Not so long ago, the Black Hole of Calcutta was part of every patriotic British child's imaginative landscape. Meira Chand is a London-born writer of Indian and Swiss descent now living in Singapore, and A Far Horizon is a skillful novel set in Calcutta in the months leading up to the Black Hole incident.
The story always told is that in 1756, on June 20, 146 European residents of Calcutta, who had surrendered to a massive local army seeking to drive them from the country, were shut up for the night in a prison room about 7㎡. When it was opened the following morning, 123 of them were dead.
In this period the European traders in India were there as members of large trading companies. They administered the small areas from which they carried out their trading operations, appointed law-enforcement officers there, and had troops at their disposal. But, although they were operating under charters received from their respective governments, they were legally private companies rather than arms of governments ruling foreign territory.
The Black Hole's significance is that it changed all that. At the battle of Plassey a year later, British and associated forces under Robert Clive recaptured Calcutta. Thereafter, trade and the control of trading centers was no longer deemed sufficient. Now the foreigners really did begin to rule, and eventually with their home governments' active participation. Soon the French and others were edged out, and British Imperial India was born.
Anyone looking for local color will be overwhelmed by this book. Eighteenth-century Calcutta is splendidly evoked. Cholera mingles with the scent of jasmine, adjutant storks circle high above the waters of the Hoogly river, and sweetness and decay mingle everywhere, even in the food.
But someone looking for poetry won't be disappointed either. In addition, Meira Chand possesses a genuine and often powerful tragic vision.
India at the time described was, for the British, formed by pre-Victorian attitudes. European women were largely absent, evangelical puritanism had yet to make its mark, and traders formed relationships of varying durability with Indian women. All this was to end with the arrival of the memsahibs in the century that followed. With them came decorum, family values, and, crucially, a far more extensive and institutionalized racism.
Consequently, by choosing to set her book in this earlier period, Chand has the chance to mix intrigue among the women of all races with the political and commercial rivalries that preoccupy the men. This feminine world involves both current seductions and the results of past liaisons, traffic with sorcerers, and other areas ruled by what the author has a tendency to think of as inscrutable female motivation.
One of leading characters in the novel, for instance, is the governor's wife Emily. The governor himself has been married before, to Emily's sister Jane, now dead. Emily is obsessed by a malleable village girl, Sati, who claims to be able to go into states of possession during which Jane speaks. When this happens, Emily is the spirit's invariable target, and its message is one of hate.
Matters are complicated by the fact that the governor had earlier enjoyed a secret affair with Sati, and so has been sexually involved with all three of the women in the triangle.
Another central character is the chief magistrate. He is now married to Sati's step-mother. When mother and step-daughter visit the governor's wife for yet another traumatic seance you see the rivalry between magistrate and governor being replicated on another, more complex, level among their women.
Meanwhile in the local capital of Murshidabad, the great nawab Alivardi Khan lies dying. He had followed a policy of accommodation with the merchants, but his likely successor Siraj Uddaulah favors no such compromises. He will sweep the foreigners from the land just as he would a troublesome mosquito invading his palace of rubies, diamonds and gold on a sultry monsoon night.
But intrigue at court holds out the possibility that Uddaulah could be overthrown, and so the British understandably maneuver to back the likely challenge to his power in any future conflict.
All this may sound like the most overblown of historical novels -- lust, sorcery and a struggle for power mixed together in a potent brew, and set against a background of gorgeous but decaying splendor. The truth is, however, that this is the work of an impressive talent. Meira Chand may dip her pen in technicolor ink, but she writes with strength and a sharply cutting edge.
What you expect from the best historical novels is a sense of the physical realities of the setting, plus a feeling for the mentality of the era. Chand certainly supplies the former. We learn about problems with insects, what the Europeans drank from their well-stocked cellars, the clothes everyone wore, how people moved about, conditions onboard ship, and the situation in both the European and Indian areas of town.
As for the mentality, this is harder to judge. Prophesy and the occult, for instance, are neither endorsed nor debunked. They simply exist, and what is foretold usually comes true. But this is necessary in any imaginative work. In a novel or a film, a prophesy that doesn't come about would be irrelevant, a piece of inept plotting. Art and life need to be judged by different criteria.
Maybe the Black Hole of Calcutta formed a convenient pretext for Britain to make the escalation from trade to rule, just as two centuries later the Tonkin Incident gave the US a reason to move into Vietnam on a war footing. Certainly, the outcry at the news in 1757 London gave the government a free hand in whatever they chose to do in response.
But Meira Chand holds aloof from any partisan position. To her, you feel, everything is part of the tide of history, a combination of political positioning, interracial misunderstanding, vanity, credulity and chance. The dark waters of the Hoogly river, as one character observes, contain more impenetrable mysteries than even the great ocean itself.
Publication Notes:
A Far Horizon
By Meira Chand
362 pages
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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