Plain Tales
Violet Powell
Stories from the Raj: From Kipling to In- dependence Selected and introduced by Saros Cowasjee, with a Preface by Paul Theroux (The Bodley Head £7.50) f the 15 stories collected in this book three are by writers — Kipling, Orwell and Leonard Woolf — whose names are
known wherever English is read. To begin, as it were at the top, Kipling is represented by 'The Head of the District' and `Lispeth', the first a drama of the disaster that follows an ill-conceived attempt to impose a Bengali as Deputy Commissioner on the Wild men of the frontier, the second a story of a hill girl who, adopted by missionaries, is coldbloodedly betrayed by them when she fails in love with an Englishman.
Kipling, incidentally, changed his at-
titude towards Lispeth. He was only 23 Years old when he wrote the story, and he had no hesitation in condemning his Amazonian heroine to reverting to a life of hard blows and drunkenness among her °wit people. Nearly 20 years later he resur- rected Lispeth as the Woman of Shamlegh inKrm. By then the author had, to quote his own lines, 'learnt to suffer and pity'. As a writer Kipling had also learnt that such a dominant character as Lispeth would have no difficulty in ruling her village of husbandshusbands, and retaining enough beauty to make her attempted seduction of Kim a Proposition that needed delicate handling.
Orwell's 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an
Elephant' perhaps barely qualify as stories, except for the intensity with which they are ,,W.ritteh, the fictional being difficult to his Introduction, from the autobiographical . In is Introduction, Saros Cowasjee considers that both are a plea for life, while, in his Preface, Paul Theroux dwells more on :well's revulsion from the Burmese
whom it was his duty to maintain law and order.
Swine' Leonard Woolf 's story `Pearls and t wine' begins sourly among a group of men an round the fire in what is described as guin `uncomfortably comfortable hotel', but his company has been overcome, he settles '-'own to listen to a story of the agonies of a pearl fishery off the coast of Southern In- dia. As Saros Cowasjee says, Conrad's ea," of Darkness comes constantly to mind n' the forceful description of the t 'ench of the rotting oysters, the crowded Inip of the fishers and the horrible death m DTs of the rundown Englishman. the 1,0 turn to the other story-tellers, three in their day were famous, Flora Annie Steel, Maud Diver and Katherine kayo, Of these, Flora Annie Steel was the best known and the greatest seller. Her novel of the Mutiny, On the Face of the Waters, should be reprinted, if only to demonstrate how much some present-day novels on the subject owe to Mrs Steel. In this anthology she is represented by three stories, two of which had their roots in her work for the education of Indian women and for their emancipation from purdah. Both stories are heavy with a sardonic melancholy, but they are crisply told, as is the third, `The Fakeer's Drum'. A young Indian Civilian is rewarded for allowing a Fakeer to murder sleep with the noise of his drum by a ghostly warning which saves the Civilian from burial under the beams of a collapsing house.
Katherine Mayo, American by birth, made her name by and came under attack for her book Mother India, which dealt un- compromisingly with the miseries of many Indian marriages. Her story, 'The Widow', is unremittingly painful, partly because, as Paul Theroux points out, the final blows in the widow's oppressed existence come form adherents of Mahatma Ghandi, the saint of non-violence. Equally comfortless is Maud Diver's `The Gods of the East'. Maud Diver's greatest success had been a novel with the stirring title of Captain Desmond V. C. 'The Gods of the East' is a harrowing story based on dharna, the custom, illegal under British rule, by which a debt could be exacted by the decapitation of wife or mother by the Brahman who was the debt's official collector. Having committed matricide, the Brahman philosophically goes to prison for life, but the wealthy deb- tor, struck by terror and remorse, starves himself to death.
Considering the stories from less well known writers, it is easy to agree with Saros Cowasjee that Alice Perrin is one who deserves to be better remembered. Like Mrs Steel she spent a quarter of a century in India, and her two stories, `The Centipede' and `The Rise of Ram Din', are told with control of material that makes their gruesomeness seem inevitable. In the first, an ayah, by following a superstitious treat- ment, brings about the death of her charge to whom she is devoted. Dismissed, she everlastingly grumbles that it was the mother's ineptitude that was responsible for the tragedy. In the second, a lowly house-boy, employed by a master given to drunken fits of mania, allows the upper ser- vant to starve to death in a storehouse and so gains a blackmailing grip on his master, leading to retirement and the acquisition of four wives.
Some of Mice Perrin's economy in writing would have improved `A Mother in India' by Sara Jeanette Duncan. India of the Indians is very much in the background, though young parents being obliged to send a baby home, to become a virtual stranger, supplies the plot. When the family are final ly reunited the clever mother, who has lived a hard life as the wife of a serving soldier, finds that her daughter has grown up to be a prim bore. She is, however, a handsome girl and admired by a young man of in-
tellectual interests. It is some time before he perceives the healthy blankness of her mind and, supported by the girl's mother, escapes without proposing. Unfortunately he has bequeathed the girl a standard of in- tellectuality which prevents her from marry- ing anyone else. Faced with a spinster daughter, the mother feels that by being generous to her young male friend she has left herself in a prison for life.
Khushwant Singh, the only Indian author in the collection, inflicts less physical damage to his characters than many of the older British writers. The humiliation that Sir Mohan Lal finally suffers is not actually mortal. He is an anglicised Hindu who has come to believe in his own transformation. Travelling in a first-class carriage while his dull, fat middle-aged wife is relegated to the zenana coach, Sir Mohan is manhandled onto the platform by a couple of hopelessly drunken English soldiers, too fuddled to recognise that they are being addressed in educated English by what is to them a nig- ger. As the train pulls out of the station the final insult comes from his despised wife, who inadvertently spits a stream of betel juice onto her raging husband. This story is the last in a collection which, it is to be hoped, will revive interest in a number of authors who have been unfairly neglected in the past and have not yet been caught up in the new wave of Raj literature.
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