he book has a racy cover, with palaces in the foreground, a handsome hero brandishing a pistol and a beautiful, bejewelled girl behind him. Not to mention a tiger. All the ingredients of a classic Bollywood potboiler; only, it’s not.
It’s a novel written in the 1860s, by a Frenchman called Alfred Assollant, about India, which has been translated into English for the first time. Once Upon a Time in India:The Marvellous Adventures of Captain Corcoran is a wacky, madcap tale of intrigue and romance set during the days of the First War of Independence in 1857. It was a wild hit of its times and translated into six languages, including Russian and Polish, but was so relentlessly rude about the British that it was never translated into English.
Sam Miller, who decided to rectify this, has an amusing tale of how he stumbled upon it when working on a book about foreigners in India. He asked his Greek stepfather-in-law (who married an Indian) where he had formed his earliest impressions of India from, to which the gentleman said ‘Corcoran’. So Miller traced the book and read it for the first time some six years ago. He was perfecting his French then, so he decided to translate it to test his fluency. But now it’s been published here and will soon be released for the ‘enemy’ to read in the U.K.
Miller says his own first impressions of India were formed from Tintin comics. And if he is talking about Cigars of the Pharaoh , then we may imagine that Miller would have been madly disappointed to land here and not find nutty fakirs , snake charmers and a city called Gaipajama.
All of these though, and much more, are present in Corcoran’s book, which is so much a product of its times that it would be a bit obvious to cavil at its rampant Orientalism. In fact, it’s rather a relief that Miller has bucked the overweening political correctness of our times and refrained from ‘cleaning up’ the copy. When I asked him about this, he said he thought it was a translator’s responsibility to represent the original as accurately as possible.
And the original, in this case, is a very funny story, possibly even funnier to read in 2016. In fact, it might have lent itself admirably to a Tintin comic with its wry, understated and straight-faced narration, where the sublime and the ridiculous merge happily in one large and gloriously messy plot.
Assollant hated the English; so in the best spirit of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, Indians don’t come off too badly. Although they are impossibly cowardly and disloyal and have to always be rescued by the brave Corcoran, “the faithful followers of Brahma” are overall better than the perfidious English.
Meanwhile, Corcoran derives a lot of his panache from his pet tigress and constant companion, the marvellous Louison, who has to frequently rescue him from tricky situations involving a Maratha king, a beautiful princess, a traitorous lackey and assorted arrogant Englishmen. Corcoran’s long and complex instructions to Louison are hilariously delivered and fulfilled, and, even if frequently distracted by hunger, the tigress quite easily steals the thunder in this book.
Assollant never did visit India, but he studied it closely and although he muddles up place names, people names, geography and fauna, his understanding of the 1857 Revolt is shrewd and he makes clear Corcoran’s sympathies with the Indians over the red-coated barbarians who “have come to take their treasure and put their women and children into slavery”.
Towards the end, Corcoran proclaims reforms in the Maratha kingdom whose capital is Bhagavpur, and these include precepts of democracy and equality that are way ahead of their times and you see that Assollant was also very much a modernist of his age.
At the time he was writing, the Second Republic would have been set up in France, which would formally adopt the motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité; but Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte would soon proclaim himself emperor. Assollant was seen as a Left-winger, who fiercely hated the monarchy and stood for election several times, although he never won.
All men above 20 can elect deputies or stand for election, announces Corcoran, which displeases Sugriva, his Chanakya-like assistant’s caste correctness, but Corcoran is firm that all men are born free and equal.
In its own funny little way, this book is as rebellious as Louison. No wonder the British, already struggling with the ideas of self-rule then beginning to bud in India and already busy churning the pot with a million divide-and-rule stratagems, chose not to translate it at all.
“It’s very different from anything the British would have written in the 18th century,” points out Miller. They were ruling India then and a Kipling novel would look in detail, for instance, at Indian administration or the minutiae of officialdom. This book, on the other hand, is unabashedly romantic and unreal, with kings and palace intrigues and a hero single-handedly winning battles and the hand of the princess — very much along the lines of a Hindi movie.
On another level, it is also an extremely self-aware satire. Assollant’s takedown of French academics in the first chapter is superb, and there is one riotous deadpan passage (among many) where Prince Holkar insists on setting out on a rhinoceros hunt knowing full well the British are on their way to Bhagavpur and might kidnap his daughter Sita, who of course promptly gets kidnapped.
Apparently, Miller tells us, among the unlikely people who loved this book were Sartre and Gramsci. Gramsci, when he was imprisoned by Mussolini, is said to have fantasised about the brave and wonderful Captain Corcoran. I am not surprised. This light-hearted book, which never takes itself seriously, can delightfully kill a couple of hours — whether in a prison cell or on a plane trip.
The book is so relentlessly rude about the British that it was never translated into English until now
Published - June 26, 2016 12:00 am IST
