Rebellion at the Residency

In Issue 49, we left Jim Farrell the winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his novel Troubles, set in the Irish War of Independence and the first in his trilogy dealing with the decline of British imperial power. But even while writing that book, Farrell had been researching its successor in which he wanted to expand on the theme of capturing people ‘undergoing history’. In Troubles, the doomed Majestic Hotel stands as a symbol of power crumbling under the onslaught of inevitable forces of change. In The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), that role is taken by a British Residency under attack during the Indian Mutiny.

Once again Farrell had difficulty in finding a satisfactory starting-point for his intentions. His epiphany came when in the British Museum he came across a journal of the five-month siege of Lucknow. It was written by Maria Germon, the wife of an East India Company officer, and it recorded how those who had taken security and privilege for granted coped with acute danger, overcrowding, filth, disease and death. Farrell had found his novel’s cornerstone. He went on to read everything he could lay his hands on about the Mutiny, and in writing the novel he cannibalized diaries, letters and memoirs written by those who experienced it, sometimes using their actual words. What Britain calls the Mutiny, Indians call their War of Independence. The rebellion was rooted in apparent discrimination against sepoys of the East India Company’s Bengal army by a British élite which – unlike the more relaxed eighteenth-century colonizers – increasingly held in disdain ‘native’ religions and culture. Arguably, it was the catastrophic result of a failure of imagination. Horrified Victorians reared to believe that India was a devoted vassal of the Crown saw the massacre of their men, women and children not only as a barbaric bloodbath but as a rejection of Empire’s crusade, sanctioned by a Christian god, to ‘civilize’ through progress. But how civilized is a society that takes for granted its assumption of superiority? How dangerous is the inflexibility of its ideas? What does ‘progress’ mean without feelings? These questions lie at the heart of The Siege of Krishnapur. In 1971, Farrell flew to India to spend three months in research. He twice visited the Lucknow Residency, saying later that it was ‘not the least like what I had imagined’. He also travelled to Bombay, Agra, Jaipur, Benares and Calcutta, and he made notes each day that recorded facts and impressions. However, he discovered that his own imagination outstripped direct experience and on his return to England he said he wished he had not gone: ‘I had a firmer idea of what India was about before I went.’ No matter. The resulting novel was a triumph. As in John Masters’ The Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), the Mutiny is portended by the mysterious distribution of chapattis throughout British India. Only Krishnapur’s all-powerful Collector Mr Hopkins, who finds four of them in his dispatch box, senses the onset of trouble. Before leaving for Calcutta to take leave of his homebound wife, he orders a defensive trench and a wall of earth to be dug round the Residency perimeter. The cynical Magistrate, Tom Willoughby, remarks waspishly: ‘The Collector’s weakness appears to have found him.’ The cast is swiftly assembled. George Fleury, an idealistic young man of romantic disposition, arrives in Calcutta with a commission to compose a small volume on the advances made by Indian civilization under the East India Company. He is accompanied by his recently widowed sister Miriam and is attracted to the lovely but disdainful Louise Dunstable. Louise and her father, Krishnapur’s civil surgeon, are in Calcutta for the cold season. To Fleury’s despair, she is the target of various soldierly attentions. But with the end of the season the group departs for the Residency where they are greeted by Louise’s good-humoured brother Harry, a Company lieutenant, who has stayed behind. In the pivotal figure of Mr Hopkins, ‘with his side whiskers sprouting out stiffly like the ruff of a cat’, Farrell portrays the well-meaning Victorian man of ideas. On a visit to England the Collector is fired by that temple of imperial commerce, the Great Exhibition, and he returns to India with his mind full of visions of improvement. The favourite object in his teak-panelled study is a bas-relief in marble: ‘The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice’. ‘What use is it if we bring the advantages of our civilization to India without also displaying a superior morality?’ he asks. ‘The foundations on which the new men will build their lives are Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops!’ The authorities in Calcutta find the Collector’s efforts to bring the benefits of European science and art to an uncomprehending native population absurd. Similarly, they laugh off his warnings of a potential uprising as the scaremongering of an old man. But the storm is not long in breaking. Word reaches Krishnapur that two sepoy infantry regiments in Meerut have mutinied and news comes of a massacre in Delhi. When General Hearsey arrives, bloodied after being attacked by sepoys in nearby Captainganj, it is clear that it is time to gather the Europeans into the dubious safety of the Residency. Unable to be separated from their comforts, they bring with them a mountain of furniture, boxes, bundles and bric-à-brac to which they cling with desperate tenacity. The remaining two-thirds of the book is a magnificent and gripping portrayal of a small society fighting against overwhelming odds in conditions of increasing horror. Stripped of the certainties that have previously governed their ordered lives, the besieged Europeans barter and auction their jewels and snuffboxes for scraps of food as starvation takes its grip. Cannon balls scream out of the sky, dismembering and decapitating. Corpses bloat in the scorching sun and cholera breaks out. The stench of putrefaction is overpowering. Meanwhile, the diminishing band of defenders resort to increasingly desperate measures as powder and shot run low. Outside the compound, a huge crowd of gleeful Indians gathers to witness amidst feasting, music and dancing the entertaining sight of the once strutting feringhees fighting for their existence. 

But this is Farrell and all this high drama is interwoven with wonderfully comic scenes as the author parodies imperial values and the Victorian adventure yarn, inverting in the process traditional symbols of ‘civilization’. A gunnery position is protected by two giant marble busts of Plato and Socrates that had once graced the Residency’s roof. Crumbling earthworks are buttressed by furniture and formerly treasured possessions. The defenders run so low on ammunition that they have to load their cannon with stones, cutlery, sugar tongs, false teeth and even marble chipped from the Collector’s ‘Spirit of Science’. An electro-metal bust of Shakespeare is particularly effective:

It had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys . . . the Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness. The head of Keats, for example, wildly festooned with metal locks which it had proved impossible to file smooth, had flown very erratically indeed, killing only a fat money-lender and a camel standing at some distance from the field of action.

As the Residency is reduced to ruins, so previously established social boundaries come under pressure. The women, encamped in the billiard room, divide themselves into groups according to the ranks of their husbands and fathers. In the absence of servants, apart from two dhobis who charge increasingly inflated prices, this is the first time they have had to look after themselves and absurd petty squabbles break out. They are united only in their ostracism of Lucy Hughes, a ‘fallen woman’ exiled from the unforgiving British community even before the sepoy revolt for having been relieved of her virtue by an ungentlemanly officer. But Lucy is made of stronger stuff than her sisters in suffering and finds inner resources of courage and fortitude that she did not know she possessed. Fleury, too, is transformed. He had fondly imagined himself to be a poet, with uplifting ideas about equality and despising materialism. Now he throws himself into the thick of battle, giving Farrell the opportunity to indulge in some wonderful examples of the mock heroic. By the end, the young man has given up arguing that feelings are more important than ideas, that ‘civilization is decadence’, and has discovered the ‘manly pleasures’ of inventing things, making things work, of cause and effect. As Fleury finally identifies himself with the spirit of the times, so the Collector loses his own faith in that spirit. The once arch enthusiast for the Victorian mission becomes aware of the hubris underlying rigid assumptions about hierarchy and the march of progress. Painfully, he recognizes that there is an entire way of life in India he will never come to know and that most of the subjugated population are utterly indifferent to their rulers’ concerns. He thinks back to the Great Exhibition and recalls that among all the wonders of the age exhibited there were chains, fetters, manacles and shackles for export to the American slave states. In his loss of faith, he asks himself: ‘We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us . . . but what if we’re only an after-glow of them?’ Even under harrowing circumstances, the inflexibility of ideas that has brought India’s rulers to this bloody crisis survives. The Padre, the Reverend Hampton, is convinced that the inhabitants of the compound are in mortal danger only because they have sinned against God. Increasingly crazed, he prowls the defences at night, exhorting the battle-weary defenders in apocalyptic terms to repent of sins they are unaware they have committed. A similar rigidity of belief underpins a bitter dispute between the Residency’s two doctors, the civil surgeon Dr Dunstable and the regimental surgeon Dr McNab, as to the cause of cholera. Dunstable, reflecting Farrell’s bleak belief in the persistence of human folly, proclaims with mounting hysteria his confidence in the ancient theory that the disease stems from a miasma in the air. McNab, open-minded and forward-looking, retorts with the revolutionary suggestion that cholera is carried in foul drinking water. Their feud splits the survivors into opposing camps and ends in a wholly unnecessary tragedy. The Siege of Krishnapur is a tremendous read. Amid the laconic humour and enthralling action, serious questions are asked about the wisdom of accepted ideas and the ownership of possessions both material and territorial. On the way, we learn about contemporary social mores, medical and religious schisms and even how to lay a cannon in the heat of battle. Deservedly, the novel won the Booker Prize. But when in November 1973 Farrell rose to deliver the winner’s speech, the sponsors were nervous. The previous year’s winner John Berger had excoriated Booker McConnell for ‘sweating blacks’ in the production of West Indian sugar. Aware of Farrell’s left-wing sympathies, Booker’s managing director rang the organizer Martyn Goff to ask: ‘We’re not anticipating any trouble with Farrell after last year, are we?’ Goff reassured him all would be well. But Farrell had already warned his friend Tom Wakefield: ‘I’m going to be very angry.’ About what? asked Wakefield. ‘Oh, things . . .’ So it came to pass. Farrell in his speech condemned Booker for its treatment of low-paid workers, delivering for good measure a general broadside at wealth and privilege: ‘I know the moment capitalism shows its more acceptable face is not the time to punch it on the nose. But I have to confess that I am no more enamoured of capitalism than my predecessor.’ Provocatively, he announced that his next novel would be a full-scale study of commercial exploitation set around the fall of Singapore in 1942. The £5,000 prize would come in handy to fund research. It would be his most ambitious venture. A final article on J. G. Farrell’s trilogy will appear in Issue 51.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Patrick Welland 2016