Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

How poignantly ironic this passage seems a hundred years later, after generations of expatriate Indians, working mainly in England, have striven so hard to unlearn the lessons taught by Bankim and his successors in India. So successfully were novelistic conventions domesticated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that many Indian readers now think of them as somehow local, homegrown, comforting in their naturalistic simplicity, while the work of such writers as G. V. Desani, Zulfikar Ghose, Salman Rushdie, Adam Zameenzad, Shashi Tharoor, and others appears, by the same token, stylized and experimental.

Yet Bankim's opinions about the distinctiveness of Indian literature were much more extreme than those of his apocryphal Sanskrit school. In 1882 Bankim found himself embroiled in a very interesting controversy with a Protestant missionary, W. Hastie. The exchange began after Hastie had published a couple of letters in a Calcutta newspaper, The Statesman. I cannot resist quoting from one of these:

Notwithstanding all that has been written about the myriotheistic idolatry of India, no pen has yet adequately depicted the hideousness and grossness of the monstrous system. It has been well described by one who knew it as "Satan's masterpiece… the most stupendous fortress and citadel of ancient error and idolatry now in the world…" With much that was noble and healthy in its early stages, the Sanskrit literature became infected by a moral leprosy which gradually spread like a corrupting disease through almost all its fibres and organs. The great Sanskrit scholars of Bengal know too well what I mean… Only to think that this has been the principal pabulum of the spiritual life of the Hindus for about a thousand years, and the loudly boasted lore of their semi-deified priests! Need we seek elsewhere for the foul disease that has been preying upon the vitals of the national life, and reducing the people to what they are? "Shew me your gods," cried an ancient Greek apologist, "and I will show you your men." The Hindu is just what his idol gods have made him. His own idolatry, and not foreign conquerors, has been the curse of his history. No people was ever degraded except by itself, and this is most literally so with the Hindus.

Bankim responded by advising Mr. Hastie to "obtain some knowledge of Sanskrit scriptures in the original

…[for] no translation from the Sanskrit into a European language can truly or even approximately represent the original…The English or the German language can possess no words or expressions to denote ideas or conceptions which have never entered into a Teutonic brain… A people so thoroughly unconnected with England or Germany as the old Sanskrit-speaking people of India, and developing a civilization and a literature peculiarly their own, had necessarily a vast store of ideas and conceptions utterly foreign to the Englishman or the German, just as the Englishman or the German boasts a still vaster number of ideas utterly foreign to the Hindu…[Mr. Hastie's position] is the logical outcome of that monstrous claim to omniscience, which certain Europeans… put forward for themselves… Yet nothing is a more common subject of merriment among the natives of India than the Europeans' ignorance of all that relates to India… A navvy who had strayed into the country… asked for some food from a native… The native gave him a cocoanut. The hungry sailor… bit the husk, chewed it… and flung the fruit at the head of the unhappy donor… The sailor carried away with him an opinion of Indian fruits parallel to that of Mr. Hastie and others, who merely bite at the husk of Sanskrit learning, but do not know their way to the kernel within.

He added: "I cheerfully admit the intellectual superiority of Europe. I deny, however… that intellectual superiority can enable the blind to see or the deaf to hear."

By the time he wrote the passages quoted above, Bankim was already an acclaimed novelist and a major figure in the Bengali literary world. But his experiments with the novel had begun some twenty years before, and his earliest efforts at novel writing were conducted in English. Rajmohun's Wife is the first known fictional work written by Bankim, and it was written in the early 1860s.

It will be evident from the above passages, abbreviated though they are, that Bankim wrote excellent English: his essays and letters are written in a style that is supple, light-handed, and effective. The style of Rajmohun's Wife, in contrast, is deliberate, uncertain, and often ponderous. What intrigues me most about this book, however, is the long passages of description that preface several of the chapters, bookending, as it were, some extremely melodramatic scenes.

Here are some examples:

The house of Mathur Ghose was a genuine specimen of mofussil magnificence united with a mofussil want of cleanliness.

From the far-off paddy fields you could descry through the intervening foliage, its high palisades and blackened walls. On a nearer view might be seen pieces of plaster of a venerable antiquity prepared to bid farewell to their old and weather-beaten tenement…

A mazy suite of dark and damp apartments led from a corner of this part of the building to the inner mahal, another quadrangle, on all four sides of which towered double-storeyed verandahs, as before… The walls of all the chambers above and below were well striped with numerous streaks of red, white, black, green, all colours of the rainbow, caused by the spittles of such as had found their mouths too much encumbered with paan, or by some improvident woman servant who had broken the gola-handi while it was full of its muddy contents… Numerous sketches in charcoal, which showed, we fear, nothing of the conception of (Michael) Angelo or the tinting of Guido (Reni), attested the art or idleness of the wicked boys and ingenious girls who had contrived to while away hungry hours by essays in the arts of designing and of defacing wall…

A thick and massive door led to the "godown" as the mahal was called by the males directly from outside…

A kitchen scene:

Madhav therefore immediately hurried into the inner apartments where he found it no very easy task to make himself heard in that busy hour of zenana life. There was a servant woman, black, rotund, and eloquent, demanding the transmission to her hand of sundry articles of domestic use, without however making it at all intelligible to whom her demands were addressed. There was another who boasted similar blessed corporal dimensions, but who thought it beneath her dignity to shelter them from view; and was busily employed broomstick in hand, in demolishing the little mountains of the skins and stems of sundry culinary vegetables which decorated the floors, and against which the half-naked dame never aimed a blow but coupled it with a curse on those whose duty it had been to prepare the said vegetables for dressing.

The questions that strike me when I read these lengthy and labored descriptions are, What are they for? For whom are they intended? Why did he bother to write them? Bankim must have known that this book was very unlikely to be read by anyone who did not know what the average Bengali landowner's house looked like — since by far the largest part of the literate population of Calcutta at that time consisted of landowners and their families. Similarly, anyone who had visited the Bengal of his time, for no matter how brief a period, would almost inevitably have been familiar with the other sights he describes: fishermen at work, cranes fishing, and so on.

Why then did Bankim go to the trouble of writing these passages? Did he think his book might be read by someone who was entirely unfamiliar with Bengal? The question is a natural and inevitable one, but I do not think it leads anywhere. For the fact of the matter is that I don't think Bankim was writing for anyone but himself. I suspect that he never really intended to publish Rajmohun's Wife; the novel has the most cursory of endings, as though he'd written it as an exercise and then thrown it aside once it had served its purpose. The book was not actually published until a decade or so after he'd stopped working on it. For Bankim, Rajmo-hun's Wife was clearly a rehearsal, a preparation for something else.