Subtle subversions

Every now and then everyone comes across books about strikingly different themes. This happened to me last month when I borrowed a book called The Audacious Raconteur by an academic called Leela Prasad. The back flap merely says she is a professor of ethics and religious studies at Duke University in the US.

She has produced a very thoughtful collection of four papers on a subject that few have bothered to think about, namely, while a conqueror can subjugate your minds, as the British did with us, some people just refused to give in, or up.

Thus, I remember an article in the Economic and Political Weekly during the Emergency in the mid-1970s by the late KN Raj, who was one of India’s top flight economists in which he talked of the Eighteenth Brumaire, the coup that brought Louis Bonaparte to power in France. That article became something of a cult read at the time.

Ms Prasad tells a fascinating story about what the colonial intellectuals called “old native storytellers” but who she prefers to describe as “audacious raconteurs.” These guys, she tells us, “challenged the bulwarks of colonialism”. It’s that sentence in her Introduction that hooked me.

The research into original sources is frighteningly detailed. She has consulted manuscripts, letters and other such original documents in a large number of archives in the UK, US and India. The result is gripping authenticity.

She has chosen four such people, all from the South. They are Anna Liberata de Souza who was an ayah; P V Ramaswami Raju, a lawyer; M N Venkataswami, a librarian in Hyderabad; and S M Natesa Sastri, an epigraphist (someone who studies inscriptions).

Subtle barbs

These people were contemptuous of British ways and social mores. But they didn’t show their contempt in a crude way. Subtlety was their main weapon. The audience understood what they were trying to convey. That’s all that mattered.

Anna Liberata de Souza was a very poor woman who worked as an ayah for 18 months during 1865-67 in the home of the daughter of a governor of Bombay. She was called Mary Frere.

Anna’s stories, told by her to Frere in broken English, came to be published by John Murray, a hugely respected publishing house in the 19th century. The details are fascinating.

The book went into four editions. It was marketed as a children’s book.

Ms Prasad has sort of reinterpreted them and this is where she moves into some slippery ground. She says Anna’s stories were a critique of the Raj’s economic policies. She has devoted an entire section to this interpretation. But whether you accept this interpretation or not, it makes for fascinating reading.

Next comes PV Ramaswami Raju whose writings Ms Prasad accessed through his great-grandson in Chennai. Of Raju’s writings she has this to say: “…wrote in what we may call a ‘double register’, a style he perfected.” This, she says, enabled him to “speak in two voices, two languages, sometimes across two cultures…” This created separate meanings.

He, thus, simultaneously praised and criticised the Empire’s policies and practices. Christianity, commerce and conquest is how he described the British. Ms Prasad says he was trying to make Asia the centre of the world and thereby “provincialise” Europe. In today’s context, that’s an interesting thought.

His first work, written when he was 24, was a satirical play called Lord Likely. Its English characters were named Sir Dreadful Dash, Major Mincemeat, Sir Sternface, Lady Homely and so on. In this, if you ask me, he was anticipating Gilbert and Sullivan’s hilarious operas.

M N Venkataswami was cut from a different cloth. He studied and wrote about both the so-called scientific method of the British and about folklore and folk tales. He was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society as well as the Folklore Society of London. 

Ms Prasad’s account of him is a page-turner. He made the colonial anthropologists look pretty silly.

And last but not least there is S M Natesa Sastri, the epigraphist. He deciphered ancient inscriptions on structures and he also collected folklore. He also wrote novels. He also advocated the cause of Sanskrit. He was a nationalist as well.

Sadly, I don’t have the space here to write in detail about these people who ploughed their own furrows. For that you must read the book despite its high price.

There’s a lot of interpretation and arcane postmodern academic terminology. In some places you have to suspend belief. But at no point do you feel like turning on the TV.