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The Literature of British India  Annotated

The Literature of British India

J. K. Buda

Introduction

At the height of its glory, the British Empire encompassed nearly a quarter of the earth's land mass and a quarter of its population. Of all its possessions, none was more precious than India, the 'jewel in the crown' of Victoria's Empire. Other possessions may have been larger or more profitable, but with none of them was there the same deep relationship as that which existed between Britain and India, a relationship whose essence was so perfectly captured by James Morris:

India was different in kind from the rest of the Empire — British for so long that it had become part of the national consciousness, so immense that it really formed, with Britain itself, the second focus of a dual power. If much of the Empire was a blank in British minds, India meant something to everybody, from the Queen herself with her Hindu menservants to the humblest family whose ne'er-do-well brother, long before, had sailed away to lose himself in the barracks of Cawnpore. India was the brightest gem, the Raj, part of the order of things: to a people of the drizzly north, the possession of such a country was like some marvel in the house, a caged phoenix perhaps, or the portrait of some fabulously endowed if distant relative. India appealed to the British love of pageantry and fairy-tale, and to most people the destinies of the two countries seemed not merely intertwined, but indissoluble. [1]

This unique relationship found expression in a large body of English literature, so large as to constitute a genre in itself.

BBC - Radio 4 - Plain Tales from the Commonwealth - Episode 3/4 My Friend the President  Annotated

In the 1950s and 60s, many British people got caught up in the liberation struggle that was taking place in the colonies, and became close to the charismatic leaders of the independence movements. After independence, some were rewarded with political positions in the new governments. Aidan talks to white men and women who held high office under black African presidents - and in some cases became disillusioned as the lofty ideals became tainted with corruption and violence.

Aidan Hartley's Articles | Spectator Magazine

The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley  Annotated

We should have never come!' So said Aidan Hartley's father in his final days, rising from a bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before. His words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back over 150 years through four generations of one British family. From great-great-grandfather William Temple, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his role in defending British settlements in nineteenth-century New Zealand, to his father, a colonial officer in Africa in the 1920s and a builder of dams in Arabia in the 1940s, the Hartleys were intrepid men who travelled to exotic lands to conquer, to build, and finally to bear witness. In The Zanzibar Chest, Hartley weaves together his family's history, his childhood in Africa and the dark world of the continent's horrendous wars, which he witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s.

After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again-in Ethiopia, in Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, terror and genocide prevailed. In Somalia, three of Hartley's close friends are torn to pieces by an angry mob. Then, after walking overland from Uganda with the rebel army, he saw the terrible atrocities in Rwanda, arriving at the sites and interviewing survivors just days after the massacres. Finally, burnt out from a decade of horror, he retreated to his family's house in Kenya, where he discovered the Zanzibar chest his father left him. Intricately hand-carved and smelling of camphor, the chest contained the diaries of his father's best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who died under mysterious circumstances more than fifty years earlier. Tucking the papers under his arm, Hartley embarked on a journey to southern Arabia in an effort not only to unlock the secrets of Davey's life, but of his own. He travelled to the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia where his father served as a British officer. He began to piece together the disparate elements of Davey's story, a man who fell in love with an Arabian princess and converted to Islam, but died tragically.

At once a modern and a historic love story, The Zanzibar Chest is also an epic narrative charting the fates of men and women who interfered with, embraced and were ultimately transformed by twentieth-century Africa.