An Aussie against the goras

John Lang

Author: Amit Ranjan

Publisher: Niyogi Books

Pages: 470

Price: Rs 800

It was by sheer chance that a few years ago I bought three thin paperback books by John Lang. I had no idea who he was but the books once more confirmed what everyone knows: Australians don’t like the English.

India has had the pleasure of having hosted two such Australians. One was Sir Osborne Smith, the first governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). He was shown the door by the British just two years after starting the RBI because he would often be obstreperously uncooperative with them.

This book, however, is about the other Aussie, John Lang, who lived a 100 years earlier in India from about 1846 to 1864, when he died. He was just 46 then.

But during his lifetime, he wrote 20 novels, 50 short stories and 100 poems. He also edited a paper for 20 years and expressed his opinion of England and Englishmen in very precise terms. Being a lawyer he also defended Laxmibai, the intrepid ruler of Jhansi who the English had dispossessed.

The author of this book Amit Ranjan has done a splendid job of reviving Lang whom the British dismissed as a “hospital bed writer”. Mr Ranjan didn’t however start with Lang. His quest was different, the search for an Australian woman called Alice Richman who had committed suicide on the Poona University campus. Her grave is still there. Talking of graves, it was Ruskin Bond, the novel and short story writer who lives in Mussoorie, who discovered Lang’s grave. It was hidden by the shrubbery.

It took Mr Ranjan, who is an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), eight years to write this book. The research, as professor Saugata Bhattacharya of the Centre for English Studies at JNU writes in the Foreword, “leads us to encounter some major figures of India’s first war of independence in 1857.”

He continues: “…involving the motley of Lang’s universe — brigands, forgers, charlatans, detectives, phrenologists, occultists and the like — paint a most vibrant picture of the complex networks of the mid-19th century colonial India.”

He couldn’t have put it better.

The book is full of little forgotten and overlooked nuggets that complete the picture of those times. It is history of a different kind.

Lang, who had also been a journalist and editor of a paper that hugely annoyed the Brits, had a friend called W C Hurry. They shared many interests but, says Mr Ranjan, perhaps the most interesting of these was phrenology or as one definition puts it, “the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities.”

Hurry used to import skulls from Australia which in those days used to export them. Hurry even arranged to import the skull of a cannibal.

Lang, too, was fascinated by the shape of skulls. Once, says Mr Ranjan, he went to see a hanging and when the body had been taken down Lang took a close look and wrote “A finer head…I have not seen”. It seems the culprit was a Brahmin.

Lang was appointed by the Rani to defend her because, says Mr Ranjan, she had heard of him. The case was over in just seven days. Lang lost.

Of her, he wrote that “her eyes were particularly fine and her nose delicately shaped”. He also found her “rather stout but not too stout”. Lang also wrote that her voice “was something between whine and a croak”.

He also seems to have flirted with her a bit. Or so it seems from his description of the meeting. Mr Ranjan then rounds this off with a nice titbit that in the film Manikarnika the Rani is shown playing cricket. Ah, well, Bollywood. The Rani gave him as gifts an elephant, a camel, two greyhounds, silks and shawls — and an Arab! 

Lang also defended, successfully this time, a man called “Jotee Persaud” who was a contractor, actor, theatre director and a bone collector. His story is too complicated to be told here. You will have to read it in the book.

As to Lang’s newspaper, the Mofussilite, it thrived on British scandals, a pioneer in tabloid journalism. It also had strong military connections but says Mr Ranjan, it was “a love-hate relationship”.

His sympathies lay with the Indians, just as had Osborne Smith’s. 

So he leaked the stories that he could not print about the gora establishment to the “native” newspapers “so that acts of injustice towards Indians came to light”.

Mr Ranjan says that in 2014 the prime minister gifted his Australian counterpart “with John Lang documents to show how far back the relations between the two countries went. I was not acknowledged”. Well. It happens to all of us.

Finally, this book is far too costly for a wider readership and it’s in hard cover. A cheaper paperback is needed.