The Audacious Raconteur

Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India

Leela Prasad

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501752292
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Storytelling

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? Studying closely the oral narrations and writings of four Indian authors in colonial India, The Audacious Raconteur argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress "audacious raconteurs": skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation.

By drawing attention to the vigorous orality, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism in the narratives of these raconteurs, Leela Prasad shows how the ideological bulwark of colonialism—formed by concepts of colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledge—is dismantled. Audacious raconteurs wrest back meanings of religion, culture, and history that are closer to their lived understandings. The figure of the audacious raconteur does not only hover in an archive but suffuses everyday life. Underlying these ideas, Prasad's personal interactions with the narrators' descendants give weight to her innovative argument that the audacious raconteur is a necessary ethical and artistic figure in human experience.

Thanks to generous funding from Duke University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Chapter 1

The Ruse of Colonial Modernity

Anna Liberata de Souza

I was sure that Gandhiji’s ghost was stirring the overturned steel cup under our fingers. It had arrived in the Ouija board that my older brother, a friend, and I, the youngest, had made. We knew it back then as “planchette,” the newest occult rage among children living on the university campus in Ganeshkhind in Poona (Pune). Our collective age no more than thirty, we sat hushed and excited while Gandhiji, summoned by me, jerkily moved across the board answering our questions, choosing between yes, no, maybe, or enigmatic silence. The summer heat had raised our anxiety about forthcoming results on recent exams, and evidently only Gandhiji could tell us the truth, even if it was in Marathi, a language he had not known in his lifetime.

Every raspy movement of the cup, manipulated by our fingers, echoed in the stable whose mud floors were caked and cracked. The stables, several of them, were among the derelict outbuildings of the large estate attached to the bungalow we lived in. It had once been the palatial home of a British officer. Such lime-washed bungalows, complete with stables, servants’ quarters, storehouses, and landscaped garden spaces, speckled the campus of the University of Poona (now called Savitribai Phule Pune University), which had once been the site of the bloody battle of Khadki in 1817 between the Marathas and the colonial British. These houses had been converted into faculty and administrative staff quarters, often too large for their modern, modest occupants. Each bungalow had a tiny kitchen and a tinier storeroom that were dark and airless. These unventilated rooms were originally intended for the Indian cook and the ayah of the colonial British household; domestic manuals of the time warned a novice English wife in India, “The kitchen is a black hole, the pantry a sink.”¹

The Ghosts of Ganeshkhind

On this campus, in such a bungalow, my childhood unfolded in the 1970s. The abundant giant trees—pipal and banyan, neem and tamarind—and the abandoned outbuildings created an ideal setting for a rich supply of stories and encounters with ghosts and their doings. So we needed no persuasion to believe that swirling inside the overturned glass, predicting that we would all pass our exams, was Gandhiji’s spirit.

The colonial past lived here. The aged trees and structures all seemed to exhale 150 years of irreconcilable history. Half a kilometer away from my home was a low-lying rambling park with scattered old graves and stone benches, all under a canopy of trees, flanked by well-maintained tar roads. I had heard from a trustworthy source that here, a British memsahib dressed in white had fallen off her horse and died. Her white ghost roamed the grounds each night, looking for her saddle and hat. In later years I recalled this specter as symbolic of the empress perennially searching for her lost throne and crown. I have often wondered if ghost stories about colonial India were a masterly way for formerly colonized people to assert justice, poetic and otherwise.

Another few hundred feet away, beyond a small hill, was a majestic Italian-Gothic building with Romanesque arches and a central tower surrounded by lavish well-maintained lawns. I knew this structure as “Main Building,” home of the administrative offices of the University of Poona. In the evenings, after the offices closed for the day and watchmen became more lenient, the lawns were taken over by scampering children and cooing lovers. Long after the secret summonings of spirits in my childhood, I was to discover another presence in Main Building whose elusive truth would haunt me for decades. This presence was of an Indian ayah who had told vivid stories in the living quarters of Main Building when it was a stately residence one hundred years before I played on those lawns.

This haunting began in earnest in 1989, when Main Building suddenly reappeared before me in the American Midwest. In a less frequented aisle of a university library, I had just picked up a yellowing copy of a book, attracted by its maroon cover, which bore a thumb-sized image of a golden Ganesha who was wearing a British crown. As I leafed through the first pages of Old Deccan Days; or, Hindoo Fairy Legends, Current in Southern India, published in 1868, I was startled to see a hand-drawn picture that looked like Main Building, captioned “Government House.” At the bottom of the page, a line read, “Anna Liberata de Souza died at Government House, Gunish Khind, near Poona, after a short illness, on 14th August, 1887.” Although the line itself referred to Government House in Poona, the picture depicted Government House in Parel, Bombay. Main Building, I soon learned, had at one time been called Government House, its construction commissioned in 1864 by Bartle Frere, the governor of Bombay from 1862 to 1867. British governors of the Bombay Presidency made Government House in Poona their monsoon residence from 1866, spending the rest of the year in Government House in Parel, Bombay (Mumbai).²

Figure 1. Main Building, University of Poona (Savitribai Phule Pune University). Photograph by Akshayini Leela-Prasad, February 2020.

Figure 2. Government House, Poona, circa 1875. Unknown photographer.

Anna Liberata de Souza: The First Sighting

Government House in Ganeshkhind is also where Anna Liberata de Souza, the subject of this chapter, lived and worked for eighteen months from 1865 to 1867 as an ayah to Mary Eliza Isabella Frere, Bartle Frere’s daughter. In the winter of 1865, when Mary accompanied her father, the governor, on an official journey through the Deccan, she recorded the stories of Old Deccan Days from Anna.

As I stood in the library, captivated by the book, I quickly turned the pages and saw a pencil sketch of Anna. On the next page was Anna’s autobiographical narrative, titled “The Narrator’s Narrative.” A first reading tells us this story: Two generations before her, Anna’s family had been Lingayats, members of a Hindu sect that worships the deity Shiva. Her grandfather had moved from Calicut to Goa, at that time a Portuguese territory, where he had converted to Christianity, and consequently become ostracized by his family. Like many Goan Christians, Anna’s grandfather and father had served in the British army; her grandfather had been a havildar (sergeant) and her father a tent lascar,³ and both had won medals in the battle of Khadki in 1817. At some point the family had settled in Poona. After a childhood that lacked nothing, Anna’s destiny changed when she was married at twelve and widowed at twenty. With two children to raise, she became an ayah to British families. Already fluent in Marathi, Malayalam, Portuguese, and Konkani, Anna quickly learned to speak, read, and write in English. A year before Anna narrated the stories, her only son drowned in a river accident in Poona. Anna’s narration ends on a philosophical note about the turns in her life.

As I browsed through the stories in the book, I remember being struck by the (curiously transliterated) phrase “mera baap re” (my dear father) and the name “Guzra Bai” (garland lady). I imagined how Anna might have told the stories at least partly in Marathi, the language of my childhood; the book inspired my MA thesis. The storied landscapes of nineteenth-century India continued to fascinate me.⁴ Ten years after I had first seen the book, the spell of Old Deccan Days returned. It took me to the British Library in London, where in the Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC) I found the handwritten manuscript of Old Deccan Days and some correspondence between Mary Frere, various other individuals, and John Murray, the publisher.⁵ At the John Murray Archive (then held in London but now at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh), I found a trove of decades-long correspondence between the Frere family and Murray. Thus began my efforts to unfold the map of the making of Old Deccan Days.

Old Deccan Days: The Shaping of the Book and Its Voices

In early March 1867, after thirty-three years in India, Bartle Frere returned to England for good with his wife and their two older daughters, Mary and Catherine. He had become quite a favorite of Britain’s royalty and Parliament. Mary brought with her a nearly completed manuscript built on Anna Liberata de Souza’s stories. And Anna’s oral stories, which she had heard from her mother and her grandmother, traveled across the Arabian Sea, curved around the Cape of Good Hope, sailed up the Atlantic, and came to be fitted to a new life as a book commercially published on London’s Albemarle Street.

About seven months after they had arrived in London, Bartle Frere seems to have written to the publisher John Murray with a query about publishing his daughter’s manuscript. In a letter dated October 15, 1867, Murray accepted, adding a word of caution about tempering expectations, as the market was flooded with books for children. Three days later Bartle Frere indicated that his daughter would accept, with pleasure, Murray’s “very handsome offer to publish the Indian fairy tales at [Murray’s] cost and risque [sic], on condition of giving her half [the] profits in the event of its succeeding.”⁶ The letter puts on display right away the entrepreneurial spirit and creative talent of the Freres: “As regards illustrations, I think my daughter would prefer its coming out at first without profusion of them—which might make it more a picture than a story book. But if it ever reached a 2nd edition, she and her sister Katie would be able to furnish many illustrations of scenery and figures such as you describe.” And so a partnership of the prominent was sealed. Frere’s political stock was high, and he carried a reputation as a formidable statesman of the British colonial government. The John Murray publishing house had been in the business for a century. It had published authors of the stature of Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, Henry James Coleridge, David Livingstone, and Lord Byron and produced the trademark John Murray handbooks and travel guides, much used by travelers to Britain’s colonies.

This collection of Anna’s stories debuted in 1868 in London. Subsequent editions came out in 1870, 1881, and 1889, and the fourth edition was reprinted in 1898.⁷ The third edition (1881) settled on a structure that gave the book its permanent identity. This edition begins with a “Preface” that Mary Frere wrote when she was thirty-six years old. She recounts the circumstances in which Anna narrated the stories and describes the manner in which she had recorded them. The next is Bartle Frere’s “Introduction,” where he tries to elaborate authoritatively on Hindu beliefs and practices supposedly underlying Anna’s stories for an English audience. The elaboration relies on his personal experiences in the Maratha country and his knowledge of European ethnology. Then comes “The Collector’s Apology” by Mary Frere, containing her guarded defense of the stories against perceptions of Indian character. In addition, she provides a brief statement on transcription and orthography.

But the tour de force is “The Narrator’s Narrative.” It is Anna de Souza’s life story, which Mary assures the reader “is related as much as possible in [Anna’s] own words of expressive but broken English.”⁸ Mary compiled and edited this story from conversations with Anna over the eighteen months that Anna worked for the Freres. Anna’s twenty-four stories follow immediately after. The literary English of the stories, ironically, has nothing in common with the curated “broken English” of “The Narrator’s Narrative” that has just preceded them. The irony may be explained by the manner in which the stories were transcribed: as Mary heard each story, she took notes, then she wrote up the story and read it back to Anna to check that she had “correctly given every detail.”⁹ So we may with some certainty, then, say that the diction of the twenty-four stories is Mary’s/European and the characters and the plots are mostly Anna’s. “The Narrator’s Narrative” presumably provides just that touch of colloquial flavor, while the stories, with Anna’s presence dissolved, satiate the narrative tastes of Victorian audiences.¹⁰ In all this, it is critical we remember that Anna’s “broken English” is in fact an accomplished act of translation. If Anna has narrated these stories in English, it means that she has translated a cultural world into an alien language system and renegotiated her cultural fluency for Mary’s benefit.

The book concludes with “Notes” and a “Glossary” (from the second edition onward). In two longish notes in the section under “Notes on the Narrator’s Narrative,” Bartle Frere raves about the heroism of British troops in the battle of Khadki (“Kirkee”) and defends the economic policy of his government, respectively. Mary’s single note provides a translated text of two of Anna’s songs. Finally, the “Notes on the Fairy Legends” are glosses—sanctimonious micro-sociologies—by Bartle Frere on six of the stories and by Mary Frere on one story. Twenty Indian words form the glossary that closes the book. Five full-page hand-drawn illustrations, one of which is a portrait of Anna Liberata de Souza, are interspersed. This was the polished book I had chanced upon in the library.¹¹

Reinterpreting Anna through Sense Reading

Earlier writing on Old Deccan Days, mine included...