Good Books Lately

The English (and subsequently British) East India Company was founded in 1600 to trade in East and Southeast Asia and India, and it was so ruthlessly successful that by1750 half of the World’s trade passed through its ledgers. Its army of over 200,000 soldiers, which outnumbered Britain’s army, was used to impose military and administrative rule over large parts of India. Its brutal, high-handed and insensitive behaviour to towards Indian cultural and religious traditions led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A year later, realising that the East India Company had grown too big for its boots and become an embarrassment, the British Government brought in an Act of Parliament to transfer direct control to the Crown. This marked the start of the British Raj, which absorbed the Company’s armies and took over its governing and administrative powers (and continued to exercise them until Clement Attlee’s post-war Administration granted Indian independence in 1947). 

I am grateful to two reading groups in my South Warwickshire town for some outstanding books I have read this year. There was The Sealwoman’s Gift, which I praised in a February post below, and now our April read: The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell. When the sepoys (Indian soldiers) stationed in the garrison at Captainganj are asked to bite the bullets for their new Enfield rifles, they suspect that the bullets are greased with a mixture of ox and pig fat, anathema to India’s great religions, and turn on their British officers. Those officers left alive run to the nearby town of Krishnapur, remotely situated on the vast North Indian plain.(Although the town is fictional, the story has roots in the notorious North Indian town Lucknow, which underwent a 6-month siege in 1857, as part of the Indian rebellion. The author acknowledges his debt to a large mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses in Lucknow, Cawnapore and elsewhere during the Mutiny, which spread to many parts of the country)

The few officers that escape with their lives join the British representatives of the Krishnapur Raj, who retreat to the Residency compound and dig themselves in for the long haul. They manage to hold their hurriedly-fortified enclave for four months against constant assaults from the sepoys, but as their supplies of food and ammunition dwindle and the rains wash away their improvised defensive mud wall, so their layers of ‘civilised’ conditioning, their social hierarchy and their body fat are slowly stripped away too.

This novel is beautifully written with great wit and intelligence; it is well paced and is a sensible length too. It has a rich cast of memorable characters, embodying so many clearly-recognisable human types; it abounds in dramatic action; It combines tragedy, comedy and farce without compromising its serious intent; It is a universal story, raising many issues that are relevant to the world we live in now. Above all, is a brilliant commentary on the human condition.