An unusual take

THE first quarter of the 19th Century was a time when the encounter between India and England was slowly beginning to translate itself into travel literature. Memsahibs like Emily Eden, Maria Graham and Fanny Parks sent regular dispatches to London periodicals about their discovery of the "real India". Ranga Rao's novel, too, is structured around several such dispatches, in the form of letters written by a young Englishwoman called Grace Clare to her mother from the Coromandel coast in 1830.

Grace is part of the "fishing fleet", the shiploads of single White women who arrive yearly in India in search of husbands. As Grace puts it in her first letter: "(W)hole flotillas of bachelor girls are arriving on the limitless Indian coasts, both West and East, almost every day. Those left behind in England — Over There, as Aunt Polly puts it — or they cannot afford the voyage to the exotic and potentially gainful land of Ind, call us, in an inspiration of dry English humour, `fishing fleets'."

This is an early example of Grace's epistolary style, which, as the novel progresses, becomes a curious mix of Hobson-Jobson and Rushdiespeak. Example: "A giggly gaggle of gangly anglers tangled singled bundled bungled, dear Mamma". But the story she relates is firmly rooted in the palmy days of the Raj, a time when the shaking of the mythical pagoda tree yielded rich pickings for the rapacious John Company.

However, Grace's uncle, Charles Eden, Assistant Collector of Kausola, is an exception. It is largely through his eyes, as well as those of the eligible John Campbell, that Grace forms her first impressions of the Telugu-speaking "Gentoo" region of the Coromandel. Her letters back home alternate between bewilderment and wonder, and sometimes horror, when she relates the stories of the Pindari massacres. As the novel progresses, her mission to find a suitable husband recedes and the more pressing realities of a blistering Indian summer and the consequent drought begin to occupy her attention.

The drought — and its inevitable corollary — famine, occur despite the Krishna river being three-quarters full. But repeated pleas by local administrators like Charles Eden to store the water find no takers at Fort St. George, the seat of government at Madras. Even when the famine reaches horrific proportions, Fort St. George continues to be in denial. For Grace, the fact that the Raj could be as callous, self-seeking and inefficient as the regimes it replaced comes as a bitter pill of realisation: "Jaan Kumpini is like the Old Man of Sinbad the Sailor, Uncle, sitting on India's shoulders, forcing India to go where he wants to, not where India wants to."

The Indians in the novel — such as the corpulent Black Collector, the intrepid Scotappa, the courtesan Basivi — are described through the sympathetic eyes of Grace. Nevertheless, they remain shadowy and two-dimensional, except in the last section of the book where Grace relinquishes her narrative authority. In the brief last section, a group of people led by Scotappa and his grandfather leave the famine-stricken land to make a new beginning. This is the one epiphanic moment in the novel, where the harsh realities of the famine and the misrule of the company are temporarily exorcised from the narrative space.

Ranga Rao has given us an intriguing novel from an unusual perspective and the flavour of his writing lingers long after the reading. However, the novel is somewhat marred by one puzzling error, where a Company adventurer called John Frenetic is seen setting up a factory near the Hooghly in 1680, "right under the nose of the Calcutta officials". Surely Calcutta would come into being only 10 years later.

ABHIJIT GUPTA

The River Is Three-Quarters Full, Ranga Rao, Penguin, 2001, p.276, Rs. 250.

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