MISIÓN

HINDU HEROISM IN INDIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENT:

THE TRIALS OF NARAYAN LAL

In a now oft-cited example of British perceptions of Bengali effeminacy, in the early 1840s Thomas Macaulay characterized Bengali men as follows:

The race by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft climate and accustomed to peaceful avocations, bore the same relation to other Asiatics which the Asiatics generally bear to the bold and energetic children of Europe. . . Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly. His favourite pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bodily exercise; and, though voluble in dispute and singularly pertinacious in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal conflict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. We doubt whether there be a hundred genuine Bengalees in the whole army of the East India Company. There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.1

The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak to helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt.2

In this stinging, racist appraisal, Macaulay characterizes the “Bengalee” man as a fundamentally pathetic figure, one who was extraordinarily weak in both character and physicality. Though “voluble in dispute,” the Bengali remained a coward, incapable of backing up his bombast with action. Prone to deceit and physically feeble, Bengalis deserved their domination by the hardier British. Lord William Bentinck, Governor-General of India from 1828-1835, maintained a similar view; for him Bengalis were “a mere flock of sheep good only for their valuable fleeces, and having no political or military character whatever.”3

1 _{T. Babington Macaulay, “Sir John Malcolm’s Life of Lord Clive,” 325.} 2 _{T. Babington Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 465.}

Macaulay’s scornful pronouncements were ironic given that they came less than ten years after his famous 1835 Minute on Indian Education, which had successfully advocated the colonial state’s sponsorship of English-medium education for the native population. Integral to Britain’s mission in India, Macaulay had argued, was the creation of a servile “class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” who would serve as “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.”4 _{But now the Western-educated effete Bengali “babu” envisioned in his Minute was} the target of blistering ridicule.5 _{The cataclysmic Rebellion of 1857 further entrenched} British assessments of Bengali effeteness as their passivity stood in marked contrast to the vigor of the newly designated “martial races.”6

Efforts of the Bengali community to combat the stereotype over the last third of the nineteenth century were futile.7 _{Nearly fifty years after Macaulay’s indictment, British official} John Strachey confirmed his predecessor’s views. Though Strachey acknowledged certain changes since Macaulay’s time, such as the Bengali elite’s newfound interest in gymnastics and the “development of a taste for athletic sports among the educated classes,” he

nevertheless affirmed the long-held stereotype of their innate effeminacy: “This, however, is true of a small section only of the population, and the general character of the people

4 _{Macaulay, “Minute recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of the} governor-general’s council, dated 2 February 1835,” 171.

5 _{van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 95.}

6 _{Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 105-106.}

7 _{See Rosselli’s essay, “The Self-Image of Effeteness” (1980), for the various ways in which Bengalis attempted} to counter the stereotype of effeminacy by embracing a campaign of physical culture, which included organized exercise, gymnastics, sports such as lathi-play, and the like. See also Sumit Sarkar’s seminal monograph The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal regarding how physical culture had become something of a “craze” among the educated young men of Calcutta by the turn of the century (398).

throughout the greater part of the province remains as Lord Macaulay represented it.”8 _As scholars such as John Rosselli and Mrinalini Sinha have documented, for the Bengalis who were on the receiving end of such derision, by the turn of the twentieth century, concern over masculinity had become nothing short of a cultural crisis.9

It was within this cultural milieu that Sarath Kumar Ghosh (1883-1920) emerged as a Macaulian interpreter of a different sort. Rather than mediating between colonial

administrators and the local population within India, Ghosh relocated to England, where he engaged metropolitan distortions of India as an exotic, otherworldly land full of magic and mystery. Feeding a fascination with India and the Orient, Ghosh published a few short stories in British periodicals before issuing Indian Nights’ Entertainment: The Trials of Narayan Lal, a six-part serialization that ran in Pearson’s Magazine in 1902 and reached audiences in both Britain and America.10 _{Set in the mythic landscape of an alluring, romantic India, it tells} the suspenseful story of a lowly court juggler named Narayan Lal who, in order to marry a beautiful Hindu princess with whom he has fallen in love, must prove his claim that he belongs to the kshatriya caste [that of the military and ruling elite] by undergoing a series of physically demanding deadly challenges. The princess’s father, a ruthless tyrant, arranges these Herculean “trials” to prevent Lal from marrying his daughter. Aided by both a

mysterious pundit and the princess herself, Narayan Lal ultimately triumphs, thereby proving

8 _{Having served in India from 1842-1880, Strachey reflected on his tenure in a series of lectures given at the} University of Cambridge in 1884. See Strachey, India: Its Administration & Progress, 412.

9 _{Rosselli, “The Self-Image of Effeteness,” 135. See also Sinha, Colonial Masculinity (1995).}

10 _{The title of the serialization as it appeared in Pearson’s Magazine was Indian Nights’ Entertainment, a direct} reference to Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, the title of the first English translation of French Orientalist Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes [Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Tales], published in twelve volumes between 1704-1717. A search in the digitized British Newspaper Archive indicates that Ghosh authored at least two short stories before this serialization. One was entitled “A Battle Royal with a Tiger” and was published in April 1898 in The Wide World Magazine; the other, “The Serpent-Charmer,” was published in The Strand Magazine in November 1900. See “Something New in Magazines” in the March 22, 1898 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette (3) and “Literary Notes” in the November 8, 1900 edition of the Royal Cornwall Gazette respectively (6).

his kshatriya identity and worthiness to marry her. Bolstering his merit even further is the deus ex machina revelation at the end of the final test that he is in fact a prince himself. The strange “pundit-philosopher,” Rama Krishna, who has been helping Narayan survive the trials, makes this melodramatic pronouncement and further reveals that he has been serving as Narayan’s guardian and ally ever since the prince had been abandoned by his mother as an infant. Ghosh later fleshed out the Pearson’s serialization and published the episodes in 1904 as 1001 Indian Nights: The Trials of Narayan Lal; beginning in 1905 it was also distributed under the title The Verdict of the Gods.

At face value the 1902 serialization of Indian Nights’ Entertainment and its subsequent narrative expansions may appear to be nothing more than the cheap attempt of a self- promoting Indian author to capitalize upon the contemporary British fascination with the Arabian Nights and the Oriental exotic. That literary scholarship on all versions of Ghosh’s text is practically nonexistent likely stems from this view as well as an understandable desire among critics to examine Ghosh’s more well-known and thoughtful work, The Prince of Destiny (1909).11 _{While it may be tempting to dismiss Indian Nights’ Entertainment as a} mediocre “Indianized” imitation of the Arabian Nights, this chapter suggests that doing so would be shortsighted. Though Ghosh exploited the British appetite for the Oriental exotic by appropriating both formal and thematic elements from popular circulating translations of the Arabian Nights—most likely Richard Burton’s 1885 edition—he did so for strategic purposes. Ghosh’s shrewd appropriation of the tried-and-true platform of the Arabian Nights

11 _{The sparse critical references on Indian Nights’ Entertainment/1001 Indian Nights/The Verdict of the Gods that do} exist characterize it pithily, giving it not more than a few paragraphs at most. In 1934, Bhupal Singh noted that the text “recounts in the manner of an oriental story-teller the super-normal deeds of Narayan-lal” (306), while in 1987 K.S. Ramamurti asserted that the work was “cast in the fashion of The Arabian Nights” (139). In 1978 Harish Raizada made the astute observation that the spectators of Narayan’s trials “form a pool of common wisdom,” but on the whole his assessment remains wanting (35-36). See Singh, A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction; Ramamurti, Rise of the Indian Novel in English; Raizada, The Lotus and the Rose: Indian Fiction in English.

enabled him to offer a seductive portrayal of Hindu heroism and triumphant masculinity for both metropolitan audiences and his own Bengali community.

Indian Nights’ Entertainment is, I suggest, what Vinay Dharwadker theorizes as a “countertext” in Indian English literature, deserving of critical attention on two counts. First, in the British milieu in which Ghosh was circulating, the story challenged prevalent negative opinions regarding India, its people, and Hinduism. Hailed in Pearson’s as “the only Hindu writer of English fiction,” Ghosh was conspicuously promoted as one who could describe “Indian life” with authority, a characterization that undoubtedly facilitated his attempts to mitigate the hostile and degrading depictions of India and Indians by British writers such as Flora Annie Steel and Rudyard Kipling, presently obsessed with portraying the macabre violence of the 1857 Rebellion and the bumbling Bengali “babu” figure respectively.12 _But even more importantly, Ghosh’s rousing story about Narayan Lal’s exploits may be regarded as a response to the cultural crisis over masculinity afflicting Hindu men and Ghosh’s native Bengali community in particular. By providing a stirring account of a Hindu kshatriya who repeatedly overcomes almost certain death, Ghosh provided a hero for Hindus at a time they needed it most, a model of masculinity who embodied numerous desirable traits thought to be missing from the community at large. Valorous, strong, and intelligent, Narayan Lal also proves to be a paragon of loyalty, dignity, and, piety, a supreme champion in all senses. Far more than an unremarkable “Indian” imitation of the Arabian Nights, then, Ghosh’s text is a contemporary Indian epic, one that pointedly draws upon the pervasive myth of India as Bharat and presents exemplars of Hindu masculinity and femininity for both Indian and British readers to admire. Through such a lens, Ghosh appears less as a cavalier self-

12 _{Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) was a popular novel about the rebellion; see Benita} Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 104-105. See also Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 160-214.

promoter and more so like an influential Scheherazade, who, like the mythically enchanting raconteur, attempts to instruct, challenge, and win the sympathies of his many audiences.

The Pursuit of Heroes

Derogatory characterizations of Hindu masculinity were not new for the British in India. As discussed in Chapter One, the belief that India’s originary Hindu inhabitants had either degenerated from a once-glorious state or had always been in a pitiable condition had long informed Britons’ racist, positivist assessments about the community. In 1793 William Jones asserted that the natives of India were a “placid and submissive people” whose “religion, manners, and laws…preclude even the idea of political freedom.”13 _{In a similar} vein, Jones’s contemporary, the historian Robert Orme, cited factors such as Hindu

pacifism, a largely vegetarian diet, and an inhospitable climate as responsible for “render[ing] the Indian the most enervated inhabitant of the globe,” one whose “manners are gentle” and whose “happiness consists in the solaces of a domestic life…”14 _{As such assessments}

indicate, whether attributed to external conditions such as diet, climate, lack of physical activity, or simply innate bodily constitution, the idea that India’s “Hindu” natives—and Bengalis in particular—were highly effete and effeminate had long been axiomatic among the British. Indian Muslims were necessarily outside of this narrative given their apparent status as foreigners to the polity; as those who had conquered and ruled India prior to the British, Muslims were a demonstrably hardier and robust community.

13 _{Jones, “The Tenth Anniversary Discourse, delivered 28 February, 1793, By The President on Asiatick} History, Civil and Natural,” 150.

The cataclysmic rebellion of 1857 compelled the British to revise their understanding of the masculinity of particular Hindu groups, but their view of Bengali effeminacy remained fixed. The passivity of Bengalis during the uprising was interpreted less as “loyalty” to the Raj and more so as confirmation of their constitutional weakness in both body and

character.15 _{For British officials like Macaulay, passive Bengalis who had largely acted out of} self-interest—and whose revolt would likely have been unimpressive if it were even

attempted—stood in dramatic contrast to the insurrection of other communities, such as the Marathas in central India. In the aftermath of the Rebellion, docile Bengalis proved an easy foil to Sikhs, Jats, Rajputs, and other groups whom the British strategically categorized as “martial races” and targeted for military service due to the belief that they possessed “innate physical and moral characteristics which made them the best fighters.”16 _{As Thomas Metcalf} observes, “…one might argue [that] the ‘extraordinary effeminacy’ of the Bengali, whom ‘no necessity would induce to fight’, alone gave meaning to the notion of ‘martial races’. They were what the Bengali was not.”17

The emerging conception that India’s genuine identity was the glorious Hindu space Bharat—and the suggestion that its past majesty could be reclaimed—was an important resource in challenging the broader charge of Hindu male effeminacy among upper-caste and upper-class Hindu communities not just in Bengal but across India. While imaginings of

15 _{Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 103-106. Bengal remained quiet during the Rebellion} while regions of north and central India erupted in violence. As discussed in Chapter One, the rationale behind revolting against the British was often complex and very rarely straightforward as individuals could be

persuaded to rebel or remain passive due to bribery or other incentives. For the Western-educated Bengali bhadralok, the decision to remain “loyal” stemmed in large part from their understanding that their prosperity was bound up with British rule and beneficial policies such as the Permanent Settlement.

16 _{Ibid., 105-106. This classification was indeed ironic considering that many of these groups had not revolted} during the Rebellion.

17 _{Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 127. Here Metcalf cites the observations of British general and scholar George} MacMunn (1869-1952), who in 1911 published an influential study of the Indian army, The Armies of India.

Bharat endowed Hindus with a wondrous past, contemporary ideas about the mythical Aryan race offered them heroes to emulate. This theory had its roots in William Jones’s famous pronouncement regarding a common linguistic origin of modern Indian and European languages.18 _{A diffusionist, Jones speculated that the speakers of this ur-language} must have shared a common geographical origin but importantly he made no attempt to cast them in racial terms.19 _{It was only in the mid-nineteenth century through the influence of the} German Indologist Max Müller that the term “Aryan” gained traction as a racial and ethnic category.20 _{Appropriating the word from the Rg-Veda, Müller claimed that “Aryans” were} sophisticated tribes of light-skinned warriors hailing from southern Russia who had

conquered broad swathes of land from northern India to western Europe.21 _{For Müller, the} Aryans were the speakers of Jones’s ur-language, and, as such, the indisputable ancestors of both Europeans and Indians.22 _{As Joan Leopold writes, “Müller used [the Aryan theory of} race] to praise the literature and philosophy of ancient India, to emphasize ‘the common descent and…legitimate relationship between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton’ and the blood tie between the Englishman and Bengali, and to reveal the providential nature of British rule in India.”23

18 _{Ibid., 82.} 19 _Ibid.

20 _{Ibid. See also Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” 40.}

21 _{Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 82. See also van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 142. The Rg-Veda is a Hindu} religious text composed between 1500-1000 B.C. As van der Veer points out, as described in the Rg-Veda, the Aryans were tribes of “horse-mounted fighters who worshipped sky-gods….” (142). The word “Arya” itself denotes nobility in Sanskrit and is found in many Hindu religious texts.

22 _{Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” 40. See also Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 82 and van} der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 142.

Not surprisingly, for many Britons the claim that they were racially identical to their Indian subjects was anathema.24 _{In order to convince his European colleagues of this shared} racial heritage Müller was compelled to emphasize the prodigious achievements of the Aryans as well as the relevance of India to Europe more broadly:

India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or, at the very utmost, a curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe, it has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own history, and in what is the very life of history, the history of the human mind…

And while thus trying to explain to those whose lot will soon be cast in India the true position which that wonderful country holds or ought to hold in universal history, I may perhaps be able at the same time to appeal to the sympathies of other members of this University, by showing them how imperfect our knowledge of universal