4 - India, 1857 & 1871

Summary

On the day following the publication of The Siege of Krishnapur in August 1973, an interview between J. G. Farrell and his friend Malcolm Dean appeared in the Guardian newspaper under the title ‘An Insight Job’. Farrell explained that in his new book he had attempted ‘to write a novel of ideas which could be read at the same time simply as an adventure storyb His choice of setting - India in 1857, the year of the ‘Indian Mutin’ - afforded him a propitious opportunity to dovetail each fictional concern. In Farrell's view nineteenth-century British India ‘was a society with rules and an idealism of its own’. The Siege of Krishnapur attempts to engage comically and critically with the ideas, and idealism, of the time, especially the colonial self- confidence in Western civilization, faith, scientific advancement and, of course, Empire. In addition, there existed a popular tradition of British writing about adventures in India by such figures as Rudyard Kipling and John Masters, and specifically about the Mutiny, upon which Farrell could draw in a way similar to his appropriation of the Big House novel in Troubles.

The Siege of Krishnapur ironically resurrects the voice and concerns of nineteenth-century English fiction in its depiction of the Mutiny. As Peter Morey explains, the novel ‘attempts not only cultural retrieval by using the popular nineteenth-century genre of imperial adventure fiction, but also its subversion through a technique of ironic distancing, pastiche and the mock- heroic’. It is also an exercise in fictional rule-breaking, challenging the conventional ways in which colonial India has been narrated. Farrell's approach is deliberately comic, and the comic vision he creates of the British in India is central to the novel's critical purposes. But as we shall see, at times the novel risks complicity with the very colonialist representations Farrell wishes to ironize and challenge. In The Siege of Krishnapur the ‘novel of ideas’ occasionally sits uneasily alongside the ‘ad- venture stor’ it makes of the events of 1857.

The Indian Mutiny concerned the uprising of the ‘native’ troops, or ‘sepoys’, of the Bengal Army. The sepoys were subject to the authority of often discriminatory British commanding officers who cared little for their religions and cultures.