian population, and their agenda “fell well short of full national independence” (Seth 31). In addition to critiquing oppressive colonial practices, the Congress also actively propagated the idea of “national unity” by proclaiming, in its fi rst annual meeting held in Bombay on December 28, 1885, that among its main goals would be the “promotion of personal intimacy and friendship amongst all the more earnest workers in our country’s cause in various parts of the Empire” and the “eradication, by direct friendly personal intercourse, of all possible race, creed, or provincial prejudices amongst all lovers of our country, and the fuller development and consolidation of those sentiments of national unity” (quoted in Sitaramayya 18). Not surprisingly, the British Raj’s response to the early nationalists was twofold: firstly, it insisted that the English-educated elite made up a very small portion of the population and were not representative of the ‘real’ India and, secondly, that the newly minted Indian graduates were neither capable nor adequately qualified to take on the more complex administrative positions. As Lord Dufferin, viceroy of India from 1884 to 1888, asserts: The chief concern of the Government of India is to protect and foster the interests of the people of India . . . and the people of India are not the seven or eight thousand students who have graduated at the universities, or the Pleaders [lawyers] recruited from their numbers in our Courts of Justice, or the newspaper writers, or the Europeanized Zemindars, or the wealthy traders, but the voiceless millions whom neither education, nor civilization, nor the influence of European ideas of modern thought, have in the slightest degree transfigured or transformed from what their forefathers were a thousand years ago. (quoted in Copland 24)

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 121 There are numerous poems and short stories by Kipling—who, as it happens, was an admirer of Dufferin—which show that he was deeply contemptuous of the opinions of the western-educated middle-class Indian nationalist. In “What Happened” (1886), for instance, a poem which scoffs at the Congressmen, we are introduced to Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, who is not only the “pride of Bow Bazar,” but also the “Owner of a native press” and a “Barrishter-at-Lar” (24). Although he displays a tremendous desire to join the British army, this lawyer-turned-soldier is not only incompetent on the front, but it is also hinted that he is looted (and perhaps even killed) by his own countrymen as “Yar Mahommed only grins in a nasty way” and “Chimbu Singh is mute” when asked the question, “What became of Mookerjee?” (25). Kipling clearly sees the attempt to infuse new (and what he considered inept) Indian blood into previously British-controlled bastions like the army and civil service as an undesirable consequence of the vociferous intervention by the Indian National Congress. This is evident when he does not directly tell us what happens to Mookerjee, but ends the poem with the following line: “Ask the Indian Congress men—only don’t ask me!” (25). Kipling is equally dismissive of the newly formed Indian National Congress in “The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.” (1890). In this short story, Pagett, a member of the British Parliament, with liberal views and a desire to learn more about the Congress, visits his school friend Orde, an Anglo-Indian civil servant, who has lived and toiled in India for twenty years. Pagett comes all the way from England with an enthusiasm to discover “what popular feeling in India is really like . . . now that it has wakened into political life,” and believes that the “National Congress . . . must have caused great excitement among the masses” (98). Pagett’s favorable opinion of the Congress is summarily dismissed by Orde, who is portrayed by Kipling as the person who actually knows the ‘real’ India. This is evident when Orde claims that “when compared with the people proper,” the Indian National Congress is “composed almost entirely of those of the literary or clerkly castes who have received an English education” (100). In fact, Orde, using an argument that was common amongst the Anglo-Indians administrators of the late nineteenth century, declares: “The average Oriental cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His life, too, is more complete and self-sufficing and less sordid and low-thoughted than you might imagine. . . . Why should such folk look up from their immemorially appointed round of duty and interests to meddle with the unknown and fuss with voting-papers?” (109–10). Thus, Orde, clearly Kipling’s mouthpiece, is all for preserving what he considers is a fitting order of things for India, which is essentially that the British are in benevolent control of people with no political aspirations and who have stronger ties to their clan than to their nation. Although there are no direct references to the Indian National Congress in Mowgli stories, the shared characteristics of the Bandar-log and the Congressional “minutemen” are, in my opinion, hard to ignore. As noted earlier,

122 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature the “minutemen” who established the Congress were essentially mimic men who had copied British behavior and speech with extraordinary exactness. Like the Bandar-log, they were constantly talking back to the British using borrowed words and gestures in a manner that could potentially threaten British dominance in India, so much so that in “Foundations of the Government of India” (1883), Stephen attempts to characterize and dismiss the “minutemen” in the following manner: “Some few Anglicized Bengalee baboos have caught up and travestied the English commonplaces which have, in my opinion, most injudiciously been made a part of their education” (quoted in Hutchins 188–89). Further, echoing the interest that the Bandarlog show in learning the skills displayed by Mowgli, the Congressmen were also interested in appropriating British systems to improve Indian society. One of the monkeys, for instance, gets the “brilliant idea” that Mowgli possesses knowledge that could not only be useful to them, but could also help them to “become the wisest people in the jungle” (Jungle Books 60). Since Mowgli was “a woodcutter’s child, [he had] inherited all sorts of instincts, and used it to make little huts of fallen branches without thinking how he came to do it,” and the Bandar-log “watching in the trees, considered his play most wonderful” (60). They immediately want to learn how to weave sticks from Mowgli, but, once they figure out how to do it from the young boy, they proceed to ignore his presence and opinions. One can certainly detect parallels in the attitude displayed by Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the earliest presidents of the Congress, who initially declared that “the British people are the very people on earth who will give us what is right and just” (quoted in Andrews and Mookerjee 79), but who subsequently, in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), wrote that the “present system of government is destructive and despotic to the Indians” (v), and came to the realization that British rule was economically damaging to India, especially since it drained the subcontinent of its wealth. By appropriating skills from Mowgli and replicating his behavior, the Bandar-log believe that they can get the jungle animals to sit up and take notice of them, and one finds a similar strategy and thought process being used by the “minutemen” during the infamous Ilbert Bill affair, which in turn proved to be the lightening rod for the creation of the Congress. As briefly noted earlier, the Ilbert Bill, proposed by C.P. Ilbert, the Law Member of Viceroy Ripon’s Council, on February 2, 1883, sought to give Indian officials greater jurisdiction over Europeans in mofussil towns. The Anglo-Indian community, as Edwin Hirschmann and Mrinalini Sinha have shown, was inflamed by the bill, and vehemently objected to it by writing protest letters to newspapers in Britain and India and holding town hall meetings. Further, as in the case of the Mutiny, the British press played a vital role in shaping the discourse surrounding the bill, and the Times, as Hirschmann notes, was one of the first newspapers to openly attack the bill on February 5, 1883, just two days after it had been introduced:

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 123 The hypersentimental policy of the present Government applying English rules and standards to everything Indian must infallibly, if persisted in, loosen our hold on the country. Mr. Ilbert claims for the Bill that it will sweep away the anomalies now existing in the administration of the law. But even if it passes, it will leave many anomalies still existing. Such anomalies must always, and of necessity, exist in a conquered country, ruled by a conquering race. He altogether overlooks the deep-seated prejudice of Englishmen, all the world over, against being tried for their lives and liberties by Orientals. (quoted in Hirschmann 42) The Anglo-Indian press, which Kipling had just joined the ranks of, also played its part by publishing sensational protest letters which decried the measures that Ilbert Bill sought to implement. The first of these sensational letters, printed by the Englishman on February 10, 1883, for instance, warned: “Figure yourself in a Mofussil Court where every pleader and underling is the slave of the presiding officer, a native; where every man’s hand is against the European, if but from the fact of his being an alien, where witnesses are procurable at two annas a head” (quoted in Hirschmann 45). As Hirschmann has noted, other leading Anglo-Indian newspapers from all across the country such as the Times of India of Bombay, the Statesman of Calcutta, the Madras Mail, and the Pioneer (which Kipling joined in the mid-1880s) also expressed strong opinions regarding the bill. The charged atmosphere of the town hall meetings held in Calcutta and in provincial towns by Anglo-Indians, where they made impassioned speeches about how vulnerable they—and especially their womenfolk—would be in the hands of native magistrates, eventually resulted in a modified version of the bill being passed on January 25, 1884. Sinha, in her excellent reading of the racial and gender politics of the Ilbert Bill affair, sees the Anglo-Indian “victory” as a “crucial moment in the consolidation of a unified Anglo-Indian public opinion in India” (33). More significantly, in the context of my argument about the Bandar-log and western-educated Indians, as a response to the Anglo-Indian reaction to the Ilbert Bill, the “minutemen” decided to deploy similar strategies of resistance. By the 1870s, an active and vociferous Indian press—which circulated in both English and regional languages—had begun to fearlessly criticize the policies of the colonial government and, in the case of the Ilbert Bill issue, mirroring the Anglo-Indian and British press which had supported its own, presented the Indian point of view. For example, an editorial in the Indian Spectator, on March 4, 1883, declares: “it becomes evident that their Christianity and their civilization are empty words and their lives are regulated on the lowest principle of public morality” (quoted in Hirschmann 67). The Amrita Bazar Patrika, in particular, published a series of impassioned editorials condemning the withdrawal of the original bill, and the one on March 8, 1883, states: “The Englishman, with his politeness, his smiling face, his high moral talks, his intelligence, his Christian charity, his British generosity, his

124 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature cosmopolitan views, to prove after all a deceitful being to the people of India is a sad disappointment to them, and a rude shock to their feelings” (quoted in Hirschmann 67). In addition to turning to newspapers to express their opinions, the protesting Indians, like their Anglo-Indian counterparts, also held town hall meetings. At a gathering of over two thousand people in the Calcutta Town Hall on January 14, 1884, Surendranath Banerjea, who went on to become one of the founding members of the Indian National Congress, spoke fervently about the power of imitating the Anglo-Indian community:

You have seen before you . . . the triumph of a great agitation. I would ask you to imitate the persistence and firmness of the Anglo-Indian agitators, discarding of course their bitterness and violence . . . The Ilbert Bill has called forth an awakening of public life unparalleled in the annals of this country. If we can utilize this feeling, deepen it, turn it into a salutary channel, an abundant harvest of good is promised to us. (quoted in Hirschmann 266) Thus, by asking his audience to “imitate” Anglo-Indian behavior, which, returning to the Mowgli stories, is not dissimilar to the Bandar-logs’ tactics of wanting to ape Mowgli, Banerjea proposes that Indians can mimic the strategies of their rulers to serve their own nationalistic goals. Another point of comparison between the Bandar-log and the “minutemen” is the fact that both groups consider themselves the intelligentsia. In The Jungle Books, the Bandar-log proudly proclaim that “What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later” (60), and they repeat to themselves and to Mowgli: “There is no one in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the Bandar-log” (69). Like the Congressional delegates, the monkeys gather in groups and “sit in circles on the hall of the king’s council chamber” (68) pondering on how to draw the interest of the other jungle animals. In a similar vein, in March 1885, a circular inviting members to the first meeting of the Indian National Congress states: “Indirectly this Conference will form the germ of a native Parliament, and, if properly conducted, will constitute in a few years an unanswerable reply to the assertion [by the British] that India is still wholly unfit for any form of representative institutions” (quoted in Andrews and Mookerjee 76). The Congressmen thus were not only thinking in collective and original terms about India’s future, but were also attempting to come up with strategies to gain the attention and regard of the British in India. Furthermore, in The Jungle Books, the most respected animals, like Akela, the lone wolf, are solitary and do not move about in groups. Baloo and Bagheera are deeply suspicious of the Bandar-log because they are a collective force to reckon with and they never seem to do anything without mobilizing the entire clan. For instance, when they snatch Mowgli and take him back to their home, the Cold Lairs, they come across as an organized

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 125 and well-orchestrated unit: “bounding and crashing and whooping and yelling, the whole tribe of Bandar-log swept along the tree-roads with Mowgli their prisoner” (61). The Congressional “minutemen” seem to be equally well-mobilized and always take action as a group, rather than as individuals. According to W. C. Bonnerji, the first president, the objectives of the Congress included the “determination of the methods by which . . . it is desirable for native politicians to labour in public interests” and the “authoritative record of the matured opinions of the educated classes in India on some of the more important and pressing of the social questions of the day” (quoted in Andrews and Mookerjee 77). Thus, the emphasis on group interest—over individualist pursuits—makes the tactics deployed by Congressional “minutemen” analogous to those used by the Bandar-log. One of the most important laws of the jungle states: “Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle—the Tiger, the Panther, and Bear. / And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar in his lair” (Jungle Books 189). In other words, in the jungle, there are some animals who have an authority and supremacy that should not be challenged or questioned. They are the leaders of the jungle who lay down the rules and have tremendous power, and it is required that the other animals respect their hierarchical position. Not surprisingly, the Bandar-log make it a point to challenge the law that gives some animals ascendancy over others, and constantly chatter to them from the treetops and shower them with leaves and twigs. The Congressional “minutemen” are similarly questioning of British dominance over India as can be seen in the case of Subramania Iyer, a delegate from South India, who, speaking at the first meeting of the Congress, questions the oppressive nature of colonial rule: “In many respects . . . India has been a loser by the transfer of the government to the Crown instead of a gainer. Since that time, the condition of the people has undergone a most distressing deterioration. They have been subjected to a less sympathetic despotism, and the expenditure and indebtedness of their Government have increased in a ratio utterly disproportionate to all improvement in its financial resources” (quoted in Andrews and Mookerji 78). Additionally, both the Bandar-log and the “minutemen” are engaged in a type of activism that can potentially fracture the ordered and structured worlds that they inhabit. They have revolutionary ideas and rabble-rousing rhetoric that is simultaneously frowned upon and ridiculed by the British and the jungle animals respectively. Francis Hutchins has argued that the Indian nationalist was regarded as an “agitator, half-devil, half child” who was “perversely intent on causing trouble, but only in the fashion of an adolescent who is unaware of the implications of his revolt and who would be incapable of coping with the consequences of its success” (189), and, in my view, the Bandar-log have a similar status in the jungle since they are looked upon as immature troublemakers who desperately seek the attention of the other animals. For instance, when they pluck Mowgli from the ground and carry him back to the Cold Lairs, they do so partly to defy and agitate Baloo and Bagheera,

126 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature however, they do not seem to think through the consequences of their antagonistic actions. When Chil, the kite, sees the Bandar-log flying through the trees with Mowgli, he thinks to himself: “They never go far . . . They never do what they set out to do. Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log. This time, if I have any eyesight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves” (Jungle Books 62). And, as Baloo repeatedly tells Mowgli, “The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their mind. . . . and [yet] they desire, if they have any fi xed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle-People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and fi lth on our heads” (59; emphasis in the original). Finally, as a last point of comparison, both the Bandar-log and the “minutemen” are viewed by the jungle folk and the British respectively as incessant talkers who achieve nothing and are incapable of maintaining order and discipline at any group gathering. Hutchins, for example, cites the recollections of an Anglo-Indian administrator who is completely stumped by the chaos that surrounds a meeting of Indian nationalists as interruptions are common and there is no consistency in the way that the keynote address is interpreted by the listeners. Further, the orator himself seems to have no desire to stick to the subject matter of his speech and, upon meeting the Anglo-Indian official, proceeds to prattle on about “beautiful old Assamese paintings” (quoted in Hutchins 190), an entirely random and unrelated topic. The Bandar-log appear to display similar attributes when they gather in groups and chatter ceaselessly about their greatness and their plans for the future. There is an inconsistency and a lack of focus in the Bandar-logs’ oratory that is seemingly similar to the Indian agitators’, for, when Mowgli tries to instruct them as a group, they lose interest in what he has to say and begin to “pull at their friends’ tails or jump up and down on all fours, coughing” (Jungle Books 69). Further, when Mowgli is taken to the ruins of the ancient Indian city where the Bandar-log live, they bombard him with speeches and songs about their cultural antiquity, and proclaim: “We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We say so, and so it must be true” (70). They also want the young boy to convey this to the other jungle animals: “Now as you are a new listener and can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that they may notice us in future, we will tell you about our most excellent selves” (70). Mowgli’s reaction, like the Anglo-Indian bureaucrat’s, is one of uncomprehending disbelief. He thinks to himself, “Tabaqui, the Jackal, must have bitten all these people . . . and now they have the madness. Certainly this is dewanee, the madness” (70). The fact that the monkeys can talk back as equals and that they regulate him to the position of a mere listener and messenger horrifies Mowgli, especially since he regards himself as the undisputed king of jungle-language. Thus, the structure of command and authority that is so crucial to the jungle—and to the Raj—is completely absent in the culture of the Bandar-log and Indian nationalists, and, more intriguingly, their rejection by the animals and the British respectively share a startlingly similar pattern.

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 127 Kipling’s opinion on the subject of Indians holding important bureaucratic positions—one of the basic aims of the early nationalists—is unequivocally presented in his short story, “The Head of the District” (1890). Set in the North West Frontier Provinces, it describes the utter confusion and mayhem that follows when a Western-educated Bengali is appointed as a Deputy-Commissioner after the death of Yardley-Orde, the same efficient and devoted AngloIndian civil servant who makes an appearance in “The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.”. In “The Head of the District,” the attempt at running the country in a more democratic way, by “appointing a child of the country to the rule of that country” (116), is a complete disaster. The Viceroy, whose “pen and tongue” are largely responsible for the creation of a “New India, teeming with possibilities—loud-voiced, insistent, a nation among nations” (116), selects Girish Chunder De, who is “more English that the English” (117), to take charge of affairs in a volatile and hardy province bordering Afghanistan.4 The sheer aversion with which the Pathans receive this announcement becomes testimony to the foolhardiness of such a plan. The Viceroy is considered “a fool, a dreamer of dreams, a doctrinaire, and, worst of all, a trifler with the lives of men” (117) since lives are lost as a result of his little experiment. It is made apparent in the short story that though De, a member of the Bengal Civil Service, may have “been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there” (116), was “crammed with code and case law” (118), and had appropriated the dress and speech patterns of the British, it was all at a very superficial level. When put to the test, he is not a man of action or of courage like his British counterpart Tallantire, and flees from his duties as quickly as he can. When some of the Pathans find out that the new head of the district is Bengali, they go on a rampage, looting and plundering the border towns, since they believe that a Bengali will be powerless to control the situation. Sure enough, De, who, like the Bandar-log, is also a voracious speechmaker, deserts his post and leaves it to Tallantire to control the situation. When De is asked by a subordinate for orders to check the rebellion, he chickens out of the situation by stammering out this reply: “I-I take you all to witness that I have not yet assumed charge of the District” (127–28). Thus, when put to the acid test, this Bengali-turned-Briton fails miserably: while he can brilliantly appropriate the superficial mannerisms of the British, he cannot display their courage at a moment of crisis. The chaos that ensues from this democratic experiment leaves many dead, and Kipling seems to suggest that it is, indeed, “dewanee” (Jungle Books 70) or madness to leave the administration of India to Indians. As mentioned earlier, the leaderless monkeys are the only animals in the jungle who exhibit behavior that can be regarded as an imitation of democratic legislative procedures, however, they make a travesty of it by “scratch[ing] for fleas” (68) during their meetings. And since they “never remembered what they had seen and what they had not,” they would wander about after their council meetings “in ones and twos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did” (69). When Mowgli sees this he comes to the conclusion

128 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature that he has “reached a very bad place indeed,” since the Bandar-log have “no Law, no Hunting Call, and no leaders—nothing but foolish words and little picking thievish hands” (69). The anarchic situation in the Cold Lairs due to the absence of a government is very similar to the turmoil, disorder, and lawless confusion that ensued in the North West Frontier Provinces when democratic principles were used to select the bureaucratic head of a district. Thus, the mimic men—whether it is Girish Chunder De or the Bandar-log— are the most despised and dangerous people (or animals in the case of The Jungle Books) in Kipling’s world since they are disruptively familiar, without being identical. The unsettling potential of the mimic men has to be curbed and, in “Kaa’s Hunting,” the monkeys are hypnotized by Kaa (after they put up a strong and vocal resistance) into submission as the “lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly” (76) towards him. It is hinted by Baloo and Bagheera that many of them will have “walked down his [Kaa’s] throat. . . . before the moon rises again. . . . [and that] He will have good hunting—after his own fashion” (77). In other words, Kaa will get rid of a large number of them in the most cruel and cold-blooded manner by brutalizing and eating them up himself. Given the dominant outlook of prominent late nineteenthcentury colonial administrations such as Stephen, it is hardly surprising that, in the Mowgli stories, Kipling endorses violence and punishment as a means of preserving order. After all, as is evident in the views of top-ranking AngloIndian administrators, it was one of the most effective ways by which the British attempted to seal the cracks of their colonial enterprise in India. Further, as Murray points out, positive law is the governing spirit behind legal codes in the British colonies and it sanctions the arbitrary use of force to ensure the preservation of a despotic imperial society. There is also a clear division between the governors and the governed and, for the laws to be successful, the governed must display unquestioning obedience to a chain of command. The monkeys, who attempt to imitate a more democratic order and, often, seem to have no laws at all, therefore, cannot be tolerated in such a world and have to be brutally and violently silenced. Like the “minutemen,” their way disturbs an ordered and structured world where unquestioned obedience to laws is what keeps it from falling apart. Therefore, force has to be deployed to keep them in check as “One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterwards” (78). Further, the reason Kaa is approached by Baloo and Bagheera to save Mowgli from the Bandarlogs’ persuasive influence is because of the fear he generates in them. Like the suppressive colonial machinery, the source of his power appears to be infi nite and omnipotent: “Kaa was everything that the monkeys feared in the jungle, for none of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could look him in the face, and none had ever come alive out of his hug” (73). And because of this, the chattering monkeys, who seem to mock the jungle folk with their rhetoric and behavior, “ran, stammering with terror, to the walls and roofs of the houses” (73) when Kaa hisses his way into the Cold Lairs.

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 129 Thus, the Bandar-log, like “Macaulay’s minutemen,” are the only ones with the tactics to disrupt an autocratic and undemocratic world. Although the monkeys are ignored and condemned, their potential to splinter the hierarchical power structure of a law-abiding jungle is never entirely dismissed by the other animals. And the only way to ensure that they do not intrude upon this well-ordered world, or the Anglo-Indian child’s power over it, is to use brute force that is both morally and ethically questionable.

(Re)establishing the Authority of the Anglo-Indian boy In an article published in the Anglo-American Magazine in 1902, an early critic, Agnes Cameron, describes Kipling’s influence and popularity as a children’s author in the following manner: “send out a town crier, a sort of Pied Piper of Hamelin searching for children through the length and breadth of Kiplingland, and see the following he will get” (275). The same article notes that his works are “bristling with maxims for the training of the young” (Cameron 275), a comment which is hardly surprising given that Kipling’s stories played an important role in introducing to children, especially young boys in Britain and Anglo-India, the concept of Empire. Lord Meath, the founder of the Empire Day Movement, declares in 1907: “We had to move the minds, consciences and feelings of the children of the British Empire, and it was those children who would elect in their turn the rulers who would make this country either a little England or a great Empire” (quoted in August 107–08). And Kipling does exactly what Meath propagates in such stories as “Wee Willie Winkie” (1888), for example, in which the theme of survival in a hostile land is reworked: a young English boy is not only able to save the life of an Englishwoman who is captured by a gang of Indians, but he is also able to hold his own against these “Bad Men” (276). He imperiously commands them to put a stop to their nefarious activities and obey his orders: “I am the Colonel Sahib’s son, and my order is that you go at once. You black men are frightening the Miss Sahib. One of you must run into the cantonments and take the news that the Miss Sahib has hurt herself, and that the Colonel’s son is here with her” (276). The men, intimidated and confused by Willie’s authoritative tone, end up fighting among themselves, which in turn enables and the young English boy and lady to escape unhurt. Willie is hailed as “a pukka hero,” and Kipling suggests that the “manner” in which he “enter[s] into his manhood” is most admirable (279). By holding Willie up as a stellar example of adolescent imperial heroism, Kipling not only exhorts his young readers, especially English and Anglo-Indian boys, to emulate such behavior, but also seems to encourage them to work determinedly towards what Meath refers to as a “great Empire.” And, arguably, nowhere are Kipling’s pedagogic instincts more apparent than in the Mowgli stories as they teach a young boy how to survive in and dominate over an unfamiliar territory. In fact, from Islam, who

130 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature reads The Jungle Books as “educational manuals” (121), to John McClure, who suggests that it “functions, among other things, as a fable of imperial education and rule, with Mowgli behaving toward the beasts as the British do to the Indians” (59), critics have been quick to point out the instructive and empireconsolidating thrust of this particular Kipling text. Although Mowgli is biologically an Indian child, Don Randall looks at Kipling’s adolescent boy characters, including Mowgli, as “literary figures whose fictional deployments articulate a Eurocentric and imperial worldview” (3). Randall, who reads the Mowgli stories as an allegory of the Mutiny, suggests that Mowgli, by defeating Shere Khan, “stands in the place of the British imperial adventurer and restages the British consolidation of empire in India” (78). Furthermore, he regards Mowgli, a “jungle-child (youthful and energetic, yet duly schooled in the codes of the Law),” as an “alien liberator whose final victory signals the establishment of just rule in the place of an ostensibly corrupt and decrepit Mogul dynasty” (Randall 78). In a similar vein, John McBratney suggests that “Kipling’s native-born characters are all allegorical figures of empire” and Mowgli is “the most fantastically allegorical of them all” (85). McBratney goes on to assert that Mowgli “enacts the white creoles’ quicksilver passages between Indian and Briton,” which in turn is “central to Kipling’s vision of the ideal imperial servant and citizen” (85). Following Randall and McBratney’s lead, I also view Mowgli allegorically—not as an Indian child—but as an Anglo-Indian child or young sahib-surrogate who is deployed to preserve (and even expand) the boundaries of the British Empire. Furthermore, although originally an outsider, Mowgli is shown to have, in keeping with what I have been proposing is the English and AngloIndian child’s dominant position in colonial children’s literature, a legitimate right to become the master of his adopted homeland. Mowgli, an apparent outsider to the jungle world, gains the respect and regard of all the animals by taking on Shere Khan, the lame but potent tiger, who had, prior to the boy’s arrival in the jungle, commanded the fear and respect of the animals. Mowgli has to brutally track and kill Shere Khan, a dangerous man-eater, in order to ensure that his position of superiority is maintained among the jungle folk. In fact, Mowgli’s position in the jungle grows from one of weakness to strength in each story. Initially, in “Mowgli’s Brothers,” he is a frail newcomer who has to be protected from Shere Khan’s appetite for human flesh by Mother Wolf. However, as he grows older, he quickly learns that Shere Khan fears the “Red Flower” or fire, and is able to scare him away by flinging “the fire-pot on the ground” (51). Although he does not kill Shere Khan, the tiger is severely burnt by this encounter and Mowgli makes a vow that one day he will “lay out Shere Khan’s hide upon the Council Rock” (53). He keeps his promise to annihilate his old enemy in “Tiger-Tiger!” when he is able to masterfully use the village buffaloes to trample Shere Khan to death. The “terrible charge of the buffaloes herd against which no tiger can hope to stand” (90) crushes and kills Shere Khan, and, in the process, Mowgli

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 131 emerges as the new and puissant master of the jungle world. Randall, in fact, makes the convincing case that Shere Khan is symbolic of the Mughal dynasty that the British replaced in India. He supports his claims by suggesting that the dissenting members of the Seeonee wolf pack (who desert Mowgli and support Shere Khan) can be compared to the sepoys (who rally around the last Mughal emperor), and just as the British “put an end to the symbolic kingship of Bahadur Shah, so Mowgli puts an end to the lame tiger’s pretensions to power” (Randall 78). Thus, according to Randall, the Mowgli saga “mirrors key features of Mutiny history” by reiterating a “British ‘triumph’ in the midst of treachery and adversity” (78). Not only do the Mowgli stories allude to the Mutiny, but, as I have argued, it also takes into account the dangers of native insurgency in the form of a national movement led by “Macaulay’s minutemen.” Further, Mowgli’s (or the young imperialist’s) fight for survival and dominance against Shere Khan is, in many ways, less complicated (and is more of a direct confrontation) than when he takes on the Bandar-log since he has to actively resist the impulse to get swayed by the enthralling rhetoric and mannerisms of these mimic men. Initially, he is entranced by the Bandar-logs’ behavior, especially when, unlike Baloo, they are “very kind” to him and give him “nuts and pleasant things to eat” (58). More significantly, even when he comes to realize their shortcomings, he seems to have no ability to control the Bandar-log or instill fear in them like he can do with Shere Khan and the other jungle folk. In “Red Dog,” we are told that “all the Jungle was his [Mowgli’s] friend, for all the Jungle was afraid of him” (298). In this story, Mowgli is able to command his troops and ward off the attacks of a vicious pack of wild dogs known as the dholes. The dhole, or “the red hunting-dog of the Dekkan,” has the ability to “drive straight through the Jungle, and . . . pull down and tear to pieces” everything that comes in its way, so much so that “even the tiger will surrender a new kill to the dhole” (301). Mowgli, on the other hand, is able to use his considerable knowledge of the jungle laws and his wits to diffuse the threat that the dholes pose to the jungle animals. In “Letting in the Jungle,” Mowgli masterminds the destruction of an entire village as a form of punishment for the injustice endured by Messua (whom he considers his human mother) and her husband by “letting in” the jungle animals and unleashing their feral fury upon the errant village. As Mowgli tells Hathi: “I have seen and smelt the blood of the woman that gave me food—the woman whom they [the villagers] would have killed but for me. Only the smell of the new grass on their door-steps can take away that smell. It burns in my mouth. Let in the Jungle, Hathi!” (227). He has full control over the animals—and can get them to do whatever he pleases—as these lines from his song against the villagers testify: “I have untied against you the club-footed vines, / I have sent in the Jungle to swamp out your lines” (233). However, Mowgli’s ability to dominate over the Bandarlog—especially once he is in their clutches in the Cold Lairs—is always in some doubt. As Bagheera tells Baloo: “He is wise and well-taught, and above

132 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature all he has the eyes that make the Jungle-People afraid. But (and this is a great evil) he is in the power of the Bandar-log, and they, because they live in trees, have no fear of our people” (63). In other words, the Bandar-log are all too familiar with Mowgli, the boy-sahib, who eventually embarks upon a career of imperial service, to be in awe of him. And although one of the monkeys “made a speech and told his companions that Mowgli’s capture marked a new thing in the history of the Bandar-log” (69), they display very little interest in what Mowgli has to say and, for the most part, reduce him to the level of a mere onlooker. Mowgli, who is used to being feared and esteemed, even by Shere Khan, and has the ability to outstare and outmaneuver the animal kingdom, is thus at his most vulnerable when he is in the company of the Bandar-log. Ultimately, it is Kaa who has the ability to hypnotize and consume the seditious Bandar-log and, by doing so, reestablishes Mowgli’s (and by inference, the Anglo-Indian child’s) position of dominance in the jungle. The violent and bloody methods that Kaa uses to do away with the monkeys are shown to be necessary in order to preserve the stability of the jungle and Mowgli’s mastery over jungle spaces. In colonial children’s literature, the English and Anglo-Indian child may begin from a position of weakness (as Henry does) or find himself captivated by a different way of life (like Frank Falkland, Sonny Sahib, and Mowgli), but, in the course of the narrative, his control over an alien environment is (re)established over and over again. Initially, Mowgli is fascinated by an ‘other’ who is not only very similar, but also stands for limitless possibilities and the promise of a way of life that is heady, alluring, and without any restrictions. He is enchanted by the idea that he can be their leader one day and is strongly attracted to their way of life, and when the monkeys refer to him as their “blood-brother” (58), the Anglo-Indian child is in danger of sympathizing with the ‘other’ who is almost the same, but not quite the same. However, his love of the ‘other’ holds out a danger to Mowgli that could potentially be more harmful to him (and his ascendancy over the jungle) than Shere Khan’s enmity. Mowgli, therefore, must be protected from the Bandar-log who, with their unruly way of life, not only have the ability to mesmerize the young boy, but also have scant respect for him after luring him into the Cold Lairs. The English and Anglo-Indian child, who is deployed as a triumphant illustration of imperial authority in colonial children’s literature, has to reclaim his agency and control over his environment, more than ever in the second half of the nineteenth century, since the British have embraced the vision of an enduring empire in India. If Sara Jeanette Duncan resorts to shows of diplomacy and loyalty by the Anglo-Indian child as a way of prevailing over India, one can say that in the Mowgli stories, Kipling’s solution is more straightforward and fierce: when the Anglo-Indian child’s ability to survive is threatened, Kipling, not unlike so many of his Anglo-Indian compatriots, advocates violence as a just measure to regain and reestablish his supremacy and preeminence in a world where he must be at all times respected and feared. And if, in the early nineteenth century, Henry is ultimately unable

‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ • 133 to survive his encounter with India, and Frank returns to the tranquility of the English countryside, by the end of the century, Mowgli, like Sonny Sahib, is not only able to endure India, but also does so successfully, and overcomes, what, arguably, will turn out to be, by the early twentieth century, the most insidious—yet effective—threat to British hegemony in India.

Chapter Five Trivializing Empire The Topsy-Turvy World of Upendrakishore Ray and Sukumar Ray On October 16, 1905, Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal—the cradle of British rule in India and the birthplace of the Bengali intelligentsia—by proclaiming that it was administratively prudent to divide such a populous and geographically unwieldy entity into two separate states. One of the main reasons for this split, however, was to undercut the influence of the educated Bengali bhadralok (gentleman), a varied group of upwardly mobile middle-class professionals, minor bureaucrats, and servicemen who, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, had “warmly embraced the [European Enlightenment] themes of rationalism, science, equality, and human rights” (4) in the nineteenth century, and were increasingly campaigning for reform and representation within the colonial state. The desire to rein in the growing power of this emergent group, who had become increasingly nationalistic (and anti-British) as the new century dawned, is clearly evident in the British Home Secretary Herbert H. Risley’s declaration in 1904: “Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways” (quoted in Sarkar, Modern India 107). An auxiliary aim of the partition, based on a cynical policy of ‘divide and rule,’ was to create a predominantly Hindu West and a Muslim East in order to showcase the fact that, far from having a united national movement, India was a deeply fractured subcontinent in need of British rule. The attempt by Curzon to redraw the boundaries of colonial Bengal resulted in a prolonged period of civil disobedience and chaos, which in turn changed the temper of the Indian national movement dramatically after 1905. Bengali nationalists who, prior to the partition, were largely conciliatory in their efforts to engage with the British were now increasingly willing to challenge British rule with various acts of civil disobedience. At the heart of this new style of protest was the Swadeshi (of our country) movement that called for the boycott of British products and institutions in favor of Indian ones. As Shekar Bandyopadhyay writes, the 135

136 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Swadeshi movement emphasized “self-reliance, village level organisation and constructive programmes to develop indigenous or swadeshi alternatives for foreign goods and institutions” (255). Thus, the mood in Bengal was one that not only celebrated all things homegrown and local, but also one that was defiant towards all forms of official authority. This attitude, I propose, fi lters into the children’s stories written by Upendrakishore Ray and his son, Sukumar Ray. Although a handful of Bengali children’s texts had been published in the nineteenth century, and there was a strong oral tradition of storytelling and rhymes, the Rays, in the spirit of the Swadeshi movement, gave Bengali children a written literature of their own.1 In previous chapters, I have argued that British and Anglo-Indian children’s texts respond to key historical moments in nineteenth-century colonial India in an attempt to contain the fault lines of the imperial project. In keeping with the overarching argument of this book, this chapter continues to explore how children’s texts respond to momentous historical events in colonial India; however, instead of looking at texts that are written to consolidate empire, I focus on children’s literature that resists and debunks Britain’s empire in India. More specifically, I read U. Ray’s Tuntunir Boi (Tuntuni’s Book) and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, and S. Ray’s Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La (A Topsy-Turvy Tale) and Abol Tabol (Rhymes without Reason)—fashioned by early twentieth-century colonial history, especially the Swadeshi movement—as anti-colonial texts that seek to empower Bengali children living under colonial rule.

Swadeshi or, How to Oppose the British Before discussing Bengali children’s literature, however, it is useful to briefly consider the historical background of the Swadeshi movement (1905–1911). By the 1890s, there was a growing realization that the methods favored by the moderate leaders of the Indian National Congress, who used prayers and petitions, wrote articles and made speeches—in an attempt to reform suppressive colonial policies—were largely ignored by colonial government. The British tended to reject Congress-led reform initiatives as elitist, by claiming that they lacked the mandate of all Indians, as epitomized in Lord Dufferin’s statement in 1888 that the Congress leaders represented a “microscopic minority” (quoted in Bandyopadhyay 217), and in Curzon’s assertion in 1900 that the Congress was “tottering to its fall” (quoted in Sarkar, Modern India 96). This dismissive attitude of the British officials, in great measure, resulted in the nationalists—largely a group of educated, city-bred Indians, many of whom were Bengalis—looking for ways to mobilize all Indians, peasants and the working class in particular, to participate in the Congress-led national struggle. Interestingly, the educated middle-class nationalist turned to nonWestern paradigms in order to articulate an easily comprehensible resistance

Trivializing Empire • 137 to colonial rule. The grassroots appeal of folk culture and folklore as a way of making the more complex issues of reform and political liberty intelligible to the common man was explored, as was the use of Hindu mythology to evoke nationalistic passions and notions of a glorious Indian past. In 1893, for example, Bal Gangadhar Tilak turned a local festival in honor of Ganesh, the elephant-god, into a forum for anti-British rhetoric. The triumvirate of more extremist Congress leaders—Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh, and Lala Lajpat Rai— also formulated the concept of Swaraj (self-rule) by vowing to get rid of British rule and to revive in India the imagined splendors of a golden Hindu past. However, the early attempts to define a new Indian consciousness by drawing on indigenous cultural, political, and economic alternatives were, perhaps, best articulated in the Swadeshi movment. Although the Swadeshi movement, a precursor of the more effective Gandhian model of mass civil disobedience, failed to capture the entire nation’s imagination, alienated a large section of the Muslim population, and by 1908, had disintegrated into political extremism and revolutionary terrorism, its impact on Bengali society, as Rajat Ray and others have argued, was, nevertheless, remarkable. Marking a clear break from the founding principles of the Indian National Congress that called for mutual regard and corporation between the Indians and the British, the Swadeshi movement was grounded in the principles of boycott, self-reliance, and defiant resistance. On July 17, 1905, Surendranath Banerjea gave the initial call for the swadeshi boycott, and a more formal boycott resolution was passed at a mass meeting at the Calcutta Town Hall on August 7, 1905. This led to marches, demonstrations, hartals (strikes), and to the picketing of government offices, schools, courts, and shops, and a large number of Bengalis vowed never again to buy British merchandise. One of the main goals of the boycott was to reduce Indian dependency on British manufactured goods that, according to the leaders of the Swadeshi movement, was the reason for India’s backwardness as it debilitated local industry and prevented India from becoming economically self-reliant. The Swadeshi movement, that was encouraged by Congress leaders like Tilak on a national level and was piloted in Bengal by “a new generation of leaders” (Sartori 271) like Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal, was initially so successful that “by 1906, imports of foreign cotton yarn and cloth into Bengal had fallen by 25 and 40 per cent respectively” (Copland 44), thereby striking a blow to the exploitative economic practices of the British Raj. Ultimately, however, as Sumit Sarkar’s seminal study, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, points out, despite its initial successes in Bengal, and the fact that the partition of Bengal was revoked in 1911, the Swadeshi movement and its brand of resistance had its limitations. For instance, at the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress in Surat in 1907, moderate leaders, who were still willing to engage with the British in order to bring about reform, and were unwilling to embrace the increasingly revolutionary and militant

138 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature aspects of swadeshi, were able to isolate the extremists like Tilak and Ghosh who wholeheartedly supported the more vitriolic aspects of the movement. Further, as the movement began to take a violent turn by 1908, resulting in random acts of terrorism, leaders who had been initially supportive of it began to distance themselves from the swadeshi cause. In addition, the movement was localized to Bengal and its popular rhetoric was largely conceptualized around Hindu images; therefore, despite the efforts to massmobilize, sections of the population, like the Muslims and the peasantry, did not join the movement in significant numbers. By 1908, as a result of a British crackdown, many of its more fiery leaders went into self-imposed or compulsory exile. Ghosh disengaged himself from politics and retreated to Pondicherry to establish a spiritual ashram, Pal left for England, and Tilak, who supported the cause from his base in western India, was imprisoned in a Rangoon jail for six years in 1908 for sedition. Lastly, in an attempt to pacify the moderate wing of the national movement, the British attempted to make a few token concessions by passing the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (Morley-Minto Reforms) that provided for very limited self-government for their disaffected colonial subjects. What is of interest to me, in this chapter, however, is not so much an analysis of the successes and failures of the Swadeshi movement as an exploration of the influence it had on Bengali children’s literature, as it came of age in postpartition Bengal. Although conceptualized in terms of political and economic opposition to British merchandise and institutions, the Swadeshi movement also sparked a cultural revival that celebrated all things Bengali. A countless number of songs, poems, plays, pamphlets, and tracts were written from 1904 onward to mobilize public opinion and generate solidarity with the swadeshi cause. For instance, one of the main supporters of the Swadeshi movement was Rabindranath Tagore, the doyen of Bengali literature, and although Tagore became increasingly disillusioned with the violent turn that the movement took by 1908, which is best reflected in his novel Ghare Baire [The Home and the World] (1915), he made speeches, wrote numerous pamphlets, and composed songs and poems with the aim of infusing a spirit of unity and patriotism in all Bengalis.2 In his Swadeshi Samaj (1904) address, he famously outlined a proposal for a self-reliant Bengali samaj (community) based on the work ethos of traditional Indian villages. Tagore also conceptualized the notion of atmasakti (self-strengthening) as a means of attaining individual self-sufficiency and self-reliance. Among Tagore’s many swadeshi-inspired compositions, perhaps the most well-known is the evocative anthem, “Amar Sonar Bangla” [“My Golden Bengal”] (1906), in which he stirringly expresses his devotion to his golden homeland of paddy fields and mango groves.3 However, I propose that it is in the emergence of Bengali children’s literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, spearheaded by U. Ray and S. Ray, that one witnesses a superb articulation of the swadeshi vision which called for indigenous methods of self-actualization.

Trivializing Empire • 139 The Beginnings of Bengali Literature While it would be an exaggeration to claim that there was no Bengali children’s literature in print before 1905, the earliest published children’s texts were largely didactic and instructional in scope, and were byproducts of Bengal’s encounter with British colonial rule. The early nineteenth-century colonial educational policies, supported by progressive Bengalis like Ram Mohan Roy, who wished to reform Bengali society through the medium of mass education, led to the establishment of schools and colleges, which in turn necessitated the publication of textbooks for use in these institutions, particularly at the primary level. The Calcutta School Book Society, a publishing house run by native scholars and backed by British Orientalists, was established in 1817, with the primary aim of writing and publishing text books and supplying them to schools. Early titles published by the Calcutta School Book Society include: Nitikatha [Conduct Tales] (1818), comprising eighteen didactic stories and widely viewed as the first children’s book in Bengali; Tarachand Datta’s Manoranjanetihas [Pleasurable History] (1819); Raj Kamal Sen’s 1820 translation of a collection of Sanskrit fables Hitopadesha (Counsel with Benevolence); and Radha Kanta Deb’s Bangla Siksha Grantha [An Instructional Book of Bengali] (1821). In fact, as Provash Ronjan Dey points out, Bengali children’s literature has its “roots in . . . text books and in the domain of education” (1), and these early texts aimed at teaching moral lessons in addition to “[the letters of the] alphabet, essays, Grammar, History and Mathematics” (2). Another factor that contributed towards the publication of Bengali children’s texts was the so-called Bengali renaissance, an intellectual awakening ignited by contact with Western ideals and education, which sought to reform and rejuvenate Bengali language and culture through much of the nineteenth century. Ram Mohan Roy’s vision of an enlightened Bengali society, which I have briefly touched upon in the chapter on Little Henry, greatly influenced Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, the Sanskrit scholar, educator, reformer, writer, and philanthropist, who did much to simplify and modernize the Bengali language in the mid-nineteenth century. Vidyasagar created modern Bengali prose by building on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century foundations left by the Fort William pundits, the Baptist missionaries, Ram Mohan Roy, and the Calcutta School Book Society, and encouraged fellow-educationists like Akshay Kumar Datta and Madanmohan Tarkalankar to do the same. Vidyasagar penned Varna Parichay [Know your Alphabet] (1855), an alphabet book that is still used by Bengali children today, and wrote several instructional textbooks for school children that were mostly translations of existing works in Sanskrit and English. Tarkalankar’s primer, Shishusikha [Lessons for Children] (1850–1855), which included poems for children, and Datta’s Charupath [Pleasant Road] (1855–1859), consisting of an eclectic blend of scientific and patriotic essays, are among the other notable mid-nineteenth-century instructional books in Bengali.

140 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Any account of an early history of Bengali children’s literature cannot ignore the impressive number of children’s magazines published in Bengali, particularly from the 1870s onward. In his pithy overview of Bengali children’s literature, Dey credits the Baptist missionaries for publishing Digdarsan (with an English title of Magazine for Indian Youth) (1818), a pioneering monthly magazine for children, whose “chief object[ive] was to impart lessons . . . on Science and History” (22). The Calcutta School Book Society began publishing Paswavali (On Animals) in 1822, with a view to “propagate scientific knowledge about animal life” (Dey 23). Interestingly, each decade saw the publication of a new children’s magazine—Jnanoday [On Knowledge] (1831), Pakshir Brittanta [On Birds] (1844), Vidyadarpana [Mirror of Knowledge] (1853), Satyapradip [Truth and Light] (1860)—all of which had the goal of shaping the empirical and moral consciousness of a modern Bengali child. However, it was from the 1870s onward—the decades that witnessed the birth of the Indian national movement—that Bengali children’s magazines came of age, infusing its pages with a spirit of patriotism. As Satadru Sen writes, “Beginning in the 1870s, the Bengali press had articulated a desire to construct its experimental terrain of childhood, i.e., a juvenile periphery of its own that might resist, overlap, complement or render redundant the histories and geographies of Bengal that were produced by British writers.” Children’s magazines such as Balak-Bandhu [Friend of Children] (1878), edited by the social and religious reformer Kesab Chandra Sen, Aryakahini [Noble Stories] (1881), Sakha [Friend] (1884), Balak [The Child] (1885), and Mukul [Flower-bud] (1895), to name some of the more popular ones, sought to educate, entertain, and politically awaken their young readers by publishing an eclectic blend of scientific and historical essays, travel pieces, short stories and poems, and brief news synopses. Some of these pieces were penned by literary luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore and U. Ray, who attempted to foreground a patriotic middle-class Bengali perspective in their writings. The publication of Bengali children’s magazines continued to flourish well into the first half of the twentieth century, and emerge in part from late nineteenth-century “middle class attempts to articulate a politically charged world of children’s knowledge” (Satadru Sen). In fact, U. Ray, who had contributed prolifically to various children’s magazines, began publishing his own hugely popular magazine Sandesh in 1913, of which he was the founding editor until 1915, the year he died. Mouchak [Beehive] (1920) was another notable early twentieth-century children’s magazine that published politically engaged material for Bengali children. The interest in Indian folklore, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century, also played a dominant role in developing Bengali children’s literature. For the British, scarred by the Mutiny of 1857, the late nineteenth-century efforts to record Indian folktales was directly tied to the Foucaultian idea of acquiring knowledge and exercising power through incessant classification and documentation. For Bengalis like Rabindranath Tagore, Jogindranath Sarkar, and U. Ray, on the other hand, it reflected a newly emerging consciousness (subsequently

Trivializing Empire • 141 articulated in the Swadeshi movement) that celebrated homegrown traditions and narratives. As in the case of the Brothers Grimm and their collection of German folktales, these efforts aimed at appealing to a collective Bengali identity grounded in folk culture, while addressing a dual audience of children and adults. It is important to qualify, though, that some of the earliest collections of Indian folktales date back to the late eighteenth century, and were largely byproducts of Orientalist scholarship moulded by Warren Hastings’s view that “every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state” (quoted in Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest 28). The early Baptist missionaries, whose proselytizing the East India Company officials regarded with suspicion, also published a few translations of folktales in an attempt to better understand native traditions and the people they hoped to convert. However, it was in the late nineteenth century that the tradition of collecting folk tales and rhymes truly flourished in Bengal, setting the stage for the publication of original folktales for children by U. Ray. In particular, Rabindranath Tagore’s validation of folklore—echoing the romantic nationalism of the British Romantic poets who glorified children and common folk as embodiments of purity and innocence—ignited an interest in compiling Bengali folk tales and rhymes. Tagore began collecting folklore from around 1883 (Mukhopadhyay 40), and the establishment of Bangiya Shahitya Parishat (Bengali Literary Council) in 1894 gave him a forum from which to encourage others do the same (Mukhopadhyay 66). As Suchismita Sen notes, Tagore’s initiatives resulted in “a spurt of activity in the editing and publishing of folk songs, folktales, and nursery rhymes during this period” (2). Pioneering efforts to collect popular children’s folk tales and rhymes by Jogindranath Sarkar, an educator and publisher, resulted in Hasi-O-Khela [Laughter and Play] (1891), drawn largely from Bengali folk and fairy tales, and Khukumonir Chhara [Rhymes for Little Girls] (1899), a collection of folk rhymes. Rabindranath Tagore inspired his nephew, Abanindranath Tagore, a renowned artist, to write “Khirer Putul” [“The Condensed-Milk Doll”] (1896), widely considered to be the first original fairytale in Bengali. Other collections of folktales aimed at children, notably Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli [Grandmother’s Bag] (1907), also reflect this trend of gathering and publishing Bengali oral folktales and fairytales in the early 1900s. However, I suggest that it was U. Ray who shifted the focus of Bengali children’s literature by not just transcribing folklore, but also using it as a creative source to write a substantial number of original Bengali stories for children.

U. Ray’s Early Influences In her whimsical biography of her uncle, Lila Majumdar, a renowned Bengali children’s author herself, describes how U. Ray spent his childhood in

142 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Mymemsingh (now a part of Bangladesh) surrounded by “rivers and pools and forests,” with a population comprising “elephants, tigers, crocodiles, jackals and other beasts and birds and [of course] the villagers” (33). Not surprisingly, the rural villages of eastern Bengal, alive with enduring traditions of oral storytelling—and far removed from the bustling imperial city of Calcutta—became a source of inspiration for a large number of U. Ray’s stories. As U. Ray writes in his introduction to Tuntunir Boi: “as the evening falls and children fall asleep without taking their supper, women of East Bengal tell these stories to them to keep them awake” (quoted in Dey 15). In fact, in The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian (1951), Nirad Chaudhuri’s charming account of his own childhood in turn-of-the-century Mymemsingh—fi lled with rich oral traditions—is not dissimilar to the type of idyllic childhood experienced by U. Ray. However, even though U. Ray evoked the jungles and tigers of a timeless Mymemsingh repeatedly in children’s stories, his stories, I propose, equally reflect the milieu of colonial Bengal. U. Ray moved to Calcutta as a young man after winning a scholarship to attend Presidency College, and proceeded to befriend some of the most remarkable Bengali men and women of his age. Among his closest acquaintances were the members of the Tagore family, including Rabindranath Tagore, whose home, the famed Jorasanko Thakur Bari (Tagore House in Jorasanko), was the meeting place of artists, social reformers, political leaders, and other pioneering Bengalis who, following in Ram Mohan Roy’s footsteps, were deeply committed to the idea of a socially reformed and modern Bengal. U. Ray’s own efforts in developing a modern sensibility in Bengali society lay in the field of printing technology. As a student at Presidency, he displayed a keen interest in science, which in turn resulted in his life-long experimentations with block printing, photography, and photo-engraving. Although he received no formal training, he was committed to changing the quality of print and illustrations available in Bengali magazines and papers, and began to study British printing and engraving techniques in order to become a printer and engraver. His self-taught choice of profession was greatly fuelled by the fact that illustrations, particularly in children’s magazines—to which he had begun contributing short stories based on Hindu myths and legends— were “adaptations from foreign originals” (Majumdar 17), and lacked authenticity as British scenes and faces were typically tweaked to look more Indian. Enthused with the spirit of late nineteenth-century nationalism that was consciously promoting the use of indigenous images, U. Ray’s aim was to make the illustrations more realistic and appealing to Bengali children. It is interesting to note that, in an era that privileged swadeshi ideals, Bengali artists also returned to local paradigms for inspiration, as is evidenced in the paintings of Abanindranath Tagore—a close acquaintance of U. Ray—who pioneered the so-called Bengal School of Art. There has been a considerable amount of scholarship on colonial Bengal, undertaken by Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mrinalini Sinha and

Trivializing Empire • 143 others, that has focused on the evolving roles and aspirations of the Bengali bhadralok—products of Macaulay’s “Minute”—who initially served as a link between the British and the Indians masses, but whose increasing disillusionment with the colonial policies gave rise to their nationalistic sentiments. As I have noted earlier in this chapter, the anti-British attitude in the late nineteenth century, nourished by burgeoning nationalism, often tended to display signs of Hindu revivalism, whereby the splendors of an imagined ancient Hindu past were emphasized. U. Ray, in spite of having a deep regard for British science and technology (so much so that when he founded his publishing house, U. Ray and Sons in 1895, he imported all the equipment and machinery from England), was unmistakably a member of this increasingly disaffected bhadralok class in Bengal, who were looking for alternative indigenous modes of expression. Thus, by the 1890s, in a city teeming with patriotic Bengali reformers, nationalists, ideologues, journalists, and authors—many of whom were his close friends and relatives—U. Ray, a block-making expert and publisher, was also unmistakably touched by the cultural and religious revivalism which foreshadowed the Swadeshi movement. Although a member of the progressive Brahmo Samaj, which rejected certain practices prevalent in Hindu society, U. Ray’s earliest works for children—Chheleder Ramayana [Children’s Ramayana] and Chheleder Mahabharata [Children’s Mahabharata] (1894)—accessible translations of the epics, emerge in part from the Hindu revivalist mood in 1890s Bengal (and India) which extolled the virtues of ancient Hindu texts and customs as being superior to Western (British) ones. At the same time, as most contemporary historians of the period agree, late nineteenth-century Bengal was a vortex of competing consciousnesses, with modernity often conceptualized simultaneously in terms of an ancient Indian past and Western progressiveness. U. Ray’s interest in scientific inquiry—for which he looked to post-Darwinian Britain—also resulted in a beautifully illustrated little volume about extinct animals entitled Shekaler Katha [Tales from the Past] (1903), complete with “dinosaurs, tyrannosaurs, pterodactyls and monstrous fish” (Majumdar 31). His audience—the middle-class Bengali boy learning about his world—was thus encouraged to return to a double past in U. Ray’s early works—an ancient Indian one and a pre-historic one—and was expected to display a curiosity in both the scientific and spiritual matters. Majumdar’s portrait of her uncle shows him to be a man who was not overtly political but, nevertheless, was deeply sympathetic to the nationalist cause and was cognizant of the momentous times in which he lived. For instance, he regularly took his own children to swadeshi melas (fairs)—organized to instill in the masses a sense of pride in local handicrafts, products, and inventions (Majumdar 28). To protest the partition of Bengal, U. Ray, a talented violinist, joined Rabindranath Tagore in street demonstrations, and provided the musical backdrop to Tagore’s stirring compositions (Majumdar 42). Not surprisingly, the Swadeshi movement left an indelible impression on U. Ray, as it did on many of his contemporaries, including Rabindranath

144 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Tagore, and, like Tagore, he was troubled by the more violent and revolutionary aspects of the movement. I propose that its effect on U. Ray’s works was twofold: on the one hand, his post-partition literary output was homespun and rebellious towards all forms of authority, thereby honoring the basic values of swadeshi; on the other hand, his rejection of the more violent phase of the Swadeshi movement—conceptualized around terrorist attacks and vitriolic Hindu revivalist rhetoric—created a more secular and humorous vision in his writings. Unlike his early works, which are largely abridged retellings of Hindu epics, his later writings reflect the more inclusive and earthy world of Bengali folklore.

U. Ray’s Post-Swadeshi Children’s Stories In Lokashahitya [Folklore] (1907), a collection of essays celebrating folklore, Rabindranath Tagore proposes that folklore is a vital source from which an uncorrupted and unadulterated Bengali cultural identity can be accessed. Mirroring the trends found in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European romantic nationalism, Tagore, from the 1880s onward, focused on the centrality of folklore as an authentic transmitter of Bengali customs and traditions. As described earlier, his validation of folklore encouraged others to compile and collect folktales; however, it was not until U. Ray published Tuntunir Boi, that the first collection of original children’s folktales was published in Bengali.4 What sets U. Ray’s tales apart is the fact that although they are set in a seemingly timeless, rural Bengal, they allegorically convey the state of affairs in colonial Bengal with a great deal of accuracy to the discerning reader. And even though his stories largely describe Bengali characters, be it child or animal, some of the more oppressive and powerful protagonists, I propose, can be read as allegorical representations of the British in India. U. Ray also used simple, everyday Bengali spoken by children, rather than the more complex prose of ‘high’ Bengali, which made the tales lively and accessible to children. U. Ray also introduced his young readers to a range of characters, the most popular being Tuntuni—a clever little tailorbird who uses wit and ingenuity to undercut all forms of official oppression—and who was, without doubt, an empowering figure for Bengali children living under colonial rule. It is worth considering, for instance, the encounter between the king (who, not surprisingly, like India’s colonial rulers, is both authoritarian and tyrannical) and Tuntuni in “How the King Lost his Nose” as it highlights the ability of an unarmed yet quick-thinking bird’s ability to escape punishment and death. Tuntuni finds a gold coin in the king’s garden and sings out aloud: “The wealth the king has, I too have it!” (Magical World 106; emphasis in the original). Initially amused by her song, the king gets increasingly furious that Tuntuni possesses a gold coin and tells his men to get it back from her. Once again,

Trivializing Empire • 145 Tuntuni, not unlike the Bengali journalists and pamphleteers who could not be silenced by the 1905 partition and the drain of wealth from colonial Bengal, sings: “What a greedy king, he takes Tuni’s money away!” (107; emphasis in the original). The king attempts to placate Tuntuni by returning the gold coin, but Tuntuni, emboldened by her success, taunts the king about being cowardly, which results in the king declaring to his soldiers: “Go catch her, I’ll fry and eat her!” (107). The king’s desire to consume Tuntuni, archetypical of monstrous eating patterns in folktales, also reflects the extreme nature of the king’s disciplinary and punitive actions, and can be regarded as a metaphor for disciplinary measures found in colonial Bengal, particularly as a reaction to the Swadeshi movement. Tuntuni, who is caught by the soldiers and brought to the queens of the kingdom to be cooked, is able to fly away when the king’s seven queens pass him around among themselves. The king is given a frog to eat instead by the queens, and the indomitable Tuntuni sings once again: “What fun, what fun, the king ate a frog!” (108; emphasis in the original). Outraged that he has been made a fool of, the king orders that his queens’ noses be cut off and demands that Tuntuni be brought to him so that he can “swallow her whole” (109). The level of absurdity to which the king stoops is, once again, reflective of the paranoia with which the colonial enterprise often functioned—where the punishment often outweighed the crime. After the soldiers are sent to catch the little bird, Tuntuni is captured and brought to the king who swallows her, she almost escapes after he belches her out, but the king, in an excessive display of might, sends two hundred soldiers after her. Once the king swallows Tuntuni again, he puts “both hands over his mouth” (109) so that she cannot escape. As with the sensation of unease and discomfort that accompanied the British subjugation of Bengal, the king begins to feel sick once the bird is trapped in his stomach. Ultimately, he is unable to keep her down without feeling very ill himself, and he has to literally heave her out of his system. The guards, trying to block Tuntuni’s escape by swinging their swords at her, cut off the king’s nose instead, and the king’s doctor has to “use all his medicines and bandages to save the king” (109). Tuntuni, on seeing the nose-less king, sings cheekily once again: “The king has lost his nose and it serves him right!” (111; emphasis in the original), and flies away to safety “beyond the borders of the kingdom” (111). The irreverent tone in Tuntuni’s songs also reflects a stance of defiance, courage, and resilience when confronted with oppression, the implications of which would not have been lost on Bengali children. Two other characters that appear in Tuntunir Boi are also worth mentioning: a cat named Matanjali Sarkar, and the Stupid Tiger. Matanjali Sarkar (whose last name literally means government) is a bullying, tax-collecting cat who grows fat by intimidating a family of tigers, who represent Bengali peasantry, into believing that he is strong and mighty, when, in fact, he is cowardly. I read Matanjali Sarkar as the oppressive native intermediary figure and agent of British rule dating back to days of Lord Cornwallis’s land

146 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature revenue regulations. Cornwallis devised a system of collecting land revenue in 1793, referred to as the Permanent Settlement, which was in effect in Bengal through much of the nineteenth century, whereby the class of Indian zamindars (land owners) were given permanent ownership of land, and became both owners and rent collectors who paid a fi xed amount of revenue directly to the British, largely by oppressing the peasants who rented the land from them. For the British, this system had direct advantages as they were not involved in the business of petty rent collecting, but had loyal Indian middlemen who functioned as the link between them and the peasants who tilled the land. It is important to note that many of these zamindars belonged to a newly moneyed class, who had become wealthy due to their business connections with the East India Company, and had gradually began replacing the old Mughalera landed gentry who had closer ties with the peasantry. Further, the Permanent Settlement gave the zamindar sole ownership over the land, whereas the earlier system had given them only revenue collecting rights. The settlement implemented by Cornwallis, terribly burdensome to the peasant, led to a series of peasant rebellions, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, which have been the focus of Indian historiography in the last few decades, especially for subalternists like Ranajit Guha who have reiterated the significance of looking at ‘[Indian] history from below.’ Matanjali Sarkar is introduced as an undernourished fisherman’s cat who envies the lifestyle of the well-fed milkman’s cat. He cleverly arranges for the milkman’s cat to be killed, and takes his place in the milkman’s home. In the process, he morphs into a snob who is disdainfully dismissive of other cats, and gives himself a “grand new name” (Magical World 162) of Matanjali Sarkar. More significantly, he walks around with “a pen and a piece of paper” and, on seeing three tiger cubs playing together, says: “Pay up your taxes!” (162). He then proceeds to tell their mother that he is the “king’s minister” and since they “live on the king’s land . . . [they] have to pay taxes” (163). What follows can certainly be interpreted as a good account of how the Permanent Settlement actually worked. The tigress and her cubs hunt day and night to make sure that Matanjali Sarkar has plenty of food and they live in fear of being killed by him when, in reality, Matanjali Sarkar, a mere cat, lacks the strength to fight a tiger. He continues to display signs of his potency by pointing to animal carcasses lying about the jungle and claiming them as his victims. Ultimately, in this allegory of oppressive taxation, Matanjali Sarkar, who is, in reality, frightened by the noises the tigress and her cubs make while hunting for him, sees a hedgehog and hides under the root of a tree, where he is trampled by a stampeding elephant. The last encounter between the tigress and a dying Matanjali Sarkar, albeit humorous, also shows the cat’s continuing efforts to maintain an illusion of power over his subjects. Matanjali Sarkar’s stomach bursts open after being crushed by the elephant, and the tigress, expecting to see him with a huge kill, is surprised, instead, to find him in such a wounded state. She asks wonderingly: “What on earth has happened

Trivializing Empire • 147 to you?” and Matanjali Sarkar, attempting to sustain an illusion of invincibility even in death, replies: “You sent me such small animals to kill. I laughed so much that my tummy burst!” (167). The story of Matanjali Sarkar, therefore, ends on an ironic note as it “was the last thing he ever said” (167). Thus, in this archetypal folktale of the triumph of good over evil, the tigress and her cubs (who represent the oppressed peasantry) are freed from the impossible burdens imposed on them by Matanjali Sarkar, who displays what Benoy Chaudhuri has characterized as “high landlordism” (quoted in Bandyopadhyay 194), or the trait of imposing taxes without any regard to the peasant or the law. The figure of an autocratic native landlord or master is revisited in a number of U. Ray’s short stories, notably “Kenaram and Becharam,” a wish-fulfi llment tale in which the servant, Kenaram (the one who is bought)—echoing the discontentment evidenced in the late nineteenth-century peasant rebellions in Bengal—is able to bring his master, Becharam (the one who sells), to justice for treating him poorly. A motif that U. Ray uses repeatedly in Tuntunir Boi is that of a stupid and gullible tiger. The tiger—an animal once found abundantly in the jungles of Bengal—has been commonly evoked in Bengali folktales as a mighty and powerful beast. However, U. Ray deliberately reverses this representation of the tiger by emphasizing its imbecility, thereby deploying the tiger as a symbol of a greatly weakened and emasculated Bengal. In The Stupid Tiger and other Tales, William Radice’s translation of twenty stories from Tuntunir Boi, we find a number of tales such as “Uncle Tiger and his Nephew the Jackal,” “The Wicked Tiger,” “The Tiger and the Palanquin,” “The Stupid Tiger,” and “The Tiger-eating Jackal Cubs,” in which the tiger is fooled by the wily and cunning jackal. In “Uncle Tiger and his Nephew the Jackal,” for instance, the jackal is able to convince the tiger that a “thirty foot long crocodile on a mudbank, basking in the sun” is, in fact, a boat, which results in the injudicious tiger jumping on to the crocodile, who “immediately clamped him in its jaws and pulled him down into the water” (Stupid Tiger 18). In “The Wicked Tiger,” a tiger caged outside the king’s palace manages to get a kind-hearted Brahmin to let him out of his cage, and wants to eat him up. However, a clever jackal, called in as an arbitrator to decide if the tiger’s actions towards the Brahmin are justified, is able to trick the tiger back into his cage and lock him up by making him reenact the manner in which he was initially found by the Brahmin. “The Tiger and the Palanquin” is yet another instance of the tiger being tricked by the jackal into believing that a small wooden hut—a trap left by the farmers in a sugar cane field—is a palanquin that has been sent for them to attend a royal wedding as musicians. Of course, the tiger enters the hut unthinkingly, and is beaten to death the next morning by farmers who find him inside the contraption. In “The Stupid Tiger,” a jackal, tied up by angry goat herds for attempting to eat their goats, once again has the last laugh by getting a tiger to untie him, and leaving him to face the wrath of the irate villagers. Finally, in “The Tiger-eating Jackal Cubs,” a family of jackals seeks shelter in a tiger’s

148 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature hole, and is able to fend off the tiger by making him believe that the cubs are “dreadful monsters” (65) who would like to eat him for dinner. In all of these tales, thus, a wily and physically weaker jackal is repeatedly able to lead an unthinking tiger into absurd and, often, life-threatening situations. While this is in keeping with folktale patterns of the cunning defeating the brawny, it also insidiously sends a message to young readers that the tiger—the so-called king of the Bengali jungle—has neither the potency nor the power to withstand being fooled by opportunistic scavengers like the jackal. Arguably, one of U. Ray’s greatest contributions to Bengali children’s literature was the publication of the children’s magazine, Sandesh. Punning on the word sandesh—which can mean both a type of sweet and news in Bengali— the magazine was an eclectic collection of informative articles, short stories, games, puzzles, and fun facts for children. It was in Sandesh that U. Ray published several of his original stories, the best known of which is the fantastical tale, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, immortalized in fi lm a few decades later by his grandson Satyajit Ray.5 It tells the story of an exiled singer and drummer, two peasant boys with a passion for music, who are able to (with humor and magical assistance) foil the King of Shundi’s wish to acquire the more benign kingdom of Halla. Although set in rural Bengal of folklore, it is evident that U. Ray covertly responds to some of the most pressing political issues of his day in this short story. The tale begins with two young village boys, Goopy, a singer, and Bagha, a drummer, being driven out of their respective villages because the prosaic villagers cannot bear to listen to their music anymore. They escape from the villagers, Bagha carrying his precious drum along, and, as fate would have it, meet inside the forest and begin to create music without fear of reprisals. The smothering atmosphere of the village—markedly inside the boundaries of a social structure that gags creative expression—is replaced by the more inclusive environment of the forest. The forest is constructed as a liminal space where the past literally comes alive and nurtures these two young musicians. Here Goopy and Bagha meet “black, shadowy shapes” (Magical World 10) who turn out to be ghosts that are so deeply appreciative of the music produced by the young boys that they request them to play at their king’s son’s wedding. One can certainly attempt an allegorical reading of the ghosts as emblematic of an Indian spiritual-cultural heritage that was nurturing to the body, mind, and soul. At daybreak, when it is time to bid Goopy and Bagha farewell, the ghosts, who cannot withstand the light, ask them to make a few wishes. The musicians tellingly wish for people to be more appreciative of their music and for “enough to eat and decent clothes to wear” (11), in response to which the ghosts bestow on them the power to mesmerize their audiences, and present them with a magical bag and shoes that will grant them their material wishes. While the first wish clearly alludes to the desire for a society that does not police individual creativity and expression, the wish for food, I propose, highlights the inability of the colonial government to meet the basic demands of their subjects, especially during the

Trivializing Empire • 149 famines and epidemics that ravaged Bengal in 1890s. The wish for clothes can also be viewed in light of the Swadeshi movement, which called for the boycott of imported cloth, and supported the strengthening of an indigenous industry that manufactured its own yarn—a practice that, in the years to come, was popularized by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who propagated the use of the charkha (spinning wheel) to produce homespun khadi (raw cotton) as a means of attaining economic self-reliance. Eager to have an appreciative human audience, the young musicians initially go to the kingdom of Shundi, which mirrors a tyrannical colonial society in several ways—not only is it ruled by an autocratic king who has territorial ambitions and is willing to go to war with his neighbors, but the king also doles out unnecessarily severe punishments as evidenced by his attempt to kill the two harmless peasant boys. Using their magical shoes, Goopy and Bagha, however, escape the attempt to immolate them and arrive in the neighboring kingdom of Halla, which is ruled by a benevolent and caring king who appoints them as court musicians with a grand salary of five hundred rupees each. They settle down happily in Halla—a state which can be allegorically read as representing the munificence of self-rule—and where they receive the best kind of royal patronage. However, after a few months, their utopian existence is threatened by war as the king of Shundi, who has the mightier army, has imminent plans to attack Halla. The way in which the narrative unfolds from this point on can certainly be read as a response to the political milieu of early twentieth-century Bengal. To begin with, Goopy and Bagha recognize that Shundi’s military might cannot be challenged by Halla by going to war, however, with a bit of magical assistance, can be destabilized by their own wit and ingenuity. Once again, U. Ray returns to his recurring message for Bengali children: that the strong—be it the British colonial state or the kingdom of Shundi—can always be outmaneuvered by the weak. Interestingly, while extensive arrangements were being made in Shundi to prepare for war, the people of Shundi “were also offering prayers to the gods in the temple every day” (24). The extreme religiosity and piousness that lace this endeavor, I suggest, might also be read in the context of the Swadeshi movement’s evocation of Hindu images that ultimately failed to convey a more secular message to the minority communities in Bengal. U. Ray, perhaps consciously, albeit humorously, uses this moment of collective worship by the Shundians to strike a blow to their war efforts. Goopy and Bagha devise a plan, whereby they use their magic bag to wish for “sweets of the most wonderful kind” (24), which they proceed to shower on the heads of the worshipers. The worshipers, who have never tasted such delicious sweets before, see it as a sign of divine benediction as they run to their king proclaiming: “the gods are so pleased with us that they have showered us with sweets which are delicious beyond description!” (25). The king hurries towards the temple only to find that his subjects have greedily eaten up all the heaven-sent sweets. Furious at his subjects, the king decides to return the next day to taste the exquisite

150 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature sweets, and orders over the top ceremonies that are a “hundred times more elaborate than on other days” (25). On this occasion, Goopy and Bagha dress up as gods wearing “crowns, bangles, necklaces and earrings” (26) and appear before the king who is gullible enough to believe that he is in divine company. Once again, using their magical powers, they lift the king off the ground and carry him off to the kingdom of Halla. During this fantastical flight, the king faints and regains consciousness the next day, only to discover that he has been tricked and captured by the same two peasant boys whom he had once planned to murder. In a reversal of fortune, the king of Halla takes away the kingdom of Shundi from its war-mongering king, and, in a fairytale ending, Goopy and Bagha marry the princesses of Halla and are “given half of Shundi to rule” (27). More significantly, the ending celebrates the ability of weak and subaltern peasant boys to challenge a tyrannical ruler and outsmart a powerful army, and, on another level, debunk the oppressive rules of the Permanent Settlement by becoming land-owners themselves.

Literary Nonsense in Post-Swadeshi Bengal U. Ray’s pioneering legacy as a publisher and children’s author was carried on by his son S. Ray, who was arguably the greatest of all Bengali children’s authors. In Sukumar Ray: A Legacy of Laughter, Subhadra Sen Gupta gives us an illuminating glimpse into S. Ray’s childhood that included playful anecdotes about S. Ray’s early storytelling abilities and sense of humor. Born in Calcutta on October 30, 1887, S. Ray, the second child of U. Ray and his wife Bidhumukhi, was a consummate storyteller from an early age, and had a rapt audience of siblings for whom he would weave humorous tales about “fantastic creatures with bizarre names” (Sen Gupta 5). Like his father, S. Ray joined Presidency College to study science and, in 1910, graduated with honors in Physics and Chemistry. In 1911, he won a scholarship to study printing technology at the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, which was followed by another year of study at the Manchester School of Technology. He returned to India in 1913 and joined the family business at a significant moment as U. Ray had just begun publishing the children’s magazine, Sandesh. Not only did he begin taking responsibility of the day-today operations of running a printing press due to U. Ray’s failing health, but S. Ray also became the editor of Sandesh in 1915, upon the death of his father. In the years that followed, until his untimely death in 1923, S. Ray wrote prolifically for Sandesh, and one can make the claim that his efforts—both as a writer and editor—ushered in the golden age of Bengali children’s literature.6 It was between 1913 and 1923—the post-swadeshi decade that witnessed the emergence of Gandhi the leader of the national movement—that S. Ray wrote his most popular stories and poems for children. Interestingly, almost all of S. Ray’s writings can be classified as literary nonsense—similar to the

Trivializing Empire • 151 brand of nonsense written and popularized by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll in the second half of the nineteenth century. A key question to explore when analyzing S. Ray’s body of work is why he chose to draw on literary nonsense as a means of communicating with his young audience, to which I offer two answers. First, the ability of civil disobedience to unsettle and disrupt—as demonstrated by the Swadeshi movement—I propose has its literary parallel in the genre of nonsense that attempts to turn our conventionally accepted notions of societal order upside down. In a sense, literary nonsense is similar to the strategy of swadeshi, in that it emboldens a person to imagine a world that overturns the one in which he or she lives. Both literary nonsense and the swadeshi vision allow for the possibility of alternative worlds in which, at least temporarily, dominant societal structures can be challenged and ruptured. Further, Wim Tigges suggests that literary nonsense “maintains a perfect tension between meaning and absence of meaning” (4), and that it typically emerges from a range of meanings in which “the seeming presence of one or more “sensible” meanings is kept in balance by a simultaneous absence of such a meaning” (255). This view is echoed by Michael Heyman, who states that, “Literary nonsense certainly allows for various readings, but the key to its success is that it provokes a simultaneous multiplicity of contradictory interpretations” (“New Defense” 189). The implications of producing a “multiplicity of contradictory interpretations” in a colonial state which attempts to stifle any conflicting or differing opinion cannot be overstated, thereby making literary nonsense an effective means of reviving the swadeshi spirit of defiance in an oppressive post-swadeshi Bengal. Thus, S. Ray’s brand of literary nonsense, which successfully fuses Bengali and British literary traditions, creates a topsy-turvy world which trivializes empire, parodies the laws of the land, and subverts all forms of official power and authority—in many ways, mirrors the most effective phase of the Swadeshi movement from 1905 to 1907. Second, as Robert Darnton’s illuminating article on literary surveillance in colonial India shows, in the post-Mutiny era, the British Raj relentlessly catalogued all types of published material by passing the Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, in an attempt to control and document all aspects of Indian society. The paranoid fear of published material was particularly heightened after the partition of Bengal in 1905 since the Indian press played a key role in fuelling nationalistic swadeshi sentiments, and the British Raj clamped down on presses and publishing houses for printing anything that it considered seditious. For instance, the beleaguered government passed the Newspapers Act of 1908, which authorized district magistrates to seize presses of papers they deemed to be too subversive, and the Indian Press Act of 1910, which required press owners to submit a security deposit and empowered magistrates to seize presses that attempted to “both by openly seditious writing and by suggestion and veiled incitement to inculcate hostility in British rule” (quoted in Darnton 155). Darnton outlines how, in the years following the passing of these acts, countless cases were tried as a means to “deter and

152 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature repress” (167) and punish any perceived transgressions on the part of presses and publishing houses. In view of such tyrannical measures, S. Ray’s use of nonsense was a brilliant strategy to evade literary surveillance and judicial persecution. As the editor of a popular children’s magazine, S. Ray cleverly outmaneuvered censorship practices by writing ‘nonsense’ for children, and had he been tried for sedition and treason for it, his trial would have ended up being as ridiculous as the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Wonderland. In her seminal exploration of literary nonsense, Elizabeth Sewell suggests that, far from being “a denial of sense” and a “random reversal of ordinary experiences and an escape from the limitations of everyday life into haphazard infinity,” literary nonsense is a “carefully limited world, controlled and directed by reason, a construction subject to its own laws” (5). Thus, the “sense school of criticism” (“New Defense” 187), as Heyman puts it, was started by Sewell and, subsequently, Marlene Dolitsky, Wim Tigges, Jean-Jacques Lecercle and others have echoed her basic assumption that there is a great deal of deliberate sense in literary nonsense. What is of interest to me, in the context of this chapter, is the notion that literary nonsense generates a calculatingly crafted and logical world, rather than one that has been randomly put together by its creator. S. Ray’s nonsensical vision is therefore not only founded on a great deal of sense, but it is also important to note that there is nothing accidental or unintentional in his self-fashioned nonsensical worldview. Surely, while poking fun at English-loving Indians or the oppressive rules of the Raj, S. Ray would have been greatly aware of the implications of his whimsy and humor and its energizing impact on Bengali children. Arguably, one of S. Ray’s finest accomplishments was to introduce his young readers to a vast body of original literary nonsense in Bengali. In his introduction to Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translation of Abol Tabol, renowned fi lm director Satyajit Ray gives us a glimpse into the creative world of his father, S. Ray, who looked to the nine rasas of Indian dramatic theory to name his “special vein of nonsense the [kheyaal] rasa or spirit of whimsy” (v). More recently, in his introduction to a groundbreaking anthology of Indian nonsense, Heyman, echoing Satyajit Ray’s observations, also notes that S. Ray wanted nonsense to be “accepted as a serious Indian art” (xl) and devised the notion of the tenth rasa or “kheyaal rawsh” (“Indian Nonsense” xli). As Heyman writes: “kheyaal rawsh . . . refers to a fundamental classification of Indian aesthetic theory, that of the rawsh, or rasas, . . . (a word which also has the meaning of taste, the ‘essence’ of something, as well as living liquids like sap and juice)” (“Indian Nonsense” xli). He goes on to elaborate: “Each rasa corresponds to one emotional effect: love, anger, the comic/happy, disgust, heroism, compassion, fear, wonder and peace. All serious art must evoke combinations of these rasas” (Heyman, “Indian Nonsense” xli). Thus, by formulating a tenth rasa, Ray attempted to give a degree of seriousness to his art and, as Heyman argues, it had a dual aim: to “distinguish the nonsense form from other Indian literary forms” (“Indian Nonsense” xli) and to Indianize literary nonsense and

Trivializing Empire • 153 differentiate it from British literary nonsense. Once again, a testament to the fact that, under the veneer of lightheartedness, Ray took both his craft and his Indian consciousness seriously enough to formulate a distinctive theory of Indian nonsense. At the same time, the British literary influences working upon S. Ray cannot be overlooked. As Sukanta Chaudhuri writes: “Lewis Carroll is clearly a major presence, above all in the comic tale of Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La. Edward Lear’s influence is less specific but none the less real” (“World of Sukumar Ray” 88). Satyajit Ray has also acknowledged that while there had been “imaginary animals in old Bengali nursery rhymes,” it is the “weird creations of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear” (“Introduction” iii) that more closely resemble S. Ray’s absurd characters. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s influential formulation about the subversive power of mimicry, in the previous chapter I have suggested that, in The Jungle Books, the Bandar-log are mimic men who are deemed as threatening precisely because they use “stolen words” (59) to disrupt the laws of the jungle. Based on a similar premise, consider the subversive possibilities of mimicry at work when an Englisheducated Bengali children’s author consciously draws on British literature to create nonsense: not only is he a member of the group of “minutemen” who have rejected the intermediary role conceptualized by Macaulay, he is also someone who artfully uses British literature—which, in the nineteenth century, had been pedagogically deployed in India to create a sense of reverence for British ideals—to mock the very principles that he has imbibed through his colonial education. Significantly, he selectively chooses Lear and Carroll for his literary inspiration—authors who were, in their own way, at odds with a Victorian England that had helped shape the defi ning ideologies of post-Mutiny British rule in India. Ultimately, I wish to propose that S. Ray is unequalled in fusing British and Bengali traditions to fashion a hybrid form of literary nonsense that was uniquely his own creation: one which seamlessly blends the rich oral cadences of Bengali chharas (folk rhymes) with the wit, humor, and irreverence of nineteenth-century British literary nonsense. He is also able to identify and build on common literary links: S. Ray liberally uses puns, alliteration, and onomatopoeia—figures of speech which can be found abundantly in Bengali rhymes and in British literary nonsense. Further, his nonsense animals, be it the Lug-Headed Loon or the Pumpkin-Puff, greatly resemble imaginary creatures found both in the world of Bengali chharas (such as Hatti Ma Tim Tim) and in Lear’s nonsense books (such as the Dong and the Jumblies). It is important to consider what function such a hybridized form of literary nonsense might serve in colonial Bengal. Turning, once again, to Bhabha’s formulation in The Location of Culture, of the empowering nature of textual hybridity—which has the potential to dislocate and transform oppressive colonial binaries—one can certainly read S. Ray’s hybrid nonsensical works as a superb articulation of native resistance which seeks to dilute authoritarian

154 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature and watertight colonial constructions. Further, by absorbing British literary nonsense into Bengali children’s literature, and assimilating it into one’s own tradition, as it were, S. Ray dilutes the ‘foreignness’ and so-called superiority of British textual authority, and makes it accessible and approachable for his young readers. One can hardly underestimate the strength of such textual assimilation and inclusion as, arguably, it can go a long way in the process of dismantling textual and other colonial binaries of the British Raj.

The Patriotism of Abol Tabol S. Ray is best known for Abol Tabol, a superb collection of fifty-two pieces of nonsense verse that he compiled from his writings that had previously appeared in Sandesh. Although S. Ray did not live to see the finished product—he died nine days before it was published—it was a labor of love, undertaken in failing health, which spoke of his deep commitment to humor and social commentary. Satyajit Ray notes that S. Ray was so passionate about publishing Abol Tabol that “he had designed from his sick-bed the cover in three colours, the lay-out, some short rhymes as space-fi llers and the illustrations for the tail-pieces” (“Introduction” vi). Abol Tabol features fifty-two pieces of Learian nonsense verse with illustrations, largely about fantastical animals (like the Lug-Headed Loon or the Griffon) and odd adult behavior displayed by batty uncles and grumpy old men, which seemingly have very little to do with the national movement; however, on closer inspection, a number of these poems reveal S. Ray’s nationalistic sentiments. One of the main characters S. Ray caricatures in Abol Tabol is the British-loving Indian, and he mocks this figure repeatedly. In “The Customs of Bombagarh,” S. Ray makes fun of the monarch of Bombagarh and his court for blindly following traditions that are clearly foreign and out of place in India. The poem is also a dig at the native Indian princes who, especially in the wake of a middle-class-led national movement, displayed tremendous loyalty to the British crown. Denis Judd has noted that, when confronted with nationalistic pressures, the British tried to “rally the loyal and conservative elements in the country: the princes, men like the Maharajahs of Bikaner and Hyderabad, who had so much to lose if the Raj collapsed, and who ruled a third of the country” (117). After the Mutiny of 1857, the native states, as I recount in the chapter on Sonny Sahib, were gradually brought into the British fold and, although they were semiindependent entities officially ruled by a native prince, they typically had a British representative ‘advising’ them on important matters of state. Among the most visible displays of their allegiance to the Raj was their strong showing at the Delhi Durbar (1877), a pageant-like event in which Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. And such exhibitions of sycophantic loyalty by native states only got stronger as the national movement gained in momentum. Often, the native princes and their families attempted to imbibe British

Trivializing Empire • 155 mannerisms by hiring private English tutors and governesses (such as Miss Derek in A Passage to India), and played games like cricket to mimic the British aristocratic set. “The Customs of Bombagarh” is composed as a series of mock rhetorical questions that ask the child reader to reflect on why the inhabitants of Bombagarh display absurd behavior. For instance, S. Ray ridicules the blind imitation of Western fashions by asking why the Queen wears “a pouffe on her head” or why the people of Bombagarh “Rub rouge in their eyes by the light of the stars” (Select Nonsense 22). He goes on to mock copied food habits as he wonders why “they pickle their watches in whey” or “fry mango jelly and frame it with borders?” (22). The ludicrous order to enclose mango jelly with boundaries can also be a reference to the redrawn borders of Bengal in 1905, which despite being reversed in 1911, continued to exist as a fault line as it become a touchstone for the official border of India and East Pakistan in 1947 (and Bangladesh in 1971). S. Ray leaves his readers in no doubt that all is not well in Bombagarh as, “Musicians walk muffled in blankets of state” while the “king sits and howls like a fox in the court” (22), a clear indication of repressive state censorship. Not only is freedom of speech—for everyone but the king—suspended in this bizarre state, but the hope for justice is also doubtful as: “On his [the king’s] lap the Chief Justice thumps pitchers for sport”

Figure 5.1 S. Ray’s illustration of the king’s aunt playing cricket in “The Customs of Bombagarh.”

156 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature (22). The members of the king’s family, however, remain indifferent to the state of affairs as they continue to enjoy life and indulge in Western-oriented pastimes: “the king’s aunt plays cricket with pumpkins for balls. / Her brother goes waltzing, with hookahs adorned” (22) S. Ray ends the poem by gently, yet firmly, drawing the reader’s attention to the fact such behavior ought to be questioned: “But what does it mean? Could we please be informed?” (22). The mock figure of an Anglicized Indian is also apparent in “Tyash Goru” (Limey Cow), a satire about an English-loving cow, and Heyman has briefly noted the “anti-colonial streak” in this piece (“Indian Nonsense” xxxvi). The Bengali babu—who features prominently in Kipling’s works for being callow and feckless—also finds himself at the receiving end of S. Ray’s satire, albeit for different reasons. Judd writes that the “most potentially difficult Indians in the late-Victorian era were the educated ‘babus,’. . . . [since] they had been transformed into brown Englishmen, but in practice were denied the chance to get the best administrative jobs in their own country” (103). Lord Mayo, viceroy of India from 1869 to 1872, epitomizes the derisive attitude of the British towards the babus when he declares: “In Bengal, we are educating in English a few hundred Babus at great expense to the State. Many of them are well able to pay for themselves and have no other object in learning than to qualify for government employ” (quoted in Judd 104). Due to the resentful stance adopted by senior British officials in India—many of whom were also responsible for shaping pedagogical practices—the odds were often stacked against Bengali boys who wished to pass school and university examinations, as is evident in “A Marriage Is Announced.” In this poem, the groom’s “scholarly accreditations” include the fact that “He tried full nineteen times to get / His Junior School Certificate,” and S. Ray writes mockingly that one must “admire the young man’s patience” (5). In spite of a high failure rate, the colonial educational system not only produced aspiring civil servants, but also lawyers, doctors, journalists, scientists, and other professionals, many of whom were denied lucrative jobs on the basis of their race and alleged incompetence. While a great number of these disenchanted educated professionals went on to join the national movement, many of them became petty officials—or babus—in the colonial bureaucracy, and S. Ray makes them the butt of his satire. In “The Purloined Moustache,” the “Baboo at the Central Works [who] seemed always mild and mellow” (4) becomes hysterical with rage because he believes that his moustache has been stolen. When it is pointed out to him by his colleagues that his moustache had “not shrunk the least iota,” he “really hit the roof, and screamed to all the writers, / ‘I don’t believe a word you say—I know you lying blighters” (4). In what is a comic imitation of how the colonial state functioned when dealing with alleged crimes and misdemeanors, he proclaims: “I’ll murder any slanderous rogue who dares to say it’s mine. / And so he took his ledger book and charged them all a fi ne” (4). He goes on to write an irate “memorandum” which describes the office staff as being as “thick as planks” (4), and proclaims that one “mustn’t ever give ‘em rope, [but] be

Trivializing Empire • 157 taciturn and harsh” (5), ironically mimicking attitudes often expressed by the British about the native babus. Of course, by centering the entire poem on the alleged loss of a mustache, S. Ray is able to underscore how absurd and vacuous petty bureaucratic jobs were in reality, while simultaneously poking fun at the Bengali babu’s incensed behavior as an inconsequential government official. The poem ends with the “Baboo at the Central Works” (4) declaring: “It’s whiskers, now, that make the man, and they are our lord and masters” (5). By leaving the ending equivocal, S. Ray enables the reader to come to his or her own conclusions: either the babu is trivializing the British—who, in reality, were the lords and masters of India—by comparing them to facial hair; or, the babu has clearly lost his sense of balance and his perception of things as a result of his dull and meaningless job at the Central Works. In Abol Tabol, S. Ray also emboldens his young readers by presenting them with the possibility that India could permanently rid itself of the British Raj—an unimaginable proposition before 1905. In “Infant Joy,” he writes about two adult-looking bold and brazen infant boys with ravenous appetites

Figure 5.2 S. Ray’s illustration of the “Baboo” in “The Purloined Moustache.”

158 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature who are able to devour, as it were, British rule. While one child has a penchant for unconventional behavior which includes “smashing bottles with his slate,” the other seems to know no fear as he “crawls up cupboards to the top, / Or climbs the bed and takes a flying drop” (29). They also have exceptional food cravings as “They won’t have milk, but want to crunch on pebbles,” and, one of them, not unlike the brave little tailor, “captures fl ies and munches them with relish,” while the other devours highly combustible “candle-ends and matches” (29). S. Ray ends the poem by expressing a suitable amount of awe at their extraordinary appetites and their display of sheer might which becomes daunting enough for Uncle Tom—a common epithet for the British—to flee in trepidation: “Dear Uncle Tom [the British] will scarce survive such feasts. /. . . . They snarl and puff: the down upon their head / Turns red with rage— poor Uncle flies in dread” (29). Sukanta Chaudhuri has pointed out that one of S. Ray’s influences was Rudolph Dirks’s comic strip, “The Katzenjammer Kids,” created in 1897 for the Sunday supplement of the New York Journal (“World of Sukumar Ray” 88). Inspired to a great extent by Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz [Max and Moritz] (1865), the well-known German children’s stories about disobedient law-breaking boys, “The Katzenjammer Kids” featured the adventures of Hans and Fritz, twins who undermined all forms of authority, in particular, their Mama (their mother), der Captain (the shipwrecked sailor who was their surrogate father), and der Inspector (the school representative). The young children in “Infant Joy” are clearly modeled after Hans and Fritz, and what is significant is the manner in which S. Ray writes admiringly of their disregard for socially sanctioned norms and behavior. In colonial India, where notions of what was acceptable and unacceptable were

Figure 5.3

S. Ray’s illustration of the bold infants in “Infant Joy.”

Trivializing Empire • 159 rigidly defined by the Raj, the little boys seem heroic and courageous in their appetites, their rage, and their ability to strike fear in the British. As noted in the previous chapter, British rule in India was defined by the passing of a number of bills and laws in order to maintain power, suppress dissent, and showcase the legitimacy and authenticity of British governance. In fact, so far-reaching was the impact of some of these legislative measures that Sinha has persuasively outlined how pivotal some of these late nineteenthcentury laws were in spawning notions of an ‘effeminate’ Bengali and ‘manly’ English identity in colonial India. In “The Rule of Twenty-One,” S. Ray seeks to unfetter his young readers from such colonial constructions by poking fun at the laws of the land. Even though he does not shy away from describing some of the harsher penalties that are deployed by the colonial state, he undercuts their potency by being flippant about why a person can find himself or herself at the receiving end of oppressive laws. Significantly, he refers to India as “Lord Shiva’s native land,” and states that laws passed in this land “are hard to understand” as one can be arrested for the most trivial of reasons: “If you trip and come a cropper / You’re collared by the nearest copper” (18). And, of course, the justice system is a travesty as “The magistrates upon you seize, And fine you twenty-one rupees” (18; emphasis in the original). Playing on the randomly chosen number twenty-one, S. Ray goes on to elaborate, in the next five verses, how

Figure 5.4 S. Ray’s illustration parodying colonial laws in “The Rule of Twenty-One.”

160 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature arbitrary laws can be, and how punishment is handed out for the most absurd of reasons. For instance, one “need[s] a special lease / Till six o’clock to cough or sneeze,” and those who sneeze without proper authorization “Are thrashed in gentle admonition, / And twenty-one compelling doses / Of snuff rammed up their streaming noses” (18; emphasis in the original). A “loose tooth,” “whiskers grown in sundry manners” (18), and a “snore” (19) can all lead to severe corporal punishment. Another ploy that S. Ray adopts in this poem is to address the child reader directly in the second person: “If strolling forth, you ever chance / To right or left to turn or glance, / They send a message to the King” (19). And, of course, there are consequences for even the most harmless look: “His scouts ride forth to haul you in, / And stand you in the mid-day sun / To drink of cups full twenty-one (19; emphasis in the original). “You”—the informal tumi in Bengali—is not only a personalized and direct form of address, but it is also emphasizes the fact that the capricious laws of colonial India can apply indiscriminately to everyone, and no one is considered too young to experience such measures. And yet, by making laws and rules the subject of exaggerated mirth, he simultaneously undermines the degree of respect and fear that such laws ought to inspire in colonized subjects. In this poem, S. Ray also seems aware of the severe censorship artists can face in such an environment: “There are people who indulge in verses / [and] Are caged up straight with muttered curses” (19). More absurdly, “They’re made to check through grocers’ tills / And work out twenty-one long bills” (19; emphasis in the original). Yet, as is evident in this cheeky reference to literary surveillance, S. Ray does not shy away from churning out verses that ridicule the tyrannical state of affairs in colonial India.

The Bengali Wonderland In Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La (A Topsy-Turvy Tale), one can clearly discern the influence of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) on S. Ray, as well as the manner in which he Indianizes the story in order to enable his young readers to reflect on the topsy-turvy predicament of colonial Bengali society. As Satyajit Ray writes: “The finest piece of nonsense in Bengali prose, the Tale is obviously influenced by Alice in Wonderland. There is the same falling asleep on the grass; the same dream; the same pageant of known and halfknown beasts and humans; the same hits at linguistic lapses, social customs and legal procedures; and finally the return to reality. Yet nothing could be more quintessentially Bengali than the latent spirit of this topsy-turvy world” (“Introduction” vi). Thus, Carroll’s ironical portrayal of Victorian England in the Alice books—which cleverly used wonderland as a euphemism to mock mid-nineteenth-century social and legal mores—clearly inspired S. Ray to view the governing principles of his own fettered society through a satiric lens. At the same time, as Satyajit Ray is quick to point out, S. Ray is able to recast the story into a “quintessentially Bengali” mould, thereby creating an

Trivializing Empire • 161 idiom which is not a hollow replication, but a uniquely vibrant articulation of colonial resistance and subversion. As with the opening scenes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice, in her dream, follows the White Rabbit through a hole into wonderland, S. Ray’s Tale begins with a young boy feeling hot and drowsy and hallucinating that his handkerchief has transformed into a tubby ginger cat. The cat, whose characteristics are not unlike the elusive Cheshire Cat, not only “snigger[s] in the most irritating manner,” but also confuses the young boy with a series of slippery statements about going to Tibet to escape the heat of Calcutta such as: “Straight roads, an hour and a quarter’s drive—just say the word” (Select Nonsense 47). On being pressed by the boy to show him the way, the Cat quickly calls upon the fantastical Cousin Treehopper who, of course, cannot be found so easily either. The young boy, who, like Alice, is initially bewildered and confused by his new environment, begins to grow in confidence and shows his irritation towards the Cat: “You are talking nonsense, and I’m getting quite bored” (48). As with the Alice books, in which Carroll emboldens a young girl to speak her mind, S. Ray similarly emphasizes the ability of the boy to resist adult-speak and articulate an autonomous point of view, which is not only a new development in Bengali children’s literature, but also one that is infinitely liberating to a colonized reading public. In fact, unlike the Alice books, the young boy narrates the Tale directly to his readers and repeatedly uses the first person ‘I’ to refer to himself; that the story is not fi ltered through an adult narrator makes his voice and opinions all the more ubiquitous and persistent through the course of the narrative. So much so that—using Sinha’s persuasive argument that adult male Bengali identity is effeminized and emasculated by the British in the closing decades of the nineteenth century—Satadru Sen goes so far as to claim that in S. Ray’s works, “The child, significantly, is the only sensible Bengali amidst all this laughter: as the amused observer of the powerless, inauthentic and awry universe of the urban adult, the child functions as a newly created repository of masculine dignity.” As is the case with nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature, which seeks to empower the young English child over the weakened Indianized Englishman, S. Ray, too, foregrounds the Bengali child (over the adult) as the more rational specimen. Once the Cat disappears “over the garden wall with a smirk on its face” (48), the boy meets the Crow, a chartered accountant—clearly a disaffected member of one of the new professions generated by colonial education—who revels in word-play, number-play, distortion, and exaggeration. Playing with the notion of time (and mirroring another vital feature of the Alice books), the Crow mockingly asks the young narrator: “Don’t you count the cost of time in your country?” (49). The Crow then proceeds to tell the young boy how important it is not to waste time: “Time’s terribly expensive here, we daren’t waste one little bit. Here I had scraped and scrounged a bit of time together, and now I’ve lost half of it talking to you” (49). The pompousness

162 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature

Figure 5.5 S. Ray’s illustration of the Cat in A Topsy-Turvy Tale.

Figure 5.6 S. Ray’s illustration of the Crow in A Topsy-Turvy Tale.

Trivializing Empire • 163 of the Crow’s statements and his supposed devotion to work, however, get undercut by the fact that he is utterly inefficient in maintaining books for his clients and doesn’t ever seem to get their accounts ready on time. The influence of the Alice books is, once again, apparent in one of the Crow’s clients, a little old man with a green beard who, like the Caterpillar in Wonderland, not only has a hookah, but also asks the narrator if his “age is increasing or decreasing” (50) and dismissively informs him that he will not age as “we turn our age back when we’re forty” (51). Thus, normative markers of the ‘real’ world—such as age and time—are just as easily dismissed in the Tale as they are in the Alice books, thereby encouraging the young reader to question some very basic assumptions of his universe. Absurd little tales with no beginning or ending, nonsense rhymes, mathematical puzzles, and a procession of peculiar creatures like Higgle-Piggle-Dee—“part man, part monkey, part owl, part goblin” (54)—who laughs raucously all the time, Grammaticus Horner, a bearded goat who claims to be a nutritional consultant, and Smoothpaste, a bald man who sings incessantly, are also woven into the fabric of this exaggerated and irreverent Bengali dream-world. At the core of this story lies a trial of the most absurd proportions, the origins of which can, no doubt, be traced back to the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but, in my opinion, can also be read in the context of what was going on in the courtrooms of colonial India in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the previous chapter, I have shown how in the late nineteenth century—as a response to the burgeoning national movement—the British set in motion a legal machinery in India that attempted to consolidate colonial authority in a manner which did not allow British interpretations of the law to be challenged by colonial subjects. The open rebellion that the Raj encountered in Bengal following the 1905 partition—arguably, the most potent outburst of collective public defiance since the Mutiny—made the British even more arbitrary and heavy-handed in their dispensation of justice. Although the British passed the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, in an attempt to placate the more moderate and conciliatory Indians leaders, their efforts to arrest and punish seditious ‘agitators’ did not abate; in fact, their attempts to bring people to ‘justice’ were further intensified between 1908–12, when more radical and revolutionary methods (such as bomb plots and assassination attempts on British officials) had replaced mass action (such as boycotts and protests). Interestingly, imperial policy in India—committed, in theory, to the rule of law and justice for all—dictated that the arrested be given a trial, and, as Darnton writes: “the British used trials. . . . to demonstrate the justice of their rule to the “natives” and, even more important, to themselves. If the Raj could not be identified with the rule of law, it might be seen to rule by force” (167). Consequently, the courtrooms became a site for the British—who, in reality, were using terrible force to crackdown on dissenters—to showcase their sense of justice and fair play. In practice, however, in spite of the elaborate show of justice exhibited by the Raj, the trials

164 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature were largely ceremonial and the outcomes were predetermined in favor of the colonial state. The arrival of Gandhi in India from South Africa in 1915 further intensified the dynamics of the colonial courtroom as it was to become even more of a proxy battlefield. Gandhi—a lawyer who staunchly believed in nonviolent methods—readily courted arrest in an attempt to counter British policies, and his involvement in local peasant rebellions—most famously in Champaran (1918) and Chauri Chaura (1922)—made him a frequent visitor to the police stations and courtrooms of colonial India. Not surprisingly, in the Tale, the legal shenanigans of the Raj become a rich source of material for S. Ray, who, in Carrollian fashion, presents us with a trial of the most outlandish proportions. Presided over by a Screech-owl, a judge who is given to “nodding and drowsing quite openly,” the trial pits two lawyers—a Crocodile and a Fox—against each other as they argue about a charge of libel made by a “sniffling and crying” Porcupine (58). The Crocodile, who represents the Porcupine, is not above histrionics as he begins proceedings by poking “his eyes with his claws until he’d squeezed out a few tears” in order to “look as sad as possible” (58). His public display of mock sorrow is followed by an opening statement in which he expresses a desire to get to the “root of the matter” (58), but puns on the word “root” in order to digress and talk about yam, an edible root. In response, the Fox jumps up and proclaims that “the yam is a toxic and execrable weed” (58), which in turn results in the trial disintegrating into a farcical display of how arbitrarily justice is handed out by the courts. For instance, when asked by the Crocodile to produce “witnesses or documentary evidence of the charge,” the Porcupine randomly points to Smoothpaste as the bearer of “all documents” and the Crocodile reads out rude little songs from Smoothpaste’s songbook as evidence (58). Witnesses can be easily bought as the Crocodile asks Higgle-Piggle-Dee if he would like to be a witness in exchange for “four annas in good money” and the latter is “only too pleased to get the money” (60), which is a clear comment that petty corruption is rife in the legal system. Ultimately, chaos ensues as there is “a regular stampede for the witness-box, as it seemed that witnesses were being paid good money” (61), and, in the midst of this confusion, the owl—who had been drowsing through much of the trial—decides to deliver a verdict only to realize that while he has a plaintiff, no one has actually been accused of libel. However, this important omission does not halt the legal juggernaut as “they quickly hustled poor Smoothpaste into being the accused” (62). As S. Ray writes in mock despair: “The silly fellow thought the accused would also get some money, so he happily agreed. Instead he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and seven days’ hanging” (62). At this point in the narrative, just when the young boy is about to protest the “unfair sentence” (62), he is woken up by his uncle who yells at him to stop daydreaming and learn his grammar instead. Although the Tale ends with the narrator being rudely shaken out of his dream-world by an irate adult who dismissively declares, “Nonsense, my boy.

Trivializing Empire • 165 You’re making up stories out of some silly dream you’ve had” (62), the young boy still holds on to the world that he has just emerged from. As he asks the reader: “Could I have been dreaming? But honestly, when I looked round for my handkerchief, I just couldn’t find it; and there on the wall sat a cat preening its whiskers, who scurried away as soon as I caught its eye. And just then a goat began bleating beyond the garden fence” (62). The readers of the Tale are clearly assumed to be young and open to a world that an unimaginative adult—caught up in a structured world of grammar and formal colonial education—is unable to appreciate or access, which in turn enables the narrator to share his story with them. In fact, the very last line of the Tale addresses the young reader directly: “But you aren’t very old as yet, so I thought I’d tell you all about it” (62). Thus, it is the child—both inside and outside the text—rather than the adult—who is able to question some of the very basic assumptions of the ‘real’ world by exercising perceptiveness and imagination that is denied to the adult.

‘A Legacy of Laughter’ In this chapter, I have drawn on two of S. Ray’s most well-known works; however, he left behind a body of children’s texts—most of which were published in Sandesh—that showcase his sense of humor and his irreverence towards British rule in India. For example, in a series of school stories, S. Ray creates the much beloved character of Pagla Dashu (Daft Dashu)—a seemingly madcap schoolboy who always gets the better of his classmates and teachers. Spoofing on the notion that colonial education creates a class of feckless brown sahibs, in “Dashu the Dotty One,” Pagla Dashu makes a fool of his classmate Jogobhondu—the teacher’s pet who is excessively earnest about learning English—by exchanging the latter’s Grammar Book with a book entitled Inspector Famous—A Hair-raising Detective Drama. When the English teacher asks Jogobhondu for a copy of the Grammar Book, he unwittingly hands him the adventure story that in turn earns him a good scolding from the irate teacher. On another occasion, Dashu arrives in school wearing trousers that are “as baggy and shapeless as pyjamas” and a coat that “looked like a huge pillowcase” (Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray 134), caricaturing, no doubt, English dress and mannerisms. When asked by his classmates why he is dressed in such an outlandish manner, Dashu replies in a tongue-in-cheek manner: “Why, to improve my English” (134). S. Ray also penned and serialized the diary of the fictitious Professor Heshoram Hushiar (loosely inspired by Arthur Conon Doyle’s Professor Challenger) whose expeditions in the Karakoram uncover—although there is never any hard evidence made available by him other than the diary entries—a number of prehistoric creatures with pseudo Bengali-Latin names like Hanglatherium (hangla: greedy) and Chillanosaurus (chillana:

166 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature to shout or scream). Professor Heshoram Hushiar (Cautious Chuckleonymous), as his name suggests, is a larger-than-life personality who is spoofed mercilessly by S. Ray in the editor’s notes that preface the journal entries. In the entry dated June 26, 1922, sent from “Karakoram, ten miles north of Mt. Bundakush” (Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray 158), the editor’s mock apology is included for the (child) reader’s benefit: “We have published various stories on ancient animals in Sandesh; but nowhere have we mentioned his [Professor Heshoram Hushiar’s] hunting stories. Truly, this oversight has been a grave injustice. We knew nothing of those tales, until Professor salvaged some parts from his hunting diary and sent them to us. We are printing extracts from the very same. Whether they are fact or fiction is something we leave to your discretion” (158; emphasis in the original). In another editor’s note, S. Ray includes a conversation between two office boys at the printing press who poke fun at the Professor’s nephew, Chandrakhai (Swallowmoon), who joins him on his expeditions: “A boy at our printing press said jokingly, ‘What saurus are you then?’ Another said, ‘He’s a Talltaleosaurus—he sits around and tells tall tales’ ” (171; emphasis in the original). Further, in a scene reminiscent of Hurree Babu’s account of his adventures in Kim, Chandrakhai recounts to the editor how the expedition ends: “You cannot imagine the storms in that far land. . . . It was unbelievable! Compasses, maps, notebooks—nothing remained. If you hear how we finally managed to return, your hair will stand on end like a porcupine’s quills. Hungry, lost, blindly guessing which way to go, it took us all of three months to cover what should have taken two weeks” (171). When asked by the editor if there was any proof of their travels, Chandrakhai replies: “I am here, in person,

Figure 5.7 S. Ray’s illustration of Professor Heshoram Hushiar and his expedition party in the Karakoram.

Trivializing Empire • 167 so is my uncle, what more proof could you want? And here, I’ve drawn some pictures for your magazine; you’re welcome to consider these to be proof as well” (171). The educated Bengali babu is, once again, made a mockery of by S. Ray, but unlike Kipling’s Hurree Babu—who dreams of becoming a member of the Royal Society and clings on to his ethnological paraphernalia—the Professor’s blundering ways and uncalculating aspirations seem far removed from the disciplined display of loyalty shown by Hurree Babu towards the British Raj. In this chapter, I have suggested that Bengali children’s literature comes of age in the early decades of the twentieth century against the backdrop of the national movement largely due to the efforts of the Rays. Responding to the call of swadeshi, the Rays produce a rich body of writing with the dual aim of entertaining and empowering Bengali children living under colonial rule. They refashion the fettered world of the Raj and create a parallel universe in which colonized Bengali children can—at least in their imaginations—as Sukanta Chaudhuri puts it, “reign as kings and creators, [and as] purveyors of joy and wisdom” (“World of Sukumar Ray” 96).

Conclusion The Postcolonial Legacy

Although this book is about children’s literature in colonial India, I conclude by briefly touching upon the enduring legacy of children’s literature of empire—in particular, its activism and its belief in the child’s ability to successfully resolve conflict and restore order—in three postcolonial narratives aimed at children and young adults. In Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed fi lms for younger audiences, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne [The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha] (1968), and its sequel Hirak Rajar Deshe [Kingdom of Diamonds] (1980), it is difficult to overlook the covert political statements encoded in them as he draws on his grandfather’s tale to obliquely comment on the social upheavals in Bengal (and in India) in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, which has gone on to become one of the most beloved Bengali fi lms of all times, is directed by Satyajit Ray at the peak of the Naxalite movement in Bengal. On May 24, 1967, the small village of Naxalbari in North Bengal became the hotbed of political conflict and insurrection when a peasant was mercilessly attacked during a land dispute with local landlords. This incident triggered a protracted and violent uprising against the state government and the police in Bengal; in particular, when the disenfranchised peasants of Naxalbari were joined by the disaffected youth belonging to the urban elite and the bhadralok class in cities such as Calcutta. Given the charged political atmosphere in Bengal, it is not surprising that in his fi lm The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, which was made at the behest of his son and largely follows the plotline of U.Ray’s story, Satyajit Ray attempts to find a satisfactory and peaceful resolution to the conflict between the peasants and the land-owning elements of society. As is the case in U. Ray’s utopian tale, the two landless peasant boys, Goopy and Bagha, not only avert war between two kingdoms, but, more importantly, are also uplifted from grinding poverty by marrying the princesses of Halla and Shundi. 169

170 • Colonial India in Children’s Literature Satyajit Ray’s sequel, Kingdom of Diamonds, also serves as a platform for political commentary as it is directed in the aftermath of the state of emergency declared by the President of India from June 25, 1975 to March 21, 1977, under advice from the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. During this contentious twenty-one month period of emergency not only were democratic elections and civil liberties suspended in India, but Gandhi was also virtually bestowed the authority to rule by decree. Kingdom of Diamonds allegorically invokes the state of affairs in India in the mid-1970s as audiences are introduced to Hirak Raja, a tyrannical king whose land is famed for its diamond mines, but who also selfishly hoards all the wealth for himself at the cost of his suffering subjects. He is not only surrounded by a coterie of sycophantic ministers who do his bidding, but has also, in addition, built a jantar mantar (a chamber of magic), which he uses to brainwash people. Uniquely, most of the dialogues in the fi lm are in rhyme; the only individual who does not use rhyme is Udayan Pandit, the youthful school teacher, whose unfettered prose symbolizes his resistance to Hirak Raja’s oppressive rule. Goopy and Bagha, who are in quest of exciting new adventures, also reappear in this sequel. Once again, they use their magical powers to defeat a horrid ruler as they assist young Udayan and his students to overthrow the authoritarian Hirak Raja. Clearly, the storyline of Kingdom of Diamonds is meant to hold up a mirror to Gandhi’s dismissive attitude towards personal and political freedoms during the Indian Emergency, and Hirak Raja’s desire to suppress all those who oppose him quite pointedly alludes to Gandhi’s crackdown on her political opponents. The tradition of political engagement found in children’s literature of empire is also noticeably visible in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), the first book he writes following the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989. Not only does Rushdie allude to U. Ray’s writings and Satyajit Ray’s fi lms by creating characters called Goopy and Bagha who choke in politically polluted waters, but he also gives tremendous agency to Haroun Khalifa, a twelve-year-old boy who is successful in vanquishing the autocratic Khattam-Shud, whose darkest desire is to rid the world of its stories. In writing a narrative which Judith Plotz has characterized as “an affirmation of freedom” (“Haroun and the Politics of Freedom” 103), Rushdie, not unlike U. Ray and S. Ray, foregrounds the importance of living in an open society which nurtures the creativity and political autonomy of its citizens. Characters such as the “snooty” ( Haroun 42) Mr Buttoo—a sleazy politician who hires Haroun’s father to “provide up-beat sagas” (49) to his electorate—and the despotic Khattam-Shud—who believes that the “world is for Controlling” (161)—are plainly drawn from a pool of world leaders who had turned their backs on democratic principles. More significantly, however, as is evident in the early twentieth-century children’s texts by the Rays, or for that matter, in the writings of Mary Sherwood, Barbara Hofland, Sara Jeanette Duncan, and Rudyard Kipling, Rushdie bestows the child—and not the

Conclusion • 171 adult—with the ability to reinstate a sense of order and stability in the politically charged environment of the Indian subcontinent. In conclusion, even though several of the British and Anglo-Indian texts I have alluded to in this book may not be as widely read today, or, in the case of Bengali children’s texts, are well-known only to a specific reading public, they continue to exert their textual power and influence in postcolonial reproductions as wide-ranging and diverse as Satyajit Ray’s iconic fi lms and Rushdie’s first novel for children.

Notes

Introduction 1

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3

4 5

I refer to the nineteenth-century usage of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ which was employed to describe the British in India. In this book, I make a slight distinction between British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature. By Anglo-Indian children’s literature, I mean children’s literature written by authors who actually lived in India for a substantial length of time in the nineteenth century. With the exception of Kipling’s works and, more recently, Sherwood’s Little Henry, one of the earliest Anglo-Indian children’s stories, nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian children’s texts have been largely overlooked in critical studies which examine the intersections of British colonialism and children’s literature. Sands-O’Connor’s Soon Come Home to This Island is an exception as she looks specifically at representations of the West Indies in British children’s literature. Castle also makes distinctions between India, China, and Africa; however, her study focuses exclusively on history textbooks and children’s periodicals. I use both ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ in this study to refer to Britain’s consolidation of Empire. The term ‘imperialism’ gains currency in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the 1870s, following the European scramble for territorial control in Africa. See, for instance, Guha’s “Not at Home in Empire.” Several factors contributed to this shift, as Thomas Metcalf has argued in Ideologies of the Raj, including the fact that racial ideologies became more prominent, as anthropology emerged as an important discipline, and race became a key category of analysis and marker of difference in colonial India.

Chapter One 1

I refer to Orientalism as a set of specific policies employed by the British in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that utilized 173

174 • Notes

2

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6 7

existing Indian languages and laws. It eventually came under attack from the Utilitarians and the Evangelicals who sought to Anglicize and, in the case of the latter, Christianize India. The East India Company’s monopoly over tea and trade with China remained, and was taken away twenty years later by the Charter Act of 1833. Tracing the prolific publishing history of Little Henry, Ketaki Kusari Dyson writes: “The History of Little Henry and his Bearer was written in India and first published anonymously in 1814. . . . It was translated into French in 1820, and is supposed to have gone through about a hundred editions between that date and 1884, including translations into Hindustani, Chinese, Sinhalese, and German” (357). Although Sherwood wrote a number of popular domestic evangelical narratives such as The History of the Fairchild Family (1818) and The History of Henry Milner (1822), and along with Hannah More, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Sarah Trimmer churned out didactic texts for children in the early decades of nineteenth century, I will be focusing on her as a colonial children’s writer in the context of India. Sherwood’s autobiography, compiled from the copious journals she maintained, was initially edited and published by her daughter, Sophia Kelly, in 1854, and by F. J. Harvey Darton, a descendent of one of her earliest publishers in 1910. I have used the Kelly edition throughout this chapter. See Ainslie Embree’s Charles Grant and British Rule in India for an account of Grant’s impact on the British colonial project in India. In referencing Grant’s Observations, I have largely used the document published in The Great Indian Education Debate edited by Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir. However, this quote and the one to follow are taken from Stokes’s English Utilitarians and India.

Chapter Two 1

2

The Captives in India (London: Richard Bentley, 1834) was initially published along with a novella by Hofland entitled A Widow and A Will. An American edition, published by Duff Green, followed in 1835. Although I am classifying Captives in India as a juvenile bildungsroman—in part as it is a coming-of-age novel about two young adults—the novel belongs to the genre of cross-over fiction, as, in my opinion, it is written with a dual audience—of adults and adolescents—in mind. Hofland often blurred distinctions between ‘children’s’ literature and ‘adult’ literature in her works, as is evident in this early review of Integrity: A Tale (1823) in which, according to the reviewer, Hofland imagines the reader as being “somewhere between the man and the boy—or rather between the woman and the girl” (Literary Gazette 259).

Notes • 175 3

See Thomas Ramsay’s The Life and Literary Remains of Barbara Hofland (1849) for evidence of her popularity as an author. See also Dennis Butts’s Mistress of Our Tears for a complete catalogue of her works. Butts cites The Son of a Genius (1812), a semi-autographical tale about a gifted and temperamental artist (arguably based on Hofland’s own mercurial artist-husband) whose family would been have destroyed—but for the steadfastness of his less talented albeit hardworking son—as Hofland’s “most popular” book, which had already “reached its tenth edition by 1827” (Mistress 4). 4 The Journal of An Officer of Colonel Baillie’s Detachment was written anonymously and published in London in 1788 by John Murray. According to Forrest, the identity of the author of the Journal remains a mystery and, in fact, he could be a “composite” (46). Appended to the Journal was another anonymous text dealing with the Anglo-Mysore conflict entitled Memoirs of the Late War in Asia (Forrest 46). Bristow’s The Narrative of James Bristow, Private in the Bengal Artillery was published by the East India Company’s press in Calcutta in 1792, and reprinted in London in 1793 and 1794 by John Murray. Scurry’s The Life of James Scurry, Seaman was published in London posthumously by Henry Fisher in 1824. See also Colley’s Captives for a list of unpublished and published British captivity narratives. 5 See also Susan Stronge’s Tipu’s Tiger for a rich account of the myriad ways in which the encounter with Tipu is realized and materialized by the British. 6 See Forrest for a comprehensive list of artwork inspired by Tipu. 7 Sir Robert Ker Porter’s “The Storming of Seringapatam,” spread across “2,550 square feet of canvas” (Forrest 316), for example, gave a panoramic view of the 1799 victory at Seringapatam and was exhibited at the Lyceum (Forrest 351). 8 Astley’s Amphitheatre, in particular, staged spectacular Tipu-themed productions beginning with Tippoo Sultan, or The Seige of Bangalore (1792) and culminating with The Storming of Seringapatam, or The Death of Tippoo Saib (1829). See Forrest for a brief yet informative account of Tipu as source material for the London stage up until the 1820s. 9 In Captives, Colley, however, has argued that the identification of India with the tiger by the British pre-dates their acquaintance with Tipu. She writes: “From the 1750s onwards, tigers stalk the British imagination (263). 10 Barrell speculates that De Quincey must have seen ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’—the most iconic of all the artifacts brought back from Seringapatam—on display in the India House library in 1808 (51). 11 Hofland procures Fay’s letters from her friend, Mary Russell Mitford, and prefaces Captives in India with the following “Advertisement”: “The friends and relations of the late Mrs. Fay, will perceive that I have interwoven her first overland journey to India in my story; an account of which has been published in Calcutta, but has never, I believe, reached England” (4). 12 In his copious History of Mysore (1810), Mark Wilks, the British Resident at Mysore, records Colonel Baillie’s and General Mathews’s—the latter

176 • Notes taken prisoner in Bednur in 1783—deaths as deliberate murder. According to Praxy Fernandes, although there is no evidence to support Wilks’s accusations, the deaths of Baillie and Mathews—two high-ranking British army officers—helped cement the notion that Tipu had a propensity for violence and cruelty (257–59). 13 Despite the menacing risks posed to the English psyche by India, Olivia must return to the country of her birth once again as there is a possibility that her father may still be alive and she can reclaim her lost fortune. Since Frank is also about to journey to India to join the East India Company, the two young cousins travel to India together. Historically, this is a turbulent and momentous time in India as Tipu and the British are engaged in fighting the third Anglo-Mysore War in the Carnatic. Braving the political turmoil, Frank and Olivia undertake their hazardous journey, the high point of which is a dramatic imprisonment in Calicut. Furthermore, as if tracing Napoleon’s eastward march, the cousins also briefly visit Egypt, and Frank’s reaction to the Pyramids is a good indication that he is going to be disillusioned by his experiences in India. Although Frank “gazed towards them with great eagerness, and appeared determined to admire objects on which from his very boyhood he had been wont to dilate with all the enthusiasm of curiosity,” he is unable to “conceal his disappointment or surprise” when finds that the Pyramids “look neither bigger nor better than sugarloaves on the store-room table!” (75). 14 In Tippoo’s Tiger, Archer gives an in-depth account of the history of this musical toy which was shipped to England in 1800. She speculates that while in “style and finish it is clearly Indian,” its “detailed mechanism” may have been French-inspired (10). The idea for the toy may have originated from the widely reported and fatal tiger-mauling suffered by the young son of Sir Hector Munro in 1792. Tipu’s (and Hyder’s) rivalry with Munro, a British general, dated back to the second Anglo-Mysore war, and Archer conjectures that Tipu may have been motivated by this tragic incident to commission the musical toy. Interestingly, Archer’s also speculates that John Keats’s “Man-Tiger-Organ,” in The Caps and Bells, may have been inspired by ‘Tippoo’s Tiger,’ after a visit to the East India House Library (2–4). Stronge gives an account of the excitement ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ generated in England after the fall of Seringapatam. In 1800, the British press printed (and reprinted) reports of a “MUSICAL TYGER” which “may be deemed a sufficient proof (if any were yet wanting) of the deep hate and extreme loathing of Tippoo Saib towards the English nation” (quoted in Stronge 62). 15 From the description of the East India House in A Visit to London, it is apparent that Hofland was familiar with its library and, in particular, its Seringapatam exhibits. For instance, Hofland mentions “the massy footstool of Tippoo Saib, formed of gold, in the shape of a tyger’s head, in which two crystals of uncommon beauty are placed for the eye” (149–50).

Notes • 177 She also describes ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ as “a kind of large toy, in which a tyger was represented tearing the throat of a man, who was dressed in the regimentals of a British officer” (150). 16 Bristow’s narrative also alludes to overt and covert acts of defiance by the captives against their guards that Teltscher has read as a coping mechanism to deal with the “loss of agency” (241) as British subjects, and as a narrative ploy to retain his readers’ sympathy. Chapter Three 1

2

3

Lord Dalhousie, governor-general from 1848 to 1856, implemented the infamous ‘Doctrine of Lapse,’ an annexation policy which did not recognize adopted sons of deceased princes as legal heirs, causing discontentment among the feudal elements of Indian society. Dalhousie also sought to ‘modernize’ India by expanding the Indian railway and telegraph networks, centralizing the postal system, and implementing policies aimed at educational and social reform. Indian discontentment at some of Dalhousie’s more aggressive measures—such as the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’—in part led to the 1857 uprising. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay notes that “regions and people who were beneficiaries of colonial rule did not revolt” (172). Hence, all of South India, Bengal, and Punjab remained largely unaffected by the uprising of 1857, and it was Awadh and the North-Western Provinces—with factions that had the most to lose from British rule—that became the hotbed of rebellion. S.N. Sen, in his classic study Eighteen Fifty-Seven, argues that what began as a mutiny ended up being, in many areas, a civilian uprising as well due to the complete breakdown of colonial administration. R. C. Majumdar, in The Sepoy Mutiny and The Revolt of 1857, similarly suggests that since “all classes of people in India were thoroughly discontented and disaffected against the British,” it was, “therefore, quite natural, and no extraordinary phenomenon, that there should be a general rising of the people against the hated feringhees wherever the success of the mutiny had destroyed their power and authority” (99). S.B. Chaudhuri, in Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, has viewed the revolt as “the first combined attempt of many classes of people to challenge a foreign power” (297). Historians such as Eric Stokes in The Peasant Armed, and Ranajit Guha in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, have emphasized the peasant element of the rebellion, and are in agreement about the widespread nature of the outbreak. The question of whether the uprising was India’s first war of independence has also been debated. For instance, in 1909, at the height of militant nationalism in India, V.D. Savarkar, not surprisingly, classified the uprising as the first “Indian War of Independence” (quoted in Bandyopadhyay 175). More recently, historians have largely tended to take a middle ground; as Metcalf suggests in The Aftermath of Revolt: “it was

178 • Notes

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13

something more than a sepoy mutiny, but something less than a national revolt” (60). In keeping with the nineteenth-century usage of the term, I will be referring to the events of 1857 as the Mutiny. The first British edition of Sonny Sahib was published by Macmillan in 1894, and the first American edition was published by D. Appleton in 1895. Interestingly, Sonny Sahib was edited by E. Nesbit for OUP’s “The Children’s Bookcase” series and remained in print until the 1930s. Sonny Sahib was well received by Duncan’s early reviewers, who typically evoke the horrors of the Mutiny and comment on the depiction of Indian life. One of the earliest reviews of Sonny Sahib, in The Literary News (May 1895), reads: “Miss Sara Jeanette Duncan has looked over her collection of Indian reminiscences and put a few of her treasured nuggets into a pretty little volume under the title “The Story of Sonny Sahib.” Poor little Sonny was born while his mother was separated from all her people after the horrors of the Indian Mutiny at Cawnpore. Her husband, a great English soldier, did not even hear of the birth of the little desolate baby . . . Indian life and a baby’s place in Indian homes are described with all the author’s genial humor and love of her kind” (144). See Thomas Tausky for a list of early reviews. As shown in my reading of Sherwood’s Little Henry, the deep bond between the Anglo-Indian child and an Indian servant that overcomes all racial, cultural, and religious affi liations is common in Anglo-Indian literature. Other notable examples include Sherwood’s Little Lucy, Steel’s On the Face of the Waters, and Kipling’s Kim. Don Randall and John McBratney have similarly suggested that the Indian-born British boy in Kipling’s fiction is celebrated because of his cultural hybridity. In comparison, Cecily Devereux analyzes Sonny’s imperial identity as an “Anglo-Saxon and Christian child” (8). Although there is no evidence to suggest that Kipling read Sonny Sahib, and that it informed his construction of Kim as an Indian-born British boy a few years later, it is likely that as a fellow-journalist and member of the Anglo-Indian society, he would have been aware of Duncan and her body of writing. See, for instance, Tausky’s Novelist of Empire and Misao Dean’s A Different Point of View. Critical editions of The Imperialist, Duncan’s novel about an aspiring Canadian politician, have also been published, most recently by Broadview Press in 2005. Duncan wrote a total of nine Anglo-Indian novels; the first, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, was published in 1893, and the last, The Burnt Offering, was published in 1909. See also Shailendra Dhari Singh’s Novels on the Indian Mutiny and Gautam Chakravarty’s The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination for an account of the vast body of literature generated by the Mutiny.

Notes • 179 14 The most well-known of these Anglo-Indian Mutiny novels are Meadows Taylor’s Seeta and Steel’s On the Face of the Waters. In addition, Nancy Paxton characterizes J.E. Muddock’s The Star of Fortune: A Story of the Indian Mutiny (1894), Robert Armitage Sterndale’s The Afghan Knife (1879), and Hume Nisbet’s The Queen’s Desire: A Romance of the Indian Mutiny (1893) as Anglo-Indian novels. She writes: “All three of these men may be considered Anglo-Indian writers since Muddock and Sterndale served in the Indian army during the mutiny and Hume Nisbet traveled widely in India and in the Far East prior to writing The Queen’s Desire” (144). Randall, in Kipling’s Imperial Boy, has read The Jungle Books as a text which allegorizes the events of the Mutiny. 15 See Pratul Chandra Gupta’s Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore and Andrew Ward’s Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 for a detailed account of how the Mutiny unfolded in Cawnpore. 16 Nana Sahib’s prominent role in the uprising at Cawnpore turned him into a loathsome figure for the Victorians. Although there is no conclusive evidence that he personally ordered the massacre at Satichura Ghat or that he had lustful designs on British women, he did flee just prior to the reoccupation of Cawnpore by British troops, leaving behind corpses at the Bibighar. Unlike many of the Mutiny leaders, he was never captured or killed by the British, and is believed to have escaped to Nepal. The year, location, and circumstances of his death, as Gupta has shown, remained a source of mystery and speculation for the British. 17 See Graham Dawson, Jenny Sharpe, and Edward Spiers for observations on the role played by the British press during the Mutiny. Writing about the exaggerated nature of the press coverage, Spiers notes that, “fears and fantasies were widely and vividly reported, ensuring the horrid fascination and fury of the English reading public” (127). 18 Spiers has remarked that British press reports, especially in the early days of the Mutiny, were “embellished by letters from India, especially from clergymen. Many of these letters repeated wildly exaggerated rumours, reflecting more about the phobias of the horror-stricken correspondents than about events in the northern provinces” (126). 19 See also Stephen Heathorn’s article “Angel of Empire: The Cawnpore Memorial Well as a British Site of Imperial Remembrance,” which explores the importance of the well at Cawnpore during the British Raj. 20 See also Dawson’s Soldier Heroes and John MacKenzie’s “Heroic Myths of Empire.” 21 A similar anxiety about rebellious Indian princes, the spread of Russian imperialism, and the unruliness of Afghan territories can be detected in Kipling’s Kim. 22 Anderson identifies the Crimean War and the Mutiny as the conflicts which altered the attitudes of the British public towards its soldiers.

180 • Notes 23 See also MacKenzie’s “Heroic Myths of Empire.” 24 I have drawn from John Clark Marshman’s Memoirs—arguably, one of the most widely read Victorian biographies—to reference events in Havelock’s life. See Anderson and Dawson for a description of the plethora of texts— from biographies to ballads—engaging with Havelock that were available for public consumption in the second half of the nineteenth century. 25 See, for instance, Patrick Dunae’s “New Grub Street for Boys” and John Springhall’s “ ‘Healthy Papers for Manly Boys’: Imperialism and Race in the Harmsworths’ Halfpenny Boys’ Papers of the 1890s and 1900s” for an analysis of the centrality of empire in boys’ magazines from the 1870s onward. See also Castle’s Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines. Although not directly dealing with empire or boys’ magazines, J.S. Bratton’s The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction gives a good overview of the reasons for the burgeoning of the juvenile publishing industry in the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 1

2 3

4

See, for instance, Shamsul Islam’s Kipling’s ‘Law,’ B.J. Moore-Gilbert’s Kipling and “Orientalism,” Mark Paffard’s Kipling’s Indian Fiction, K. Bhaskara Rao’s Rudyard Kipling’s India, and Zohreh T. Sullivan’s Narratives of Empire. In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Karlin also gives an informative account of Kipling’s sources for The Jungle Books. See Anil Seal’s The Emergence of Indian Nationalism and John McLane’s Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress for an overview of the initial phase of Indian nationalism. It is safe to assume that Kipling is referring to Lord Ripon and his attempts to alter some of the more severe policies of the Raj during his tenure as viceroy from 1880 to 1884 that included supporting the Ilbert Bill, repealing the Vernacular Press Act, and modifying the Arms Act. Ripon, who Kipling scornfully refers to as “a circular and bewildered recluse of religious tendencies” (31) in his autobiography, was followed by Lord Dufferin, who, much to Kipling’s satisfaction, was greatly mistrusting of educated Indians and the nascent Congress.

Chapter Five 1

2

See Provash Ronjan Dey for a brief survey of Bengali children’s literature, and Syed Mohammad Shahed, Suchismita Sen, and Sanjay Sircar for a succinct introduction to Bengali rhymes. Rabindranath Tagore is also well-known for his stories and poems for children. However, unlike the Rays, he is not exclusively a children’s author, and his fame as a writer largely rests on ‘adult’ literature.

Notes • 181 3

4

5 6

Interestingly, “Amar Sonar Bangla” was to become the national anthem of Bangladesh, and was invoked decades later by Bangladeshis in their struggle for independence from Pakistan. I have drawn from two English translations of U. Ray’s Tuntunir Boi. “How the King Lost his Nose” and “Matanjali Sarkar” are taken from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne: The Magical Word of Upendrakishore Roychoudhury, translated from Bengali by Swagata Deb. In addition, I have also referred to William Radice’s The Stupid Tiger and other Tales, a translation of selected stories from Tuntunir Boi. I have used Swagata Deb’s translation of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne: The Magical Word of Upendrakishore Roychoudhury. In referencing S. Ray’s works, I have drawn on Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translation of Abol Tabol and Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La in The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray. In addition, I have used Sampurna Chattarji’s translation of the Pagla Dashu stories and Professor Heshoram Hushiar’s diary in Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray.

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Index

Abol Tabol [Rhymes without Reason] (S. Ray), 9–10, 136, 152, 154–160 Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, The (film), 169–170 Africa Described in Its Ancient and Present State (Hofland), 50 Aftermath of Revolt, The (Metcalf), 80, 114 Al Sirajiyyah: or the Mohamedan Law of Inheritance (Jones), 111 Alastor (Shelly), 25 Alfred Campbell, The Young Pilgrim (Hofland), 50 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 10, 18, 160–161, 163 Amherst, J. H., 53 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 123 Anderson, Olive, 93, 95, 97–99, 101 Andrews, C. F., 110, 122, 124–125 Anglo-American Magazine, 129 Anglo-Mysore Wars, 8, 11, 51–54, 56, 58, 62, 74–75 Archer, Mildred, 53, 67, 75 Arms Act of 1878, 110, 180n4 Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Gubar), 4 Aryakahini [Noble Stories], 140 Arzoomund (Sherwood), 18 Aurangzeb, Emperor, 15 Austen, Jane, 96 Autobiography of An Unknown Indian, The (N. Chaudhuri), 142 Baillie, John, 20 Baillie, William, 59 Balak [The Child], 140 Balak-Bandhu [Friend of Children], 140 Ball, Charles, 88

Ballantyne, R. M., 51 Ballhatchet, Kenneth, 95, 96 Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, 135–136, 147, 177 Banerjea, Surendranath, 120, 124, 137 Bangla Siksha Grantha [An Instructional Book of Bengali] (Deb), 139 Barbadoes Girl, The (Hofland), 50 Barrell, John, 42–43, 54–55 Basu, Ramram, 33–34 Bayly, C. A., 55, 62–64 Bentham, Jeremy, 111 Bentinck, Lord, 48, 58 Bhabha, Homi, 5, 12, 39–40, 116–117, 153 Bhattacharya, Nandini, 28 bildungsroman, 48–49, 66, 72, 174n2 Blackwood’s Magazine, 83, 101 Bonnerji, W. C., 125 Boone, Troy, 7 Boy’s Own Paper, 101 Bradford, Clare, 3, 4 Brantlinger, Patrick, 83, 85 Bristow, James, 61, 52 Bristow, Joseph, 6, Britons (Colley), 22 Brontë, Charlotte, 20, 50 Bunyan, John, 18, 31 Burke, Edmund, 10–11, 15, 47–48, 63, 71–72 Burnett, Frances H., 57 Burnt Offering, The (Duncan), 82 Busch, Wilhelm, 158 Butts, Dennis, 49–51 Cambridge History of India, The, 76 Cameron, Agnes, 129 Canning, Lord, 80, 90

191

192 • Index Captives in India, The (Hofland), 9, 47–78, 90 Captives of Tipu: Survivors’ Narratives (A. W. Lawrence), 58–59 Carey, Eustace, 19 Carey, William, 19–20, 31, 33–34, 42, 98 Carroll, Lewis, 10, 18, 151, 153, 160–161 Case of Peter Pan: or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, The (Rose), 3 Castle, Kathryn, 7 Cawnpore (G. Trevelyan), 85, 90–91 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 12, 135, 142 Charter Act of 1793, 24 Charter Act of 1813, 2, 11, 16, 19, 22, 24, 38, 44 Charupath [Pleasant Road] (A. Datta), 139 Chatterjee, Amal, 48 Chatterjee, Partha, 142 Chaudhuri, Benoy, 147 Chaudhuri, Nirad, 142 Chaudhuri, Sukanta, 152–153, 158, 167 Chheleder Mahabharata [Children’s Mahabharata] (S. Ray), 143 Chheleder Ramayana [Children’s Ramayana] (S. Ray), 143 childhood agency, 3–5, 11 Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Lesnik-Oberstein), 3 Chums, 101 Civil and Military Gazette, 109 Clive, Robert, 15, 100–101, 111 Coats, Karen, 11 Cohn, Bernard, 25, 39, 53, 80, 110 Cole, C. W., 55 Colebrooke, Henry T., 20 Colley, Linda, 22, 52, 60–64, 72 Collins, Wilkie, 54 colonial bildungsroman, 72. See also bildungsroman colonial India: children’s literature and, 1–14; Kipling and, 108–110; missionary debates in, 19–25 colonial law, 107–118, 128–131 colonial policy, 15–25, 58, 112, 136, 143 Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Cohn), 25, 53, 110 coming-of-age novel, 47–49, 174n2 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey), 43 Copland, Ian, 119, 120, 137 Cornwallis, Lord, 15, 62, 74–77, 75, 145–146 Cotes, Everard, 82 Cox, Jeffrey, 23

cultural divides, 79 Curse of Kehama, The (Southey), 24 Curzon, Lord, 9, 135 “Customs of Bombagarh, The” (S. Ray), 154, 155 Cutt, M. Nancy, 17, 28, 30, 38 Daily Telegraph, 101 Dalhousie, Lord, 80, 85, 177n1 Dalrymple, William, 25 Darnton, Robert, 151 Datta, Akshay Kumar, 139 Datta, Tarachand, 139 Dawson, Graham, 87–88, 96–98, 100 De Quincey, Thomas, 43, 54 Dean, Misao, 83 Deb, Radha Kanta, 139 “Defence of Lucknow, The” (Tennyson), 98 Dempster, John, 70 Dey, Provash Ronjan, 139, 140 Digby, John, 34 Digdarsan, 140 Dirk, Rudolph, 158 Dirom, Alexander, 75 Disraeli, Benjamin, 72 Dobrée, Bonamy, 113 Dodson, Michael, 33 Dolitsky, Marlene, 152 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 165 Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (Green), 6 Dufferin, Lord, 120–121, 136, 180n4 Duncan, Sara Jeanette, 5, 8, 9, 11, 79–105, 132, 170 Dyson, Ketaki Kusari, 17, 28, 30–31, 36, 55 Edgeworth, Maria, 49–50, 54 Edinburgh Review, 23 Edmonstone, Neil, 20 Elphinstone, William F., 22 empire, trivializing, 107, 135, 157 Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (Joseph Bristow), 6 English Utilitarians and India, The (Stokes), 21, 24, 111–113, 115 Englishman, 123 “Enlightments of Pagett, M.P., The” (Kipling), 121 Examiner, 101 fairytales, 141, 150 Fay, Eliza, 55–56, 68–69

Index • 193 folk rhymes, 141, 153 folk songs, 141 folklore, 55, 135–148 folktales, 140–147 Foote, Samuel, 43 Forrest, Denys, 52, 55, 61 Forster, E. M., 44, 82 From Sepoy to Subedar (Pande), 104 Gandhi, Indira, 169–170 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 150, 149, 164 Gardner, Brian, 96 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 49, 77 Ghosh, Aurobindo, 137, 138 Gilchrist, John, 20 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (U. Ray), 9–10, 136, 148–150, 169–170 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne [The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha] (film), 169–170 Gora (R. Tagore), 94 Grant, Charles, 21, 23, 26–27, 35–36, 58, 112 Great Victorian Age for Children, The (Synge), 90 Green, Martin, 6 Grossman, Joyce, 25 Gubar, Marah, 4 Guha, Ranajit, 8, 12, 146 Haggard, Rider, 12 Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La [A Topsy-Turvy Tale] (S. Ray), 9–10, 136, 153, 160–165, 162 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie), 170 Hasi-O-Khela [Laughter and Play] (J. Sarkar), 141 Hastings, Warren, 8, 15–16, 22–24, 58, 111, 141 Havelock, Henry, 93, 96–99, 101 “Head of the District, The” (Kipling), 127 Henty, G. A., 7, 12, 51, 55, 66, 73, 85, 101 Herbert, Christopher, 83 Heyman, Michael, 151, 152 Hibbert, Christopher, 87–90, 100 Hidden Adult, The (Nodelman), 3 Hirak Rajar Deshe [Kingdom of Diamonds], 169–170 Hirschmann, Edwin, 122, 123, 124 History of British India, The (Mill), 26, 111 History of George Desmond, The (Sherwood), 18, 30

History of Henry Milner, The (Sherwood), 29 History of Little Henry and His Bearer, The (Sherwood), 9, 15–45, 28 History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye, The (Sherwood), 18, 29, 30–31 History of the Criminal Law of England (Stephen), 113 History of the Fairchild Family, The (Sherwood), 29 History of the Indian Mutiny (Ball), 88 History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (Orme), 62 Hitopadesha (Counsel with Benevolence) (R. Sen), 139 Hodgson, Orlando, 55 Hofland, Barbara, 5, 8–12, 47–78, 90, 170 Home, Robert, 75 Home and the World, The (R. Tagore), 138 Horne, Amelia, 88 Hubel, Teresa, 82 Hunt, Peter, 6 Hutchins, Francis, 11, 80, 84, 122 Hutton, W. H., 76 Hyam, Ronald, 8, 15 Hyder Ali, 51–55 Ideologies of the Raj (Metcalf), 80, 84, 107 Ilbert, C. P., 122–123 Ilbert Bill, 110, 114, 122–124, 180n4 Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India, The (Hutchins), 11 Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Richards), 6 In Their Own Words (Raza), 12 In Times of Peril (Henty), 85 India and British Portraiture (Archer), 75 Indian Councils Act of 1909, 138, 163 Indian Pilgrim; or, The Progress of the Pilgrim Nazareenee, The (Sherwood), 18, 31 Indian Press Act of 1910, 151 Indian Spectator, 123 “Infant Joy” (S. Ray),157, 158 Ingham, Kenneth, 37 Institutes of Hindu Law, or the ordinances of Menu (Jones), 111 Into All Lands (Thompson), 20 Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (Zornado), 3 Islam, Shamsul, 113, 129 Iyer, Subramania, 125

194 • Index Jane Eyre (Brontë), 20 Jnanoday [On Knowledge], 140 Jones, William, 111 Journal of an Officer of Colonel Baillie’s Detachment (Anon.), 52, 59 Judd, Denis, 84, 154 Jungle Books, The (Kipling), 9, 107–133, 153. See also Mowgli stories jungle law, 107–118, 128–131 juvenile bildungsroman, 48–49, 66, 174n2 Karlin, Daniel, 118–119 Kaye, John, 85, 89, 96 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 170 Khukumonir Chhara [Rhymes for Little Girls] (J. Sarkar), 141 Kim (Kipling), 84–85, 91, 114, 166 Kingdom of Diamonds, 169–170 Kipling, Rudyard, 1–5, 8–12, 17, 51, 73, 81, 84–85, 91–95, 107–132, 156, 167, 170 Kopf, David, 20, 23, 33 Krishna, Rajah Nil, 84 Kutzer, M. Daphne, 7 Laird, M. A., 37 Last Days of Boosy, The (Sherwood), 18, 43–44 law: colonial/jungle, 107–118, 128–131 Lawrence, A. W., 58–59, 64, 70 Lawrence, John, 114 Lear, Edward, 151, 153 Leask, Nigel, 25, 42, 71 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 152 legacy, postcolonial, 169–171 Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín, 3 Life of James Scurry, Seaman (Scurry), 52, 60 Life of Mrs. Sherwood, The (Sherwood), 18, 29, 31, 35, 37–38, 42–43 Lindsay, John, 70 literary nonsense, 150–154 Lloyd’s Weekly, 100 Location of Culture, The (Bhabha), 5, 153 Logan, Mawuena Kossi, 7 Lokashahitya [Folklore] (R. Tagore), 144 London Gazette, 74 Louis XVI, 64 Lytton, Lord, 114 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 6, 26, 58, 97, 110–118, 153 Macaulay, Zachary, 21, 23, 97 “Macaulay’s minutemen,” 6, 107–133

MacKenzie, John, 100, 118–119 Mackenzie, Roderick, 75 Mackintosh, James, 71 Madras Courier, 77 Madras Mail, 123 Magazine for Indian Youth, 140 Magical World of Upendrakishore Roychoudhury, The, 144–146, 148 Majeed, Javed, 39 Majumdar, Lila, 143 Manoranjanetihas [Pleasurable History] (T. Datta), 139 Marches of the British Armies in the Peninsula of India During the Campaigns of 1790 and 1791 (Rennell), 75 Marryat, Captain, 50–51 Marshall, P. J., 74 Marshman, Hannah, 98 Marshman, John Clark, 98, 99, 100 Marshman, Joshua, 98 Martyn, Henry, 35–38, 42 Marvel, 102 Masks of Conquest (Viswanathan), 21, 38, 58, 141 Max und Moritz [Max and Moritz] (Busch), 158 Mayo, Lord, 156 McBratney, John, 130 McClure, John, 130 Meadows Taylor, Philip, 54, 83 Meath, Lord, 129 Memoir of William Carey (E. Carey), 19 Memoirs of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, KCB (J. C. Marshman), 98, 100–101 Metcalf, Thomas, 80, 84, 107, 114 Mill, James, 26, 58, 111, 117 Minto, Lord, 41 “Minute,” 6, 22, 26, 58, 111, 119, 143. See also “Macaulay’s minutemen” Missionary, The (Owenson), 24 missionary debates, 2, 15–16, 19–25 Mistress of our Tears (Butts), 49–51 Mitford, Mary Russell, 54 Mitra Majumdar, Dakshinaranjan, 141 Modern India (S. Sarkar), 135, 136 Mookerjee, Girija, 110, 121–122, 124–125 Moonstone, The (Collins), 54 Moor’s Last Sigh, The (Rushdie), 6, 108 More, Hannah, 49 Morning Chronicle, 74 Mouchak [Beehive], 140 Mowgli stories, 9, 108–118, 121, 124, 128–132. See also Jungle Books

Index • 195 Mukhopadhyay, Prabhat Kumar, 141 Munro, Hector, 59 Murray, John, 113 Mutiny of 1857, 8–11, 80–83, 90, 107, 140, 154 My Diary in India (Russell), 98 Nabob, The (Foote), 43 Nabobs, The (Spear), 43 Nana Sahib, 85–87, 98, 104, 179n16 Napoleon, 49, 52, 63–64, 66 Narrative of James Bristow, Private in the Bengal Artillery (James Bristow), 52, 60, 69 Narrative of the Campaign in India, which Terminated with the War with Tippoo Sultan, in 1792 (Dirom), 75, 77 Narrative of the Operations of the British Army in India (Anon.), 75 Neill, James, 89, 96 New York Journal, 158 New York Times, 101 News of the World, 97 Newspapers Act of 1908, 151 Nicholson, John, 96 Nitikatha [Conduct Tales], 139 Nodelman, Perry, 3 Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray, The, 165 nursery rhymes, 141, 153 Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (Grant), 21, 23–24, 26–27 On the Education of the People of India (C. Trevelyan), 93 On the Face of the Waters (Steel), 83 On the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation (Bentham), 111 O’Quinn, Daniel, 53 Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture (Dodson), 33 Original Letters from India (Fay), 55 Orme, Robert, 62 “Other, The” (Nodelman), 3 Outside the Fold (Viswanathan), 44 Owenson, Sydney, 24, 25 Pakshir Brittanta [On Birds], 140 Pal, Bipin Chandra, 137 Pande, Sita Ram, 104 Pandey, Mangal, 79 Passage to India, A (Forster), 44, 82, 155

Paswavali (On Animals), 140 Philips, C. H., 23 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 18, 31 Pioneer, 109, 123 Plotz, Judith, 71, 170 Pluck, 102 Portable Edmund Burke, 10–11 Potts, E. Daniel, 19–20, 31, 34, 41 Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (Naoroji), 122 Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, 151 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 96 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 25 Punch, 101 “Purloined Moustache, The” (S. Ray), 156, 157 Quarterly Review, 23, 101 Radice, William, 147 Rai, Lala Lajpat, 137 Ralston, William, 55 Randall, Don, 130–131 Rao, Peshwa Baji II, 85 Ray, Satyajit, 148, 152–154, 160, 169–171 Ray, Sukumar, 6, 9, 12, 135–167 Ray, Upendrakishore, 6, 9, 12, 135–167 Raza, Rosemary, 12, 18 Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (Bradford), 3 Regaignon, Dara Rossman, 30 Regulating Act of 1773, 20 religious conversion, 15–45 Rennell, James, 75 Revolt of Islam, The (Shelley), 25 Rhymes without Reason (S. Ray), 9–10, 136, 152, 154–160 Richards, Jeffrey, 6, 101 Risley, Herbert H., 135 Rose, Jacqueline, 3 Roy, Ram Mohan, 33–34, 39, 55, 139, 142 “Rule of Twenty-One, The” (S. Ray), 159 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 108, 170–171 Russell, William Howard, 98 Sakha [Friend], 140 Sandesh, 140, 148, 150, 154, 165 Sands-O’Connor, Karen, 6, 7 Sarkar, Jogindranath, 140, 141, 145 Sarkar, Sumit, 135, 136, 137 Satyapradip [Truth and Light], 140 Scott, Walter, 54, 61 Scurry, James, 52, 60–62, 69

196 • Index Secret Garden, The (Burnett), 57 Seeley, J. R., 8 Seeta (Meadows Taylor), 83–84 Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray, The, 155 Sen, Kesab Chandra, 140 Sen, Raj Kamal, 139 Sen, Satadru, 140, 161 Sen, Suchismita, 141 Sen Gupta, Subhadra, 150 sepoy mutiny, 79–80, 86, 95–97. See also Mutiny of 1857 Set in Authority (Duncan), 82 Seth, Sanjay, 120 Sewell, Elizabeth, 152 Sharpe, Jenny, 72, 88–89, 96–97 Shekaler Katha [Tales from the Past] (S. Ray), 143 Shelley, Percy B., 25 Sherwood, Henry, 18, 28 Sherwood, Lucy, 18, 28 Sherwood, Mary, 5, 8–12, 15–45, 49–50, 66, 73, 109, 170 Shishusikha [Lessons for Children] (Tarkalankar), 139 Singh, Rashna B., 7 Sinha, Mrinalini, 122–123, 142, 159, 161 Sitaramayya, Pattabhi B., 120 Sketch of the War with Tippoo Sultan (R. Mackenzie), 75 Smith, Naomi Royde, 18 Something of Myself (Kipling), 108–110 Southey, Robert, 24–25 Spear, Percival, 43, 48 Spiers, Edward, 88, 96, 97 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 7 Springhall, John, 101–102 Stalky and Co. (Kipling), 95, 109, 114 Statesman, 123 Steel, Flora Annie, 83–84 Steevens, G. W., 101 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 112–114, 122 Stewart, Colonel “Hindoo,” 23 Stokes, Eric, 21, 24, 111–113, 115 Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism (Sherwood), 18 Storming of Seringapatam, or The Death of Tippoo Saib, 53 Story of Sonny Sahib, The (Duncan), 9, 79–105, 92 Stronge, Susan, 64 Stupid Tiger and Other Tales, The (Radice), 147–148 Sukumar Ray: A Legacy of Laughter (Sen Gupta), 150

Surgeon’s Daughter, The (Scott), 54, 61 Swadeshi movement, 2–3, 8–9, 135–138, 141–145, 149–151 Swadeshi Samaj, 138 Synge, M. B., 90 Tagore, Abanindranath, 141–142 Tagore, Rabindranath, 94, 138, 140–144 Tarkalankar, Madanmohan, 139 Tausky, Thomas, 82 Teltscher, Kate, 43, 60, 61, 70 Tennyson, Alfred, 98 Thakurmar Jhuli [Grandmother’s Bag] (Mitra Majumdar), 141 Thompson, H. P., 20 Thomson, Mowbary, 88, 89 Thornton, Samuel, 21 Through Three Campaigns (Henty), 101 Tiger of Mysore; A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib (Henty), 55, 66, 73 Tigges, Wim, 151, 152 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 137, 138 Times, 87–88, 97–98, 101, 114 Times of India, 123 Tippoo, A Tale of a Tiger (Ralston and Cole), 55 Tippoo Saib, or The Storming of Seringapatam, 53, 55 Tippoo Sultaun (Meadows Taylor), 54 Tippoo’s Tiger (Archer), 53, 67, 68 Tipu Sultan, 2–3, 8–9, 22, 47–78 “Tipuism,” 53 “Tipu’s captive sons,” 75 Topsy-Turvy Tale, A (S. Ray), 9–10, 136, 153, 160–165, 162 Trevelyan, Charles E., 93 Trevelyan, George, 85, 89, 90 Trimmer, Sarah, 49 Tuntunir Boi [Tuntuni’s Book] (S. Ray), 9–10, 136, 142, 144–147 Twining, Thomas, 23 “Tyash Goru” (Limey Cow) (S. Ray), 156 “Undertakers, The” (Kipling), 1–2 Union Jack, 101 Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (Bradford), 3 Varna Parichay [Know Your Alphabet] (Vidyasagar), 139 Vernacular Press Act of 1878, 110, 180n4 Victoria, Queen, 154

Index • 197 Vidyadarpana [Mirror of Knowledge], 140 Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra, 139 Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer (Stewart), 23 Visit to London, A (Hofland), 67 Viswanathan, Gauri, 6, 21, 39, 44, 58, 141

Wilberforce, William, 21, 23 With Clive in India, or the Beginnings of an Empire (Henty), 101 With Wolfe in Canada, or the Winning of a Continent (Henty), 101 Wolpert, Stanley, 81

Waring, Scott, 23 “Wee Willie Winkie” (Kipling), 129 Wellesley, Lord, 20 “What Happened” (Kipling), 121 “White Man’s Burden, The” (Kipling), 4

Young Cadet, The (Hofland), 50, 51 Young Crusoe, The (Hofland), 50 Young Pilgrim, The (Hofland), 50 Zornado, Joseph, 3