The Imperishable Empire: A Study of British Fiction on India

Ketu H. Katrak
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 1990, pp. 283-285 (Review)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v036/36.2.katrak.html

Access Provided by Virtual University of Pakistan at 06/17/11 7:50AM GMT

nrfr
Rashna B. Singh. The Imperishable Empire: A Study of British Fiction on India. Washington: Three Continents, 1988. 287 pp. $28.00 cloth; pb. $14.00.

7"Ae Imperishable Empire is a thoroughly researched and scholarly work. Singh's analysis covers fiction by "Anglo-Indians in its original sense," that is, "the English who colonized India"a category separate from contemporary Anglo-Indian (or Indo-Anglian) writers, so named because they write in English. The book discusses five of the "minor" authors (William Delafield Arnold, Sir Henry Cunningham, Philip Meadows Taylor, Maud Diver, Edward Thompson) and all the "major" Anglo-Indian writers (Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, George Orwell) in the period before independence, because these writers represent "major types of AngloIndian fiction," and together they encompass the entire period of British Raj. The aim, however, is not to undertake detailed analysis of any particular writer
but rather to examine "the interfusion of forces in the formation of this fiction

and its influence on its reading public." Singh analyzes several novels by "apparently minor novelists," although,
as she remarks, in terms of "appeal and influence" the distinction between major
and minor novelists would have to be inverted. One structural flaw of the entire

study is present incipiently in the very categorization of works as major and minor.
The book is divided into nine chapters, with headings like "The Imaginative Ap-

peal of India," "The Role and Significance of India," "Perception and Depiction of Reality"compartmentalizing concepts that in fact necessarily overlap. This leads to repetition, taking away, at times, from the overall argument. Given
such categorization, the rationale for including certain texts in one chapter rather
than another is not clear.

Among the major writers that Singh covers, she follows a useful method

literary productions of E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and Paul Scott are read
in conjunction with memoirs, journals, letters, and critical reviews, hence revealing several contradictions between their alleged aims and literary representations.

Singh also demystifies the "greatness" of these writers by placing them as part
of a dialectic between writer and reader and, further, by locating them within an arena of social responsibility in creating and sustaining certain images of India

for their largely, in this case, British readers. The impact on the British reading public (both in India and in Britain) of literary images powerfully presented in such cultural productions is an especially fascinating aspect of Singh's project. Singh's historicist approach analyzes British writers in relation to such larger
political configurations as race, class, and Empire. She raises several conceptual

issues: orientalist representations and their impact on readers' and writers' imaginations and interpretations; configurations of Empire and the sharing of "a common consciousness" by writers and readers, mutually reinforcing several stereotypes. This validates the equivocation of historical material through the use of "coded terms" that describe Indian characters in dangerously generahzable
terms.

RECENT BOOKSBRITISH AND IRISH

283

Singh suggests that women writers, some of whom after retirement and return

to Britain could not quite forget India, seemed particularly susceptible to such generalizations. The titles of some of their novels7"Ae Romance of a Nautch Girl, A Mixed Marriage, Love by an Indian Rivertell the tale. For their audiences, stories of love and adventure reveling in "mystery and exoticism," remarks Singh, "remained a far more appealing aspect of the country than its history or politics." "A story about India is not necessarily a story of India." Even some of the better
known women writers such as Maud Diver describe India as "an uncomfortable

reality." The romances are more about English life in India than about India itself. Diver depicts characters who were "watchdogs and builders of the Empire," sometimes continuing a family tradition of service and civilization, fulfilling the White Man's Burden.

Singh also discovers in Diver the image of India as genderedfeminine, submissive, embodying inexplicable and mysterious charms. "England always as husband of India," writes Diver. At other times, the country is described as "a
passion," as "seducer," as "goddess." Such mystification ensured that India appealed "to the heart rather than to the mind." Singh adds that this is true

even in Forster's A Passage to India: "How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried but mey remain in exile." When Adela remarks,
"I want to see the real India," such desire is confined to India as exotic land rather than to knowing its people, customs, and religions, which Adela, perhaps

subconsciously, holds in contempt. It might be more or less a commonplace now to remark that the British "invented" an image of India that was full of myths. Singh extends this analysis to state that the British did not evolve this image "out of [their] experience in India but out of the exigencies of a historical and political situation." Further,
the fictionalization of this "invention" is what concerns Singh in her analysis of the novels. She also explores historical reasons for such positionsshe presents

nonliterary sources such as Lord Bentinck's words (Governor General of Madras, 1803-1807), namely that the British knew very little of Hindu customs or Indian languages. Such positions include Mill's type of arrogance that could not conceive the need to see India or to understand her people firsthand but that could

write volumes about it. At times, Singh's analysis of such sources is more useful in determining the gaps between appearance and reality than in her analysis of the literary material. Fiction is, after all, a representation of reality; hence Singh's unmediated discussion of distortions of "reality" becomes problematic. This is not to say that arrogance and racism in the fiction cannot be criticized without literary and theoretical mediation. As a whole, Singh's compelling analysis and careful scholarship (including extensive bibliographies of texts, pamphlets, and reviews) make this a useful
work to students and scholars in the field. It is also a welcome addition to the

ongoing challenge of countering stereotypes of the mystic and inscrutable East

trapped in abject poverty and exotic timelessness. Cultural productions in the West

continue to sustain and validate such stereotypesBritish renditions of the Raj in such films and television shows as The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions
"have contributed to a revival of interest in the entire era of British India," remarks

Singh, "an interest that, alas, does not reach below its surfaces." A scholarly
284 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

work such as The Imperishable Empire admirably reaches "below the surfaces" and
reveals certain fictional and fictionalized truths embedded in that historical and

cultural past.
KETU H. KATRAK

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

rrfr
T. J. Binyon. "Murder Will Out": The Detective in Fiction. New York: Oxford UP,

1989. 174 pp. $19.95. Charles Viney. Sherlock Holmes in London: A Photographic Record of Conan Doyle's Stories. Boston: Houghton, 1989. 168 pp. $24.95. Walter Shepherd. On tL Scent with Sherlock Holmes. Bloomington: Gaslight Publications, 1987. 85 pp. $14.95.

In "Murder Will Out," which the author describes as "an attempt at a history ... of a type of fictional character," T. J. Binyon classifies and discusses "the fictional detective in all his guises," especially series characters. He divides detectives into three main categories: the "professional amateur"private detectives like Holmes and Poirot; the "amateur amateur"dilettantes like Dupin and Lord Peter Wimsey; and the "professional"policemen like Gideon and Inspector French. He then breaks each classification down into subcategories: for example, under the "professional amateur" he places lawyers, doctors, journalists; under
the "amateur amateur," academics, priests, husbands, and wives. No classifica-

tion is rigid, and certain detectives may at times cross from one category to another. Binyon also includes short sections on comic detectives, fictional villains, burglars, and Robin Hood types. Moving chronologically according to the first published
appearance of each fictional detective, Binyon discusses mainly the story in which

a particular detective debuted, but he occasionally also notes subsequent titles. And he records authors' names, pseudonyms, and birth and death dates. Binyon ignores many psychic detectives, such as Algernon Blackwood's John Silence and Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, when he states that William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki "is unique among fictional detectives, to my knowledge, in
that he concerns himself solely with occult phenomena." He never mentions the

fact that E. W. Hornung (Conan Doyle's brother-in-law) meant his gentleman

thief Raffles to parody Sherlock Holmes. He gives the title of the annual in which

the first Holmes story was published, as "Beeton's Xmas Annual." Xmas also appears in the index. He probably abbreviated Christmas in his notes and forgot to translate it back, but this is careless work. The greatest difficulty with this book, however, arises necessarily from the fact that Binyon treats over 400 fictional detectives in less than half as many pages. Aldiough he occasionally devotes a paragraph or two to an individual, he often moves so quickly from one detective to another mat he creates only a run-through catalogue of names, tides, aumors,
and dates.

RECENT BOOKSBRITISH AND IRISH

285