Taking an axe to the British Raj

I find alternate histories great fun to read. They often try to correct some injustice, an impulse like John Lennon’s iconic song. Artistically, they achieve a most satisfying asymmetricity: close enough to what actually happened to twin reality, seen through a mind askew.

In the case of popular Bengali humorist Rajshekhar Basu, pen name Parashuram, who passed away in ‘60, his short story of what happened when Bengal colonized Britain is both a hysterical ancestor to Goodness Gracious Me and a dispiriting reminder of the fissures within India’s independence movement. Once again an artist tweaks in fiction those who escaped just desserts in real life. The story leaves me with an ashen taste even as I enjoy the Shakespearean reversals. It is the impotent shake of a thin intellectual fist.

‘The Scripture Read Backward’ was translated into English for Words Without Borders (thanks, blackmamba), a recent anthology with the gimmick that well-known authors would drag out of obscurity their favorite stories in languages other than English. Thank Amit Chaudhuri for this one. In the story, Britain is ruled by the mighty and paternalistic Indian government, and children vie to dress like civilized Bengalis. To this student of the British Raj, this mirror world has the joyful sting of first snowfall. Here’s reverse Macaulay, where Indian-written textbooks exhort the natives to uplift themselves out of their savagery. Here are competing newspapers, the resistance organ which sees the government as naked imperialists and the loyalist rag which believes it can do no wrong.

But Parashuram diagnoses the ills of the independence movement with particular bitterness. He pens Irishmen riven from their British neighbors due to ancient hatreds, unable to make common cause. Here are mirror princes, British royalty content to nosh on opium and sell their loyalty to the highest bidder. Here, most un-PC, is a feminist movement which demands its own liberation at a most inconvenient time. (One has to wonder what Parashuram’s wife had to say about this.) The story, short and pointed, is a time capsule of the issues of the day.

Parashuram did eventually live to see liberation of India from colonial rule; it must have stripped some of the barbedness from his bitter story. Today, of course, much colonizing happens not through the soldier but through the wallet. By purchasing Jaguar and Tetley Tea and surging to become one of the top investors in Britain, India is rewriting Parashuram’s ‘Scripture’ as its own alt-alt reality.

The Words anthology also contains a story set in Madurai, written by an Italian. It’s the typical breathless exoticism of Hindu myths. Other tales of alternate realities: Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, much of Goodness Gracious Me, and my Jhumpa Lahiri homage, Nabokov Ninnington.

Here are the first couple of pages. Enjoy.