‘Arthur & George’
Three years ago, Julian Barnes’ novel Arthur & George was shortlisted for the Booker. Initial reviews made it out to be a dry work loosely based on a historical crime involving a part-desi lawyer in the English countryside. I found much the same — the book is written with the same tightness and engineer-like detail as Jhumpa Lahiri’s work. But it’s propelled by a conflagration of injustice which burns deeply despite Barnes’ bone-dry assembly and care.
In the early 1900s, solicitor George Edalji, whose father Shapurji Edalji was a Parsi convert to Christianity and whose mother was British, was railroaded into a prison term for allegedly fondling farm animals and then ripping them through their bellies (hello, Equus). Edalji was a quiet fellow kept under his vicar father’s thumb, sharing a bedroom with his father, later living with his sister and never marrying. But racial prejudice ran wild in rural England; Edalji had long been the target of harassing letters and pranks. When the provocations escalated, the local constabulary ignored far more likely suspects and ginned up a circumstantial case pinning the blame on the quiet, myopic lawyer.
Edalji served three years in prison for crimes he did not commit. After release, the bar would not take him back without a full pardon. In desperation, Edalji wrote celebrities for assistance and lucked upon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was looking for a new project to distract him from his wife’s death from tuberculosis.
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George Edalji |
The most surprising thing about this book is that the novelization apparently sticks closely to the facts. The titular pair lived parallel lives, offset by ~15 years in age and vast differences in social ease. Doyle was a tall, athletic Scotsman, a doctor, successful novelist and pillar of society. Edalji was a quiet, socially awkward technician who wrote a manual to railroad law and felt most comfortable behind his desk at work. Though the pair became friendly, the book plays them off one another, much like the pair in Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan & Eddie.
This very English novel is written in the precise style of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. Yet the harassment of Edalji, despite his desire to be seen only as an Englishman, despite his denial that skin color could be a factor, closely echoes some of the struggles of British Asians today. Barnes imagines him insisting on the correct pronunciation of his surname in a way that eludes the Sanjay Guptas and Kiran Chetrys of our age.
And so this tale riveted me. Based in real life, it comes with no neat ending. It’s not a satisfying read, but a necessary one. I blew through it in one and a half long gasps, staying up the first night far past my bedtime. You might too.
Here’s more about the real-life case.
on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, 10:11 pm in Booker Prize, History, Issues, Literature › 
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Heard there might be a film made of this. I personally loved the book too.
Manish, related is historian David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism, which talks about which kind of Indians (and other colonized nationalities) could integrate within British society. As you can tell from the gently mocking title, it is a refutation of Said’s orientalism. Cannadine finds Said’s theorizing a little too neat.
Linda Colley (Cannadine’s wife), an excellent British historian wrote Captives, another unusual and riveting account of imperial history.
“Barnes imagines him insisting on the correct pronunciation of his surname in a way that eludes the Sanjay Guptas and Kiran Chetrys of our age.”
I’ve never liked this sort of thing. When I used to speak to cousins as a child I would sometimes be made fun of for my pronounciations. It was, and, is, rude. If you grow up in the states, you may well speak Hindi, or whatever, with an American accent. And, if you want to Americanize the pronounciation to YOUR OWN NAME, because it represents some sort of hybrid of your life experiences, or you don’t care, or you are lazy, or it’w what people have always called you and you are not comfortable with it, then, so what?
It’s like those desis who judge you because you are not properly desi enough for them. Feh.
Yes, I know, the above has major mispellings. I was typing very emotionally.
Any Manish is free to call himself mann-ish, and I am free to giggle at it.