The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) A novel of the Indian Mutiiny

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	J.G. Farrell

"Farrell introduces us gradually to a large cast of characters as he paints a vivid portrait of the Victorians' daily routines that are accompanied by heat, boredom, class-consciousness and the pursuit of genteel pastimes intended for cooler climates. Even the siege begins slowly, with disquieting news of massacres in cities far away..."
Alex Wilber, Amazon book reviews.


"the rim of darkness beneath the horizon began to sparkle like a firework and immediately the air about them began to sing and howl with flying metal and chips of masonry ... then in a wave came the sound. Daubs of orange hopped at regular intervals from one end of the darkness to the other. Suddenly, a shrapnel shell landed on the corner of the veranda and all was chaos."--Farrell, "Siege of Krishnapur."

J.G. Farrell's 1973 Booker prize winning novel is about a group of British colonial officials, ordinary civilians and some Indian loyalists holding out against a determined group of "Sepoy" (Indian troops) during the Great Mutiny of 1857. It is one of three book about Imperialism, British-style, Mr. Farrell wrote in his short life. Sadly, the Oxford-educated writer, who appears to have the talents of both a genuine wit, keen psychologist and vivid historical reinactor, died in 1979 at age 44 when a wave struck him during a fishing trip on the rocks near his home in Ireland in 1979.

The main characters in the book find themselves under siege in a provincial town in northern India at the time of the Great Mutiny of the regular indigenous soldiers against the East India Company, a war triggered by the introduction of a type of cartridge for the new Enfield rifles that the Muslim troops believe contains pig fat as a grease, thus making it seem an attack on their culture.
The uprising (or revolution) at first comes to the main character of the book, Hopkins, East indian official, through dispatches and rumor and some small biscuits that suddenly appear mysteriously in a dispatch box in his office. Hopkins is known as "The Collector" in the book and he is a classic 19th Century Positivist who visited the Great Exhibition of London while on leave from his employers in 1851. His faith in science and technology from industrialization is solid, so much so that he brings out statues of Shakespeare and Keats and Socrates and other Western thinkers to decorate his office and remind him of the "superior" culture that justifys the subjugation of Indians of all races and sects.

Then bad things happen. British officers stragger from a local fort into Krishnapur, the survivors of the spreading mutiny. Many are severely wounded and others have fresh tales of cut-throat engagements with their former local-recruits: privates, corporals and sergeants who have opened fire and put the Europeans to the sword. The Sepoys make up most of the active forces in northern India and the British troops are outnumbered and spread too thin to come to any timely relief. British confidence, built up over a century of progress in subjagating northern India, is shattered.

The siege goes on for weeks. All European and Eurasian citizens crowd their way into the Residency ,where a last-ditch effort is made to survive. What was a ground for cricket games and picnics and official festivities showing off a replica of "proper" Victorian society abroad is ripped apart by shell and shot. The stench of the dead, animal and human, surrounds the besieged. The necessity of burial parties and desperate counter-attacks to fend off the enemy and capture some food and cannon shot become the new pastimes of any man not already dead or unable to stand.

The European ladies are trapped in the relative safety of the chapel, making bullets out of anything metal they can find and forbidden by prejudice from taking amore active part in the defense of their lives. The poverty-stricken natives gather outside about the perimeter of the Residency, waiting for the Union Jack to be struck down and the slaughter to commence.

Stripped away of their sense of superiority to nature and the natives by deprivation, near-starvation, and a growing lack of hope in rescue, some go off the beam while others reassess their lives and their faith either in religion or Eurpopean scientific progress; all pretense of class distinctions ebb away as well.

Farrell does an excellent job in the beginning of the novel, both in establishing the main characters and having some fun wagging at the old-style romantics of Victorian romance. There are two men who just arrive in India in the novel's first chapters: a young idealistic chap named Flurey, a romantic fellow with a head filled with Byron and Coleridge, and a brave but rather callow young officer. Both men are after a pretty young lady who they first meet in the luxury and safety of the port city of Calcutta, a bastion of British power and the place where much of the opium trade to China is situated. All three will see their world turn upside down at Krishnapur.

The young "hero" of the book is a visiting English travelling gent and university educated poet named Flurey. This is no dashing hero--more like just a smart fellow with the wrong training in the worst possible place. He has to bone up quickly on the military arts to help the British officers and Sikh loyalists in defending the residency. The book is, according to the introduction, very much in the style of the romantic and pro-colonial "Mutiny Novel" that was popular for many years in Britain, where a young soldier and a lady he fancies find themselves thrown together by the insurrection and the Indian forces outside the walls of whatever town ship are always bloodthirsty savages.

But Farrell takes the obsolete "Mutiny novel" to a very different place, where more emphasis is made on anti-romantic, mordant humor and insecurities among the "middle managers" of empire. There are also and some flat-out hilarious passages (such as two doctors arguing over the right treatment for cholera whenever one recovers enough from the other man's treatment to argue against the cure) and the imaginative day-dreaming of Flurey, who fancies that his new -found military bravado will get him a big story in the London Illustrated News.

If Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling had teamed up to write a novel and to accommodate each others style, "The Siege of Krishnapur" might well have been a similar result. This is an older book, but one that has been reprinted several times--most recently by the New York Review of Books Press. To me, it is worth seeking out.

"The Foggy Dew"--The Wolfe Tones--Song of the Easter Rising, Dublin, 1916.

 

I'm not Irish, but I love this song. It's based on a sad but inevitable chapter in history---the beginning of the modern Irish Free State and later Republic when nationalists under the banner of the United Irish Volunteers and other groups known as "Fenians" to the British  marched on Dublin on the day after Easter, April 24, 1916, to the General Post Office at the center of the city. Other points were attacked as well but the GPO assault was the last to fall. What  these few men were willing to risk here was the catalyst for a nation. It was a nation that would see a continuing war as many of the leaders (16 in all) were executed after surrendering.

 

A terrible urban guerrilla war was launched in 1917 by Michael Collins  and other IRA leaders. It was countered by British forces, including over 8,000 "Black and Tans" (recruited from World War I ex-soldiers who couldn't find work in England) who came in 1919-20 to shore up the Royal Irish Constabulary and created some of the worst attacks on civilians since Oliver Cromwell's invasion in the 1650s.

 

In 1921, the Irish Free State was born out of a negotiated settlement by Collins and other Irish leaders with Lloyd George's government. Conflict over a demand of continued loyalty to the British King sparked a Civil War in Ireland with nationalists--a war that still scars Ireland today.  There was great bloodshed over the  full republic goals of Eamon DeVelera against the Free State advocates.  Michael "Big Fella" Collins was assassinated for signing the Free State treaty.

 By the 1930's DeValera was in power and the old IRA elements he once favored were outlawed. Ireland became an independent republic in the 1950's. But it all started here, and this song to me celebrates the terrible price men and women pay for wanting to govern themselves, a right mostly taken for granted in this world.

The opening clip from this video is from the Ken Loach film "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" from 2007.  I would recommend that film to anyone who wants to see a searing drama about those times.  

 

 

 

Facts about the uprising... from basicirishfacts.com   

"The GPO on Sackville St was occupied at noon on Easter Monday 24 April and the Proclamation of Independence read out from the front of the building by Padraig Pearse.

"The GPO was occupied by a mixture of Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army.

"Edward Daly commanding the 1st Battalion occupied The Four Courts, Mendicity Institute, Jameson’s Distillery, and North King St.

"Thomas McDonagh commanding the 2nd Battalion occupied Jacob’s Factory.

"Eamonn De Valera commanding the 3rd Battalion occupied Boland’s Mills, Landsdowne Road, Westland Row Station, Mount Street Bridge, and Northumberland Road.

"Eamonn Ceannt commanding the 4th Battalion occupied South Dublin Union, Marrowbone Lane, Roe’s Distillery, Ardee St Bakery, and Cork St.

Eamonn Ceannt’s second-in-command was Cathal Brugha.

"Michael Mallin commanding a unit of the Irish Citizen Army occupied St Stephen’s Green, Royal College of Surgeons.

"Michael Mallin’s second-in-command was Countess Markievicz.

"Séan Connolly, commanding a unit of the Irish Citizen Army, occupied City Hall

"The first casualty of the Rising was a 45-year-old unarmed policeman from Co Limerick, Constable James O’Brien.

"He was standing at the entrance to Dublin Castle shortly before noon on Easter Monday when a volunteer cycled up to the gate and shot him dead.

"Lt A.D. Chalmers, 14th Royal Fusiliers was in the GPO conducting business when the rebels entered and he became a prisoner of war.

"On 24 April, after an attack on Beggar's Bush Barracks, 2,500 reinforcements arrived from The Curragh.

"They retook City Hall and Séan Connolly was killed in the attack.

"He was the first rebel casualty.

"On 25 April Brigadier-General WH Lowe assumed command of British forces in Dublin. Reinforcements arrived from Belfast and Templemore and the rebels in St Stephens Green were forced back to the Royal College of Surgeons.

"Martial Law was also declared on 25 April.

"On 26 April HMY Helga began shelling rebel positions. The Mendicity Institute was recaptured.

"On 27 April British Forces regained control of Sackville Street and began shelling the GPO and The Four Courts.

"On 28 April General John Maxwell assumed command of all British Forces. The burning GPO was abandoned by rebel forces. The rebels retreated to Moore Street.

"On 29 April the insurgent leaders in Moore Street decided to negotiate a surrender.

"The emissary sent to make preliminary arrangements was Nurse Elizabeth O'Farrell, a member of Cumann na mBan.

"At 3.30pm Pearse surrendered to Brigadier-General Lowe at the corner of Sackville Street and Great Britain Street (now O'Connell Street and Parnell Street).

"At 3.45 pm the instrument of surrender was signed at British HQ at Parkgate.

"Due to several contradictory orders, volunteers in Cork and Tyrone dispersed on Sunday 23 May.

"There were small scale engagements in Wexford, Galway, and Meath.

"The last incident of the Easter Rising took place on 1 May with the gun battle at Thomas Kent's house in Co. Cork.

318 insurgents and civilians were killed and 2,217 wounded.

116 British soldiers were killed, 368 wounded, and 9 were reported missing.

13 Royal Irish Constabulary were killed and 22 wounded.

3 Dublin Metropolitan Police were killed and 7 wounded.

3,430 men and 79 women were arrested.

170 men and 1 woman were tried by Court Martial.

16 men were executed.

1836 men and 5 women were interned.

1,272 were subsequently released after further investigation.

All remaining internees were released on 18 June, 1917.

The Philipine-American War (1899-1902); America's Last 'Frontier Outpost' And First Asian War

"There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”---Mark Twain (founding member of The Anti-Imperialist League) from a letter in "The New York World", circa 1900.)

Starting in 1898, the United States, under President William McKinley, annexed the islands of Hawaii as a United States territory.  (There had been a coup backed by US business interests there in 1893.) It was the first stirrings of American power beyond the continental frontier that stopped at the West Coast.

 

In February ,1898, after years of hyperbolic anti-Spanish "yellow journalism" in the big city papers of William Randolph Hearst and other publishers of "the yellow press",  war broke out two months after the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, with the loss of 200 sailors. 

Soon ,despite attempts to placate the US government,  Spain was locked in a war with the young nation over the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the little island of Guam in the remote central Pacific and the large archipelago of the Philippines in Southeast Asia.   

The United States intelligentsia, government and business officials paid very little attention to the Philippines in the decades before the war, according to Professor Richard Sibley in his 2007 book, "A War For Frontier and Empire".  Indeed only a few dozen articles about the enormous chain of islands had even been published in American periodicals for the decades prior to the conquest. 

   By the Summer of 1898, the Spanish forces--which faced defeat from Filipino Independence fighters in all but its capital of Manila--were suddenly faced with defeat at sea.  This came fromm American Admiral George Dewey's Pacific Fleet in Manila Bay itself.  Spainish forces surrendered to the Americans after a one-sided sea battle.  The "Battle for Manila" that shortly followed the loss of the Spanish fleet was more of a hand-over between high officials of two governments than an actual fight.  

The point of the battle was to prevent the imposition of forces from The First Philippine Republic, led by President Emilio Aquinaldo, into the city.  The new president was suffering under the impression that the Americans had no interest in an empire in his country--or so he had been led to believe reportedly by US officials in Hong Kong before the firing started.

But now he was frustrated from taking control of the capital city---the main conduit of commerce and information to the outside world.  By early 1899--shortly before the US Senate in Washington was ready to vote to accept the annexation of the islands from Spain---a shooting incident on a bridge on the outskirts of Manila, started by one American soldier, precipitated an exchange of volleys between Alquinaldo's forces and the Yankees.

 

 The second phase of the war, called "The Philippine Insurrection" by some historians, had begun. 

The US Army and Marines drove the often lightly-armed Philippinos back in conventional attacks on the main island of Luzon.  One of the American commanders was General Arthur MacArthur, the father of the more famous "American Caesar" of World War II and Korea, Douglas.          

     A bloody war became bloodier when the local forces broke into guerrilla groups later in 1899 to try and fight back against the Americans.  To counter the "hit-and-run" strategy and the casualties brought on by unconventional warfare, the Americans became more aggressive. Torture techniques such as "the water cure" were introduced to get suspicious men to talk.  This was like the water-boarding methods of today, only you put a man on the ground and force-filled him with water until his stomach was extended.  If he didn't talk, as happened often according to reports, the torture was repeated.   

Word of these techniques (as well as mass shootings in villages by soldiers and Marines ) were leaked out of the war zone by American soldiers and newspapermen from  the USA, Britain, France, et al.  Soldiers themselves risked court-martials by writing about what was taking place in their units to family members back home.   They told of the "water cure" tactics and regular firing squad reprisals against villagers suspected of harboring "rebels". Then there were the camps: 

 

From Wikipedia:          

Filipino villagers were forced into concentration camps called reconcentrados which were surrounded by free-fire zones, or in other words “dead zones.” Furthermore, these camps were overcrowded and filled with disease, causing the death rate to be extremely high. Conditions in these “reconcentrados” are generally acknowledged to have been inhumane. Between January and April 1902, 8,350 prisoners of approximately 298,000 died. Some camps incurred death rates as high as 20 percent."

 

 "One camp was two miles by one mile (3.2 by 1.6 km) in area and 'home' to some 8,000 Filipinos. Men were rounded up for questioning, tortured, and summarily executed"

"In Batangas Province, where General Franklin Bell was responsible for setting up a concentration camp, a correspondent described the operation as “relentless.” General Bell ordered that by December 25, 1901, the entire population of both Batangas Province and Laguna Province had to gather into small areas within the “poblacion” of their respective towns. Barrio families had to bring everything they could carry because anything left behind—including houses, gardens, carts, poultry and animals—was to be burned by the U.S. Army. Anyone found outside the concentration camps was shot. General Bell insisted that he had built these camps to "protect friendly natives from the insurgents, assure them an adequate food supply" while teaching them "proper sanitary standards." The commandant of one of the camps referred to them as the "suburbs of Hell."

Estimates vary over how many Philippine civilians died, but the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands.  Most of them died from cholera and typhus outbreaks in the camps.  As in all wars, atrocities were committed on both sides, but the suffering fell harder on least trained and out-fitted forces. 

 

The US military lost 4,200 men in the war and 20,000 Philipinos combatants fell officially in action.   By the end of the main part of the war (July, 1902) General Alquinaldo had been captured and the islands were on their way to becoming Americanized--with English-language schools, an American style court system and a lower house of elected representatives to bring a measure of democracy to the whole affair of American conquest.  The Upper House remained in the hands of the American Commissioners, acting much as the viceroys and district commissioners of another empire.  

The Philippine-American war is not much discussed in American schools, and is low on the radar of major US  conflicts.  But in it contains all the seeds of the modern wars in American history from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.  It's not surprise that this is so, given that the "frontier attitude" of many Americans combined well with the colonial aspirations of any emerging industrial nation of the time.    

 

 There seems little in this chapter of imperialism of just over a century ago that is becoming of a republic.   And the words of Mark Twain above could have been said of Iraq and Vietnam and our extended time in other areas as well.