Cromartie vs. the God Shiva

by Rumer Godden

‘But I feel richer not poorer. I had her.’

  ‘And will have, for ever.’

  ‘To the end of my life,’ said Michael. ‘Artemis.’

  Mr Bhatacharya was still trying to persuade Auntie Sanni. ‘After all, you and your grandfather sheltered the Nataraja and let him be worshipped for close on a hundred years.’

  ‘That is why I can take nothing for him.’ Then Auntie Sanni stopped. ‘There is one thing I should like you to do.’

  ‘Of course. No matter what.’

  ‘That first offer you made to the man Cromartie. Michael told me about it. Wasn’t it fifty thousand pounds?’

  ‘Yes, and at first he thought it generous.’

  ‘Please make it to him again – pounds not dollars.’ Auntie Sanni smiled – Walter had told her the whole story of his meeting with Mr Cromartie. ‘Fifty thousand pounds – not dollars. After all, he did bring the Nataraja home.’

  AFTERWORD

  This book is a twin; more than that, a Siamese twin, in that places, people, even phrases are taken from another of my books.

  A few years ago I wrote a novel, Coromandel Sea Change, set in an old-fashioned hotel, Patna Hall, on South India’s Coromandel coast. The sub-continent of India is shaped like a vast pear-drop and this is on its eastern side.

  When the novel was half-way through, my attention was caught by a newspaper article in The Times of such interest to me that I immediately became aware that I had two plots for the same novel, something most uncommon and inconvenient because they were both so strong that I could not blend them. I had to choose and so went back to my original one which, I am glad to say, met with a measure of success.

  In 1994 I had to spend some time in India to make the BBC’s documentary programme Bookmark which, in the course of its journeyings, took me back to that eastern coast again. Perhaps it was this that made my second plot erupt into life.

  As I have said, the book is based on truth – as can be seen by the newspaper cutting that first caught my eye.

  MUSEUMS FEAR FOR THEIR TREASURES

  Bronze idol must be returned to Hindu temple

  By Andrew Billen

  A High Court decision to return to India a twelfth century bronze idol worth more than £250,000 may have put under threat other art treasures in the possession of British collectors and museums.

  Mr Justice Kennedy ruled that the Nataraja, a statue of the Hindu god Siva, belonged to a ruined temple in Tamil Nadu and said that similar ownership claims could be made.

  ‘Many will fail but some will succeed, particularly if the criminal character of their taking could be proved,’ he said. The judgement ends a legal battle that began in August 1982 when Scotland Yard seized the Nataraja as it was being examined in the British Museum.

  The Nataraja had lain buried in the temple grounds for centuries when it was dug up in 1976 by a labourer while he was building a cowshed. He sold it for 200 rupees (£12).

  By 1982, it had come into the ownership of a London antiques dealer who sold it for £50,000 to the Bumper Development Corporation, a Canadian company controlled by Mr Robert Bordon, an oil magnate, art collector and philanthropist.

  It had been handed to a conservator at the British Museum for advice on its transportation to Canada when police intervened.

  The judge ruled that while Mr Bordon’s behaviour could not be faulted, the labourer from India, Mr S. Ramamoorthi, was guilty of criminal misappropriation under local law.

  The case was complicated by some recondite issues, including whether a consecrated deity such as the Nataraja can be regarded as property. The Indians who wanted its return claimed its divine properties did not prevent its remaining a lump of stone.

  The judge also had to decide which of the co-plaintiffs was the rightful owner. Rejecting the claims of the Union of India, the local state, a public official of the Temple and Siva Lingham, a cylindrical piece of stone representing a Hindu god, he decided the ruined temple itself was a legal entity capable of suing.

  He said: ‘I am satisfied that the pious intention of the twelfth century notable who gave the land and built the Pathur temple, remains in being and is personified by the temple itself, a juristic entity.’

  Yesterday, a spokesman for the Indian High Commission applauded the ruling. He said: ‘The judgement is very welcome encouragement for us. As a result we may be able to open the way for others of our things to come back to us.’

  Both the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has a collection of 33,000 Indian paintings, sculptures and textiles, and the British Museum, which owns hundreds of religious objects from India and Asia, have followed the case keenly.

  The two museums said yesterday that they did not believe that any of their exhibits were in immediate danger, but that they would need to examine the judgement in detail.

  The Times,

  20 February 1988

  Through an experienced researcher, I managed to collect several other articles and then, by tremendous luck, was lent the documentary book of the trial, which opens with an account of a writ issued by a Canadian antique dealer against the State of Tamil Nadu in India for the return of an eleventh-century Nataraja, which he had brought to London to sell and which had been impounded by the British police.

  The Union of India & Others v Bumper Development Corporation Judgement

  INTRODUCTION

  0.1 The issue which I have tried arises in an action brought by Bumper Corporation Ltd (‘Bumper’) against the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and two of his officers to recover an antique Indian bronze sculpture. The Police interpleaded between Bumper and the State of Tamil Nadu, who had asserted a claim to the bronze. On 10 February, 1983, by consent, Master Waldman ordered that the following question and issue should be tried:

  ‘Whether the State of Tamil Nadu can prove that it has a title to the Bronze which is superior to the title of the Bumper Development Corporation to the Bronze, and that meantime all further proceedings in this action relating to such other questions or issues be stayed until the trial of the said preliminary issues or until further order.’

  This account of the trial goes on for 145 closely typed pages and is unutterably tedious, confusing and complicated; so many claimants followed Bumper that the Government of India launched a counterclaim in which the god Shiva became the plaintiff.

  I decided finally to keep to the Judge’s opening – its first two paragraphs – and let my story be almost completely imaginary.

  APPENDIX

  SHIVA NATARAJA

  Shiva Nataraja – S. India AD 1100. Shiva manifests five aspects of eternal energy: creation, preservation, destruction, concealment, favour. He is seen here as Supreme God and Lord of the Dance. In his upper right hand he holds a drum representing the primordial sound of creation. The upper left hand holds a flame of destruction: indicating the overcoming of opposites in the nature of this great god echoed by wearing both female and male ear-rings. He makes the gesture ‘have no fear’ and points to his raised left foot, symbolising release. He treads upon the prostrate dwarf of ignorance, ‘Apasmara’, and the diminutive figure of the Goddess Ganga appears in his flowing hair. The God maintains an exquisite poise and equanimity at the centre of the whirling cycle of cosmic activity.

  Plaque from the glass case holding the great Nataraja in the Department of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum.

  By permission of the Keeper, Robert Knox.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I should like to give my most sincere thanks to those experts who have so generously helped me with the plot and writing of this book, extraordinarily difficult and intricate as it was.

  To Mr and Mrs Talbot, Rina and Rupert of New Delhi, and their colleague Mr Reddy of southern India, for their constant advice on location and custom.

  To Robert Knox, Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, London, who, by happy coincidence, was one of the experts called in by the Government of India to identify the dancing Shiva.
He not only taught me a great deal and gave valuable advice but actually lent me his book containing an account of the statue and trial and let me keep it until my writing was done.

  To Andrew Henley, barrister, for his long and patient help on matters of law, and his wife Kris who acted as a ‘go-between’. Also Fraser Barber, film sound recordist, for many practical suggestions. To my brilliant editor at Macmillan Publishers, Hazel Orme, and friend and typist Sheila Anderson, whose patience never seems to wear out.

  And to my long-suffering family and staff. Once someone asked my elder daughter Jane if she too wanted to be a writer when she grew up. ‘No thank you,’ was the candid answer. ‘One in the family is enough.’

  R.G.

  1997

  A Biography of Rumer Godden

  Rumer Godden was the prolific author of over sixty works of fiction and nonfiction for both adults and children, including international bestsellers Black Narcissus and In This House of Brede.

  Margaret Rumer Godden, also known as Peggy, was born on December 10, 1907, in Sussex, England. Six months after her birth, her family moved to India, where her father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company. Godden spent most of her childhood in a large house along the river in Narayanganj, a trading town in Bengal with her sisters Rose, Nancy, and Winsome, also known as Jon. She fell in love with India, and went on to use it as a colorful backdrop for many of her successful novels, including The Peacock Spring and The River. In 1966, she and her sister Jon, cowrote a memoir about their childhood, Two Under the Indian Sun.

  In 1920, at the age of thirteen, her parents sent her and Jon to boarding school in England. The girls struggled to leave their home in India behind, changing schools five times in two years. Godden eventually parted ways with Jon and attended school in Eastbourne, England, where she studied literature and dance. Due to a chronic spinal injury, she could not pursue a career as a professional ballerina and instead trained in London as a dance teacher. When she was eighteen, she opened a dance studio in Calcutta, the Peggie Godden School of Dance, and there she taught both Indian and Eurasian students, a practice that was considered controversial at the time. At twenty-seven, she married Laurence Sinclair Foster, with whom she had two daughters, Jane and Paula. Upon the birth of her children, she briefly returned to Britain, where she published Black Narcissus, a commercial and critical success.

  At the start of World War II, Godden took her daughters to Kashmir and parted from her husband, who left her with many debts. She rented a small house by the Dal Lake with no electricity or running water, wrote endlessly, and cultivated an herb farm. At this home, one of her servant’s tried to poison her and her children by putting ground glass, opium, and marijuana in their food, inspiring a scene in her book Kingfishers Catch Fire. At forty, she returned to England again, and truly emerged on the British and American literary scenes. She remarried and lived in England for the rest of her life with the exception of a few visits to India. Godden felt at home in both Britain and India, and wrote, “When I am in one country I am homesick for the other.”

  Godden studied many religions of the world and she struck up a friendship with a scholarly Benedictine nun, Dame Felicitas Corrigan. Her studies inspired one of her best-known novels, In This House of Brede, a story about an Englishwoman who leaves her life in London behind to join an order of Benedictine nuns. Godden lived near Stanbrook Abbey for three years, researching the book. She officially converted to Catholicism in the early 1960s.

  Many of her books were made into classic films, including Black Narcissus, The River, The Greengage Summer, and The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. She collaborated with filmmaker Jean Renoir on The River, and they traveled to Calcutta while working on the movie. In addition to her novels written for adult audiences, she also wrote several children’s books—the most famous being The Doll’s House—and nonfiction books, including a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. In 1972, she won the Whitbread Award for children’s literature, and in 1993 she was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. At the age of eighty-six, she visited India—for the final time—with her daughter to shoot a BBC documentary.

  She published her last book, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, in 1997, just a year before she passed away.

  The Godden family house at Narayanganj in Bengal in the early 1900s.

  Godden in Bengal in 1915 with her parents, Norah and Arthur; her sisters, Rose, Nancy, and Jon; and their dogs, Cherub and Chinky.

  Godden at her desk in Dove House in Dal Lake, Kashmir, 1943.

  Godden in her garden at Dove House in the 1940s.

  Godden on the set of Black Narcissus at Pinewood Studios with Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Deborah Kerr.

  Godden in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.

  Godden with her daughter Jane in the woods in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.

  Godden at a book launch in New York with Jean Primrose in the 1960s.

  Godden with her grandchildren Mark and Elizabeth in Rye, 1962.

  Godden’s home, Lamb House, in Rye.

  Godden and her cat, Simkin, in Scotland in the 1990s.

  Godden in India in 1995 while filming BBC’s Bookmark.

  Godden while filming Bookmark in 1995.

  (All photographs courtesy of the Rumer Godden Literary Trust.)

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by the Rumer Godden Literary Trust

  Lines from “Childhood” from Poems 1906–1926 by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leishman.

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4206-2

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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