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Voices from the Raj

Last Updated 12 September 2015, 18:38 IST

In the Court of the Ranee of Jhansi                                                
And Other
Travels in India
John Lang
Speaking Tiger
2015, pp 201, Rs 250

“She was a woman of about the middle size… very intelligent. The eyes … particularly fine, and the nose very delicately shaped… not very fair... a remarkably fine figure. What spoilt her was her voice which was something between a whine and a croak.”

This description of Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi comes from the prolific pen of an unusual writer — Australian lawyer-journalist-novelist-diarist-Indophile John Lang (1816-1864) — spotlighted in the Indian media as recently as November 2014, when our Indian PM presented to his Australian counterpart, a photo collage of Lang’s India connections.

Known primarily to Indian historians as the man who unsuccessfully defended the Rani against the East India Company’s unfair annexation of Jhansi, Lang is now being familiarised to the Indian reader; and thus, this publication — a sparkling gossipy diary (first published in 1859) of his wanderings through pre and post-Mutiny British India.

Lang was brash, outspoken, typically Australian, averse to colonialism, an irritant to the British Raj. After a youth spent in Australia and England, he came to India in 1842 where he remained for the most part till his demise at Mussoorie. In between, he ran a tabloid-style newspaper, successfully defended contractor Jotee Persaud’s suit against a cheating Company — and gleefully reported in his journals the missteps taken by a colonial bully power. He travelled, accepted the hospitality of Indians and Britishers alike — and wrote about it all. Of late, Lang has been resurrected beyond Australian consciousness.

This collection of articles may not be high on literary quality, but it is eminently readable, bringing as it does to us in the 21st century, voices from mid-19th century British India. So after recounting his meeting with Rani Laxmibai (as preliminary to his taking up her case), Lang moves on to tell us about Black and Blue, a young man, born to a reprobate Englishman turned native. It’s a touching tale about a mixed-race youth ending up as the unwilling recipient of a peerage in England and getting lost in its innards, while the widowed mother in India awaited his return, in vain. Another unfortunate, a Mohammedan Mother in Simla, pines for a son removed from her. Liaisons in a colonised country resulted in issues and heartbreaks. Lang is an empathetic observer of such situations.

Lang soon gets into his raconteur mode, delighting the reader with his observations on known and unknown Indians and Britishers. Lang informs that East India Company officials were not really favourably inclined towards visiting attorneys, merchants and sundry non-Britishers; they were considered interlopers and adventurers. Lang decided to be a wandering observer, making his living through law and journalism, meeting and recording his observations. However, he was smart enough to arm himself with good working knowledge of Hindustani and Persian.

In the course of his work, Lang became acquainted with the barbaric practice of Thuggee (ritualised highway killing and robbery), particularly prevalent in the Monghyr district of present day Bihar. He had curious conversations with freed thugs-turned-informers, and understood that whole families lived these amoral lives, simply because it was part of their tradition.

Lang spent months with varied hosts, French planters and small rajahs; he learned to shoot tigers, became quite sun-browned, moved on through the Upper Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh). As a guest of the deposed Peshwa, Nana Sahib (who wished that Lang would represent his case to the British authorities in England), Lang found himself casting a critical and mocking eye on the unhappy and cynical ‘Nena Sahib’. The complaining Nana impressed neither Lang nor the Britishers. The generally India-empathetic and anti-colonial Lang sounds surprisingly condescending as he talks about this deposed Maharajah’s home: “There is something peculiarly quaint about the arrangement of European furniture in the house of a native.”

However, Lang is more generous to the sepoys in whose company he spent a few days, as the guest of a voluble British lieutenant who made Lang understand that sepoys were practical rather than rigid when it came to caste matters. He also paints attractive word pictures as he describes the sepoys dealing with daytime heat, pairing their red coats with loose and airy dhotis, bathing in the open, washing and drying their clothes, socialising easily together despite the mixed Hindu-Muslim nature of the group.

The book abounds in interesting revelations (Lord William Bentinck was for pulling the Taj Mahal down and reusing the marble); cantonment town Agra bristled with tensions between military and civilian groups. There is a picaresque portrait of an English-speaking Bengali Babu, the penitent fraudster Nobinkissen with some practical views on religious co-existence; and of course there is an abundance of terms that evoke the Raj — Umballah (Ambala) shasters (shastras), sahib logue, sowars (horse riders).

It’s an amusing read that also prompts the reader into further exploration of British Indian history.


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(Published 12 September 2015, 15:35 IST)

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