The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Once they were in England, they settled in quickly: Dutt was a gleeful tourist, visiting Madame Tussaud’s, the Crystal Palace, Westminster Abbey, Cambridge, Brighton and any other entertainments that came his way with immense zest. The weather didn’t dampen their spirits, though in time-honoured fashion, he registered a complaint: ‘The weather is murky and the days are generally half dark, there being plenty of mist with showers every now and then, but they are not our Indian heavy showers, but slight patter, patter, patter, which is very annoying.’

  He was far more impressed with the levels of political engagement he saw around him. The ‘commonest tailor, the commonest greengrocer, the commonest bootmaker in London’ would talk about the national debt or the day-to-day business of Parliament in detail, and Dutt’s approval was warm.

  In a reversal of the usual exclamations of horror from foreigners who visited India and found the poverty overwhelming, Romesh Chunder declared that the size of the families of the poor in London, and the drunkenness that often accompanied poverty, ‘presents a sight of misery compared to which the poorest classes of people in our own country are well off ’. It was really painful, he wrote, to reflect on the sufferings of the poor ‘in this inclement weather’. He sounds almost exactly like a present-day foreign correspondent when he summarises the English class system—the aristocracy, the landed gentry (‘a creature with little education and less general knowledge’), town gentry (‘educated, in many case liberals’), tradespeople and labouring classes.

  The three friends from Bengal discovered that they had all passed the exam, though Surendranath would later be disqualified on account of questions over his date of birth. ‘I cannot describe the transport I felt on that eventful day,’ Dutt wrote. Their aim had not been simply to emulate the British, but to open a door for more Indians to join the civil service, breaking the monopoly that the English had maintained over the administration of the country. In 1868, ideas of Independence were far off, but Dutt could still write: ‘A path, we ventured to hope, had been opened for our young countrymen.’ They set off on a celebratory jaunt around the British Isles, travelling to Scotland and other places. But London had cast its spell on Dutt, and he wrote:

  I must say I was very glad to come back to old London, unromantic as it is, with its busy shops and markets, its huge and unshapely omnibuses, clattering over stony streets, and its thousand haunts of business or pleasure.

  Some eighteen years later, in 1886, he went back with his wife and four children to settle briefly in England. Marriage had changed him, and this part of his travels is cozily domestic, filled with notes on the costliness of laundry, the easy availability of good food, and the difficulty of finding domestic help.

  ‘Both the Hindu matron and the Mem Saheb would, I fancy, have more patience with the state of things in India after they have tried house-keeping in London for some time,’ Dutt wrote after a week of interviewing potential housekeeping staff. The household sorted, he plunged with his usual enthusiasm into London life. He enjoyed a performance of The Mikado, and dropped in at the Wimbledon camp of exercise, where soldiers and volunteers contested for prizes. ‘What interested me most was the Lawn Tennis match between the celebrated players Renshaw and Lawford.’ He visited Parliament and heard Gladstone speak, but his attention was caught by ‘little Churchill, twirling his moustache as he eyed his opponents as if in disdain’.

  When the demand for home rule in Ireland swept London, it made Dutt cautiously optimistic. Over two decades, India had changed; it was possible to think of autonomy, at least. ‘And is it a bold prophecy to make that the time is not far distant, that some of our young men may live to see it, when it will be considered unwise to govern any country or any people without consulting the people’s wishes, without some kind of representative institutions?’ he wrote with some hope.

  The family travelled further; he met his old professors, some of whom had mentored him in his years at the Temple Inn, and then they visited other towns across England at the invitation of the Colonial and Indian reception committee.

  It was the year of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, and they were received, he writes, ‘as the sons of old England, visiting the old country from the ends of the earth’, feted, wined, dined, received at galas and balls galore.

  But Dutt was no longer a wide-eyed student on his first visit abroad, and his years in India had given him a strong sense of how much was at stake for England. The point of them was ‘to display to Europe and to the world the strength which she derives from her connection with various nations to the ends of the world, and to draw closer the bonds of sympathy and fellow-feeling which bind these colonies to her’. He wrote, drily but without rancour, that England desired that these visitors should go back to their countries ‘full of sympathy and affection for her’. He listened with interest to the impractical idea of a federation of colonies, and concluded with the hope that the day was not far when India too ‘would have a voice and a hand in the management of her own affairs’.

  And before leaving Bristol, he visited one of his favourite spots—not a church or an English memorial, but the tomb of the reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Soon after that, the Dutt family boarded their ship, and went home; they would visit Norway on their next trip, they had caught the habit of travel from Romesh Chunder.

  Behramji Malabari, Traveller to the Occident

  Dutt’s travels end in 1871; Behramji Malabari’s The Indian Eye on English Life, or The Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer, was published in 1895 at the Apollo Printing Works in Bombay.

  It would take an intrepid novelist to invent the life of Behramji Malabari. My own imagination quails at the thought of creating a great Hindu reformer who was born a Parsi in Baroda, educated at an Irish mission school in Surat after the death of his father, where he was adopted by a childless Gujarati spice-trader.

  Behramji took his name, Malabari, from the Malabar spices in his adopted father’s shop, though his love for writing and for reform was entirely his own. He began his career as a Gujarati poet, switching with dismaying results to English.

  His first collection, The Indian Muse in English Garb, is grimly awful, as this 1876 ode to The Empress of India, demonstrates:

  See! how lordly Nizam glares!

  Holkar, Scindia and Benares, Cashmire, Jepur and their heirs

  Evincing all their loyalty!

  See the gallant Gaicowar, Princes of old Katyawar,

  And each dominant Durbar

  Increasing thy hilarity!

  But two years previously, he had put together a superior collection, the Niti Vinod written in Gujarati. The poems here foreshadowed his interests far better than his English verses: odes bewailing the curse of infant marriage, the ‘prayer of a Hindu widow’ marked the areas where he would argue for reform.

  Max Mueller wrote a gentle letter when he received a copy of the younger man’s English poems: ‘Whether we write English verse or English prose, let us never forget that the best service we can render is to express our truest Indian or German thoughts in English . . .’ In subsequent decades, Malabari would translate Mueller’s lectures on Hinduism, attempting to justify his own argument that some of the Indian guardians of religion had misinterpreted the Vedas and the Puranas.

  It is not Malabari’s poems that should be exhumed from their well-earned grave, but his prose. When he wrote Gujarat and the Gujaratis, some seven years after his volume of verse, he joined Dutt and others—they were part of the first generation of Indians who wrote about their travels in the West in the spirit of enquiry, seeing the flaws as well as the marvels of the Occident.

  Malabar had trained as a journalist at the Times of India, and by the time he took over as editor of The Spectator, his paper was part of the new, thriving, often robustly combative school of Indian journalism. From the Hindoo Patriot and The Pioneer to the Indian Statesman and the Indian Mirror, ‘native’ Indian journalists had begun to report on their own country.

  Gujarat and the Guj
aratis reminds me of the very contemporary explorations of their own cities, and of the ‘other’ India, undertaken by writers such as Aman Sethi, Sonia Faleiro and Amitava Kumar. The gap of a century shows most in terms of craft: Behramji left out the fact that he had walked across large stretches of Gujarat, for instance.

  He ruffled several feathers: ‘Something ails it now,’ he wrote of his ‘poor, primitive, peace-loving’ Surat. Of Broach he writes: ‘The town itself is henpecked by that termagant of a river, the Narbada; the husbands are henpecked by their better halves.’

  Malabari published his influential Notes on Infant Marriage in 1884. His zeal for reform was successful, winning him the friendship of Florence Nightingale, among others. Writing the foreword to Malabari’s biography, she remarks: ‘The mission which he led against infant-marriage has stirred up a strong feeling of hostility in some quarters. But . . . the evils he has attacked will be acknowledged to be those which most endanger the physical and moral well-being of the Indian race.’

  A few years later, he published The Indian Eye on English Life. Malabari, who began by trying to imitate the English, and then by reporting like a tourist on his own country, would close his literary career with this absolutely confident travelogue. He turned as close and as carefully scrutinizing an eye on Britian as any traveller from the West had done on India: this was the Exotic Occident. England’s cities were crowded, he reported, their food barbaric; everybody ate too much, walked too fast, and yet, he admired their energy and their political engagement.

  The Cockneys on buses and the London bobbies were rendered for comic effect, just as travellers to India had written with patronizing charm about the antics of palkiwallahs and khidmatgars. ‘The people seem to be as changeable and restless as the weather,’ Malabari writes, and elsewhere, of the English habit of eating in shops, on the streets and in the open: ‘Bismillah! How these Firanghis do eat!’ He found points of resemblance: ‘How like our Diwan-i-Khas and Diwan-i-Am of old are these Houses of Parliament!’ and of resentment: ‘Talking of “Babu English”, I should like to know how many Englishmen speak Bengali half so well as Bengalis speak English.’

  After his return, Malabari was interviewed by a Bombay newspaper. ‘How much I wish my countrymen travelled more freely, and that they studied history, modern and ancient, with a tithe of the zeal they devote to barren rhetoric or still more barren speculation.’ Over a century later, much has changed in India, but versions of Malabari’s complaints—and his optimistic belief in change—survive, side by side.

  (From research and columns written between 2004 and 2013.)

  Rokeya Begum’s Legacy

  Around 1904, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein wrote a stirring essay in Bengali:

  Dear female readers, have you ever thought about the condition of your misfortune? What are we in this civilised world of the twentieth century? Slaves! I hear slavery as a trade has disappeared from this world, but has our servitude ended? No.

  ‘Woman’s Downfall’ was just one of the essays collected in String of Pearls, but it was fairly representative of the persuasive bluntness that Rokeya Begum employed through her busy writing life. She put bilinguals to shame: her articles came out in Urdu, Bengali and English, and the periodicals she wrote for were equally eclectic—Nabaprabha, Mahila, Nabanur, Sabujpatra, Bangeya, Muslim Sahitya Patrika, the legendary Indian Ladies’ Magazine and The Mussalman.

  I had known of her only as an educationist—she was famous for setting up one of the first schools in Bhagalpur and then in Kolkata for Muslim girls. She was born in 1880 in Bangladesh, in what was then part of undivided Bengal and the British Indian empire. At home, she was taught Urdu and Arabic as a matter of course; women were not supposed to learn languages that might take them too far out of their households, but her brother Ibrahim and her older sister Karimunnissa secretly taught her Bengali and English.

  I had read this detail, and thought of the woman who had written the first autobiography in Bengali, Rassundari Debi, whose Amar Jiban was published in 1876, just four years before Rokeya Begum was born. Rassundari Debi had written eloquently of her struggles to teach herself how to read, secretly, furtively, hoping that no one in the family would find out, because in that time and community, it was forbidden for women to learn letters. And yet, she had written of a hunger that would not be appeased, of the snatched attempts to write the letters of the Bengali alphabet from memory in between the endless rounds of kitchen and household tasks.

  Visiting Dhaka’s Liberation War Museum, before we went upstairs to witness the records that had been kept of the bloodbath and devastation of 1971, I had stopped, startled, before a photograph of Rokeya Begum and her husband Syed Sakhawat Hossain. She had been married at sixteen, and had moved to Bhagalpur, where Syed was deputy magistrate. In her writings, she had often acknowledged his encouragement, with a gratitude so genuine that you could feel it across the intervening decades; in the photograph, they stand beside one another with the ease peculiar to married couples who are also good friends, their smiles unforced and natural. There was a letter in her firm handwriting, and a small, handbound booklet in red cloth that contained one of the treasures of Indian writing in England—Sultana’s Dream.

  Rokeya Hossein had a distinctive voice, and quite a presence: in 1926, she presided over the Bengal Women’s Education Conference, for instance. The academic Mrinalini Sinha records that she had come out in support of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, writing in the periodical Masik Mohammadi: ‘I too have been speaking of these evils for the last twenty years, but no one heard my faint voice, today they have all sat up at the roar of Miss Mayo’s voice!’

  It made her unpopular with her readers, but Rokeya Begum was not the kind of writer who softened her words. In ‘The Dawn’, another piece of early journalism, she had sounded a war-trumpet:

  Wake up, mothers, sisters, daughters; rise, leave your bed and march forward. There, listen, the Muezzin is calling for prayer. Can’t you hear that call, that command from God? . . . Whilst women of the rest of the world have awoken and declared war against all kinds of social evils, we, the women of Bengal, are still sleeping on the damp floors of our own homes, where we are being held captives, and dying in thousands as victims of consumption.

  And a year later, she had refined her message: ‘Only catch them (men) and put them in the zenana.’ In 1905, that was the advice Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein offered in her vision of a feminist utopia called ‘Ladyland’ in Sultana’s Dream, now considered a minor classic. If Shoshee and Keshab Chunder Dutt had set off Indian writing in English on the path of speculative fiction, it was Rokeya Begum who would return most strongly to that genre.

  Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein was actually ahead of her time when she wrote Sultana’s Dream. The women of her benign utopia don’t view men as the enemy, but see them with affection as time-wasting creatures who must be shut up because they can’t control their own appetites and urges. Once the men are behind the purdah, women can get on with running things the way they should be. Back in 1905, Rokeya dreamed of a world where women had learned to harness the power of science, had pressed solar energy and rainwater harvesting into service. Her vision contrasted women’s ‘sentimental’ view of science with the masculine ‘military’ view of science, to fascinating effect.

  ‘Ladyland’ was very unlike the female-populated utopia created by another pioneering writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose Herland I found frightening when I read it as a teenager, and did not change my mind when I read it in my forties. It was not a feminist vision of a perfect, manless world so much as a slightly rabid vision of a perfect, Aryan-populated world where the purity of the race was protected by an unbroken line of births through parthenogenesis. In Gilman’s book, three male explorers eventually break into Herland, with troubling consequences.

  But Rokeya Begum’s two fantasies, Sultana’s Dream and Padmaraag, have both aged well, standing as precursors to more modern explorations of feminist utopias and dystopias by Indian-orig
in writers.

  When Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape came out in 2008, I found myself hoping that readers wouldn’t read this intriguing work of dystopian science fiction in isolation. (The sequel, The Island of Lost Girls, was published in 2015.)

  A brief plot summary: Escape is set in a world devoid of women, dubbed the ‘Vermin Tribe’ by the generals who run the land. There is, however, a single woman left—a young girl called Meiji, who has been raised in isolation by her three uncles, and as she emerges into adulthood, she must escape in order to survive. It’s a complex tale, where, as with much of twenty-first-century science fiction, the development and growth of the characters is just as important as the futuristic setting.

  To read Escape in a vacuum, however, would be to do both the book and yourself a disservice. It should be book-ended by a utopia and a dystopia—both written by Asian women. Ladyland’s utopia is a gentle precursor, filled with touches of whimsy—the work day in Ladyland is only two hours long, for instance, because the men used to waste the remaining hours in smoking hookahs. Rokeya Begum continued her exploration of utopia and its challenges in a second novella, Padmaraag.

  It was almost nine decades after Sultana’s Dream—and just nineteen years before Padmanabhan’s Escape—that the feminist scholar and imaginative writer Suniti Namjoshi published Mothers of Mayadip, in 1989. This fable was set in a crueller world than Ladyland, and Namjoshi set down a flatly didactic novel: what if a feminist utopia depended on killing off all men? How utopian would it remain, if it rested on a foundation of fear and deliberate cruelty? What would happen if any one of the women decided to save even a single baby boy? Namjoshi’s world was the exact opposite of the world Padmanabhan evokes in Escape, but they share a common basis: in each, one gender’s sense of identity is based on its fear of the other.