(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts main theme)
JM:
Hello and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This is JM, and I'm here with my co-hosts Gretchen and Nate, and over the next few weeks, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be discussing six short stories that we chose between the three of us, and we're going to spend some time talking about each one. We've made some pretty cool picks, some sort of dark ones as it turns out. We didn't really consult each other before picking the stories, so we just picked stories that we liked or wanted to do, and that's the plan for the next little while. So we hope you enjoy it. First off, we're going to talk about a story from India and another from Japan, and Nate is going to lead us on those.
You can find us on the web in various places. We have a blog spot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, and also on all the podcast platforms that are currently running that are popular, Spotify definitely, Google, we're also on YouTube. So you can find us just by typing in "chrononauts podcast", or you can also reach us on Twitter at @ChrononautsSF, or email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com
Nate:
Alright, so yeah, the last time we took a look at science fiction from India on the podcast was way back in the beginnings of the show when we covered "Sultana's Dream" in episode 10 and "Runaway's Cyclone" in episode 15, and those episodes in particular we probably covered way, way too much for one show. And as a result, really just barely scratched the surface of those stories without going into really any historical background on science fiction in India or the political situation there, and certainly now we'd be able to produce much better segments on those stories.
But rather than spinning our wheels and redoing our early stuff, I want to move forward and cover other stories, but like the episodes we did last time, we're visiting "Frankenstein's" themes. I think we'll find opportunities going forward to perhaps touch upon some of the things we missed during those early days of the podcast while being able to cover different stuff. So this story in particular that we're going to be taking a look at tonight gives us a nice opportunity to provide a brief historical sketch of science fiction in India since it is almost certainly the earliest known science fiction adjacent story from India, so early and so adjacent, that it doesn't appear on a fair amount of the chronologies and histories of Indian science fiction.
As always, we will link to the sources mentioned in the description, which we really encourage you to read, especially for this episode, as this is one area where we're entirely reliant on secondary sourcing. As unlike the Russian and Spanish language stuff, the language barriers here are too steep for me to personally meaningfully navigate any primary sources or do any kind of original research.
Unfortunately, a lot of these sources conflict on the dates of pretty much all of these early stories, that is pre 1920, and also as we've seen interpretations of these stories also very wildly in the secondary sourcing as well. And these conflicts aren't something that I'm able to resolve so this is more or less going to be a very brief summary of the existing secondary literature which again we will link to in the description, and I highly suggest you read.
But before we get into this story and science fiction in general, I just wanted to lay a brief outline of colonialism in India and its exportation of science and science fiction.
Company rule of the British East India Company begins in the 1700s, which was one of the many companies trying to exploit the region, which also included the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish. The British East India Company's first major foothold on the subcontinent was in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, and they began collecting revenue from Bengal and Bihar in 1765. And in 1773, they appointed Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Fort William in Calcutta.
Over the years, the East India Company expands its territory through a number of colonial wars. And after the rebellion in 1857, the crown assumes direct control of the subcontinent with independence won from the British in 1947, almost 100 years later. The Independence Act of 1947 split the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and then Bangladesh splits off from Pakistan in 1972. Likewise Sri Lanka nearby gains independence from Britain in 1948.
Through the colonial infrastructure comes the railways introduced in India in 1849, the telegraph in 1852, and major colonial universities were founded in 1856 in a Mumbai then called Bombay, a largely Marathi speaking area. Chennai then called Madras, a largely Tamil speaking area, and Calcutta, a largely Bangla speaking area, which is significant to note as Bangla and Marathi language stories would comprise the bulk of early Indian science fiction.
Regarding science in India, in Hans Harder's paper, "Indian and International: Some Examples of Marathi Science Fiction Writing", which is also quoted in "Other tomorrows: postcoloniality science fiction and India" by Suparno Banerjee, he says:
"in the Indian context, the word ‘science’ (together with its Indo-Aryan neologism vijnana) rings different than in the West: less well-defined and at the same time more loaded with polarising connotations. Like the pairs dharma/‘religion’ and darsana/‘philosophy’, vijnana/‘science’ represent an instance of the complexities of intercultural semantics. All these terms, even when explicitly used solely as equivalents of their respective Western concepts, tend to retain some of their former semantical content. While this may appear less problematic in the case of vijnana, a term less central and semantically more confined than the other terms mentioned, ‘science’ however creates additional difficulties because the thing denoted by it was and is often perceived as something specifically ‘Western’. In nineteenth-century India, while religion and philosophy were certainly seen as integral parts of pre-colonial India— whatever may be the terminological problems involved—‘science’ (in the sense of technology and as the producer of various gadgets), often appeared as an attribute of European civilisation."
This dichotomy ties directly into science fiction and something to keep in the back of one's mind.
JM:
So that's an interesting point to bring up because that seemed to be both part of the idea in the "Runaway Cyclone" story, but also some of the slight pushback we got against that episode.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly, yeah. And I think that is an important piece of the underlying political climate there. I don't think the attribution of genre specifically and "Runaway Cyclone" being a meta-commentary piece on genre itself really sticks with me. But yeah, the idea of science being satirized coming from a colonial and Western standpoint I think is definitely right on with that story, and certainly one of the things that some of the other sources mentioned.
With regards to the genre piece itself, again, it's very, very hard to speak to. I'm not entirely sure what appeared and when, which is something we'll get into a little bit.
There's a 1993 anthology "It Happened Tomorrow", which was the first anthology of Indian science fiction translated into English. The editor, Bal Phondke, was a nuclear biologist and Marathi science fiction author, and he describes a history of science fiction in three stages.
That is, science fiction as a whole, not just science fiction in India, but the first of these is the adventure utopia stage, which would encompass pretty much all the pre-Shelley stuff we covered really early in episode one, as well as the more adventure type stuff like the Jules Verne.
He defines a second stage as the stuff in Amazing and the early days of Astounding where Hugo's scientifiction piece comes into the equation. But they still retain the mode of a simple adventure story, but has a heavy focus on science and at least some kind of conscious effort to make the science plausibly extracted from current science. And while he doesn't cite any authors, we could easily see Asimov, Heinlein, Van Vogt, et cetera, fitting in here.
The third stage he defines as the post-World War II era where science fiction explores more social commentary in the face of nuclear annihilation. Again, he doesn't cite any authors, but we could easily fit people like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and other new wave authors in this third stage.
Specifically, relating to India, Phondke states that Indian science fiction starts to appear in the 1880s and 1890s across many Indian languages. A few early examples cited are in Bangla, like Bose's "Runaway Cyclone", or Hemlal Dutta's "Mystery" from 1892, or possibly 1882, and this wide variance in dates, sometimes spanning decades, in the dates given for these stories and secondary stories makes it incredibly difficult to speak on the nature of the genre question as far as when did it start, who were they influenced by, what was in the author's minds when they wrote these stories? Was Western science fiction an influence on this, or did it develop in parallel? I mean, obviously, if something comes up in the 1870s, there's much, much less written and available to anybody in the world than if you're talking 1896. So the global body of what we can now consider science fiction really, really accelerates towards the turn of the century. And even 1896 itself is really, really early, given that Wells's major works only started being published in 1895. Burroughs was still a few decades away, but the story "Mystery" from 1892 or 1882, whenever it's from, is described as another one of those automated house type stories where like robots and automated devices run all the domestic affairs in various ways. So it sounds like it would fit in quite well with some of the other stories we've done on the podcast previously.
The Marathi-language science fiction starts around the time as well, like "Tareche Hasya" by S.B. Ranade, and Banerjee notes that Hindi-language science fiction gets going around this time, but it doesn't appear to be as numerous as the Bangla and Marathi stories. Banerjee says there are mentions of Verne and Wells early on in these three languages, and he only says around the turn of the century. Unfortunately, the sources he cites for this point aren't any more clarifying to specific dates, and again, around of the turn of the century could mean 1910, 1890. That date range of like 20 years means very, very different things for the genre and what was available at the time, and just the total volume of work that one could possibly consider science fiction. So again, it's a little frustrating of a point that we're not able to drill down into these areas with any more specificity in the extant secondary sourcing.
But it does appear fairly certain that translations of Western writers like Verne, Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle were more commonly and verifiably available in the 1920s and 1930s. There is an explicit tie to a Western story from this time, Doyle's "The Lost World", from 1912, which apparently forms the basis of near-parody, and Sukumar Ray’s "Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary" from 1922.
In addition to possible Western influences, it would also seem that there is a pretty strong tradition of fantasy type adventure stories from throughout the entirety of the 19th century that could be equally plausible as influences on the really early stuff. Certainly we've seen with the American and British stuff the delineation between fantasy and science in 19th century stuff is not all very clear for a great deal of these authors, and despite the fact that Hugo proclaimed an issue number one of Amazing to be for hard science only, those early Amazing issues still publish a fair amount of stuff that is borderline at best, which I mean, again, I think it makes it more difficult to speak to a firm hard science/magical realism division in anything from 1896 that some of the criticism tries to ascribe to "Runaway Cyclone" as being like meta commentary on the genre itself. I don't know, I just don't think that there was really that much there at that time to be making those kind of arguments, but maybe others would disagree.
JM:
I didn't get that sense.
Nate:
But in regards to the character of these stories, Phondke notes that Indian science fiction typically falls into this first adventure story phase until roughly the late 60s, early 1970s, and around the 1960s, 1970s, a number of dedicated science fiction magazines emerge. And Phondke says it's here where the genre becomes elevated rapidly to the second and third stages. The Amazing Stories equivalent, that is the first magazine to focus solely on science fiction to emerge in India, was one called Ascharya, a Bangla language magazine first publishing in 1963. And a number of notable magazines emerge around this time include the Marathi language magazine, Naval, which was edited by Anant Antarkar, who Phonke describes as "the Indian John Campbell", but also there are a number of magazines and other languages, including Bangla magazines like Incredible Science Fiction, or Hindi magazines just Science Fiction. And Banerjee notes that this is when other languages like Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Urdu start to increase as well.
So before we get into tonight's story, I just want to briefly run down some of the historical Indian science fiction that is currently available in English. There are a handful of stories written in English natively from the colonial period. They include this one that will be covering tonight, "Republic of Orissa" from 1845, which we'll talk about more briefly later, and "Sultana's Dream" from 1905.
There seems to be a substantial body of literature in Bangla from the pre independence period translated into English. These include "Runaway Cyclone", and also recently published is a collection called the "Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction", which contains the story, "The Inhumans" by titular story by Hemendrakumar Roy from 1935, but also three other stories, Jagadananda Ray's "Voyage to Venus" from 1895, and two other stories from 1931, "The Mystery of the Giant" by Nanigopal Majumdar and "The Martian Purana" by Manoranjan Bhattacharya. "The Inhumans" is novella length and sounds really interesting and was translated by the same person who translated "Runaway Cyclone." So we'll certainly be covering that one on the podcast at some point. And that seems to be all I can find in English from the colonial era, so really not that much available. Just a handful of stories and one novella.
From the post independence period, I was able to find a few collections from Premendra Mitra, the "Adventures of Ghanada" collection, as well as "Mosquito and Other Stories", and a couple collections by Satyajit Ray, "The Final Adventures of Professor Shonku", "The Diary of a Space Traveller and Other Stories" Both those authors seem to have a recurring character who gets in like, Carnacki and Doyle style adventures.
JM:
That sounds like fun.
Nate:
Seems to be more oriented towards juveniles and younger adults, but it might be pretty cool to check out.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
There's also a three volume "Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction", which is a wide range of stuff from short story to novel length works dating back to the 1950s. Not all of it is science fiction, but if you enjoy some of the adjacent tangents we go on, I think all of it will at least be of some interest.
And there's also "The Gollancz book of South Asian Science Fiction", which is mostly modern stuff. It has a few historical stories dating back to the 1940s.
JM:
That publisher, Gollancz, they've done so much cool stuff and they're responsible for both the Fantasy and the Science Fiction Masterworks, which have so many really awesome books in both series by so many great authors. So it's interesting to see what they've included in that.
Nate:
Yeah. In addition to the stories, they also include a critical introduction and commentary and stuff like that. And another one of these really good reputable publishers that are taking a look at this stuff. So it's nice to have new stuff, new old stuff that is coming out in translation.
The anthology that I mentioned in the beginning of the segment, "It Happened Tomorrow" features stories primarily from the 90s written in Marathi, Bangla, Kannada, Odia, Hindi and a couple natively written in English.
And the last one I want to mention is one of the most discussed novels in the criticism, namely Amitav Ghosh, "The Calcutta Syndrome" from 1995, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. And this one features none other than Sir Ronald Ross as a major character who we talked about last time.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Fate, once again, provides a nice tie-in.
JM:
Good connection to our recent story episode there.
Nate:
Yeah. It always works out like that for some reason. I guess the tapestry is incredibly well-woven and a lot of these connections everywhere. But yeah, that's pretty much what I could dig up on the early stuff. There seems to be a fair amount more stuff available in English starting in the 1970s on, but not like a huge, huge amount of stuff. And I think it's pretty safe to say that the definitive history work on colonial-era Indian science fiction has yet to be written. Though, fortunately, scholarship in this area appears to be expanding and more translations are being produced. So we'll certainly be keeping an eye on this area for more stuff to cover in the future. And as we've been moving ahead in time and through the Golden Age and beginning to work and stuff from the 1960s and 1970s into the podcast, I think we'll have a lot more opportunities to bring in the post-colonial stuff, which not only seems like there's more available in English, but some of it also sounds really interesting as well.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's funny, I've read another novel, "Ghostlines" by Amitav Ghosh. I hadn't realized that that was another, there was a science fiction novel that he wrote.
Nate:
Yeah, apparently that one is extremely well acclaimed. It's discussed pretty much all the criticism that I looked at for this episode. So yeah, it definitely will be one to check out later for the future, certainly.
JM:
I'd be interested as well. I don't know if I've heard anything about that one. But I feel like I should remember reading something about it recently, maybe.
Nate:
Yeah.
As regards to this one, our author, Kylas Chunder Dutt, was part of the famous Dutt family, a large family of writers and poets who were important to the development of literature in Bengal in the 19th century. An anthology of four poets was published in 1870 as "The Dutt Family Album."
Kylas Chunder was born in 1817, and like many of his family was a student of Hindu college, which was founded in the same year, that is, 1817, and eventually became Calcutta University. "A Journal of 48 hours in the Year 1945" is the only known work by him. It's often described as the first Indian work of fiction published in English, and was published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette, or Journal of Belles Lettres, Science and the Arts on June 6, 1835, when he was just 18 years old.
Response to the story was strongly negative, with the Calcutta Courier publishing a scathing rebuke of it four days later. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the full piece on it, but the sentence quoted in most of the sources discussing this story is, "when the British Parliament ordered a sum to be set apart out of the revenues of India for instructing a native population, it could have never been intended to teach them sedition."
Kylas Chunder Dutt died in 1857, and in Subhendu Mund's "Kylas Chunder Dutt: The First Writer of Indian English Fiction", says he was, "reported to have joined the government revenue service soon after, and had a premature death when he was a deputy magistrate," but doesn't provide any additional details.
This story was extremely rare for several decades, and there's a rather amusing article by Alex Tickell called "Midnight's Ancestors, Kylas Chunder Dutt and the Beginnings of Indian English Fiction," where he attempted to find a copy of it somewhere in India to no avail, only to find it in a used bookstore in Leeds, with a Bangla academic friend of him telling him, "you should have known it was in the UK after all of our treasures over there," and indeed the brutal exploitation of the peoples of India by the British colonial powers is the theme of this story. It's estimated that the British colonial policies in India killed more than 100 million people between 1880 and 1920, and the ramifications of such are still being felt in the country today.
As mentioned previously, this was a story written in English, which as noted by the sources is a deliberate choice, using the colonizer's language as a weapon against them, in a sense a warning of what might happen. And indeed, his 1945 isn't very far off from the year that India actually gained its independence.
JM:
It's interesting that the year 1945 was chosen because it's over 100 years after the story was written, but it's also actually close to the actual date of Indian independence.
Nate:
Yeah, extremely close, like 1947 was the date, so again, a lot of the sources comment on how prescient and accurate that was. So yeah, what did we think about this one? I mean, it's definitely the odd man out for tonight's stories in that all the other five stories we've covered tonight are mostly firmly in the genre of fiction landscape and particularly attached to horror, but in some ways this might be the most horrific of them all in that it hints at the very brutal real world atrocities.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. But I mean, also, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it's almost had a bit of a light touch to it. I don't know if that was like sort of to negate the brutality that's really implicit there, but like there's some humor and the depiction of Lord Fell Butcher and the...
Gretchen:
Was it General Blood-Thirsty? What was the name of the person he writes the letter to? It's something Blood-Thirsty. Colonel John Blood-Thirsty.
Nate:
Yeah, Colonel John Blood-Thirsty, yeah. Yeah, the names in this are not subtle. Pretty much all the English officers have names like Lord Fell Butcher and yeah, Colonel John Blood-Thirsty.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I enjoyed that. I thought that there was like all the names are, it was like the British names are comically bloodthirsty. Yeah, although there's their Valancourt as well mentioned, but that's the French name, whatever that means. Yeah, I don't know, it was, it was an interesting story. It was, it kind of reminded me a lot, most in terms of what we've done on the podcast before of "The Battle of Dorking" story, just in terms of like how it was laid out and the kind of matter of fact way in which it's told, although I think this one is like, I don't think humorous is the right word, but again, like it has a light touch to it, which I think maybe the author uses again, as a kind of a slightly satirical...
Nate:
Yes, using that as a weapon in the same way that Swift wrote like "A Modest Proposal", he's describing real atrocities and comic language and I think that is what is being done to some extent here, at least with the naming conventions. It's not like our patriotic heroes are cracking jokes with one another.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It kind of introduces the kind of distance that the colonizers would feel when, like seeing these scenes and like the way they would feel about the people they're colonizing.
JM:
I guess that's true, yeah. And it is interesting that the story is written in English and I kind of wonder like, I don't have any data on this, but I'm guessing that English would have been learned by a lot of the educated people, no matter where they lived in the provinces, like, whereas India has like so many languages, right. But on the other hand, there are so many people who wouldn't have had an opportunity to go to the Hindu University and stuff like that.
Nate:
Exactly. Yeah, again, that's why it's very difficult to pinpoint the genre question of when does this Western stuff come, not only in English but translated into the Indian languages when most people would have the opportunity to actually read this stuff aside from a handful of college educated people.
JM:
I don't know. I mean, I thought it was a worthy story.
Nate:
Oh, definitely. Yeah.
JM:
I don't know how much I can really like say I enjoyed it as such. But at the same time, it was like, I'm glad that we read it and it has that aspect to it where it's like, it doesn't really feel like science fiction because both 1835 and 1945 are kind of quite far in the past now. And so there's no super weapons or anything like that. It's just, okay, maybe this will happen in the future. And I mean, independence might not be far away then. But the fact that he still anticipated this oppression going on for 100 years or more is pretty potent and grim. He's anticipating 100 more years of strife and misery before people can rise up. And what was interesting to me is that the language he used felt very modern. Like it felt very, like it could have been written 100 years later and it would have been the same, right? Like it would have been, it didn't feel like some of the older stories that we read on the podcast. It feels more contemporary, more like a 20th century work almost.
Nate:
The elements I think of both in terms of the language used, some of the cursing I thought was charmingly archaic and that they say "zounds" and stuff where it's phased out later.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I don't see that too much. I'm not used to seeing that anymore.
Nate:
But yeah, the impassioned patriotic speeches again could be in a 1950s science fiction novel easily. And yeah, this is one where there are no explicitly futuristic elements in it aside from the year. There's a whole bunch of these stories that fall into a genre of what I call "X in the year Y". There's "Mexico in the Year 1970", Jules Verne did "Paris in the 21st Century." There's a whole bunch of others from this time that use that as a framing device.
All the technology that appears in this story is indeed 1830s technology. It's extrapolated out 110 years in the future, probably due to the fact that if he set it in the present day it would get him in more trouble with the British authorities who already didn't like it.
Gretchen:
I think that the way that nothing does seem to change that there isn't these technological advances that we might expect from a story, usually when we have these stories set in the future, there is this usual desire to have these technological advances, but I think the lack of that makes it more powerful as the world will be the same. There will still be all this oppression of the colonized people. So it's like the rest of the world kind of is still stagnant while that's happening.
Nate:
Yeah, literally under the foot of the empire, not being able to breathe or progress or change at all. Now it's definitely a very good point and I think one well taken certainly. And it does provide an interesting contrast with "The Battle of Dorking" and that kind of invasion literature, which again would be decades, decades later after this. Those stories play on the fear of the other coming and invading one's homeland where as this that's already happened in the real world and this is a reaction against that. So I mean, it definitely provides the other side of the coin, I think.
JM:
Yeah, right. Yeah, I guess I guess it's strange that it reminded me of that one in particular because yeah, they're kind of opposites in a way. But maybe that's why, you know, this feels like this could be our future. Yeah, from that perspective.
Nate:
Yeah, they played a similar scenario is just different angles, I think and it's an interesting way of looking at it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, interesting to like compare the two.
Nate:
Definitely. Yeah.
All right, so let's take a look at what happens in this story. So as the title may indicate it is 1945, 110 years in the future from when this was written colonial oppression from the British is at its height, especially in the urban areas. This maltreatment provokes a rebellion of Indian nationalist with the ultimate aim of expelling the viceroy Lord Fell Butcher.
JM:
It sounds like the name of some like really bad, I don't know, weird like metal band or something like that. Lord Fell Butcher.
Nate:
Yeah, or even the villain and like some comic sword n sorcery movie or medieval parody or something like that, you know, definitely not subtle at all. But during one gorgeous evening in Calcutta, a large group is assembled and older man speaks asking if everyone is bearing their carbine and their sword, like was so moved in the prior meeting. Cheers and applause enthusiastically signifies that they are in a youth. Bhoobun Mohun, spelled similarly to a real life friend that Kylas Chunder Dutt had, gives an articulate and moving speech.
He highlights the brutal oppression of India from the British specifically highlighting the historical examples from the 1750s to then what was more or less the present when this was written in the 1830s. He says:
"Let us unanimously engage to emancipate the natives from the thraldom of oppression. Let us all unite in a body, and it shall be the most glorious scene that India has beheld, when we effect the overthrow by one powerful and deadly blow of this system of injustice and rapacity"
and he goes on to say:
"Friends! countrymen and chieftains! let us no more be called the weak, the deluded portion of mankind, let us no more be branded with cowardice and degeneration, let us unfurl the banner of Freedom and plant it where Britannia now proudly stands. If the consideration of rising in the estimation of the world move you not, Oh! I beseech you to look for the safety of the dear companions of your souls, the little ones, the darling of your eyes, and above all attend to the wants of our much neglected mother, the land that gave us birth."
This is met with great cheer and applause, but shortly the imperial troops show up, and Mohun tells them:
"You see before you men who will neither be terrified by the neighing of a steed, the waving of a sword nor the flashing of a gun. We are determined to assert our liberties, when every other resource has failed, by the strength of our arms. Go tell them that sent thee that we have resolved to hurl Fell Butcher from his seat, we have renounced the allegiance of the feeble and false Harry of England, and that we mean to abide by our own laws and parliaments!"
At Mohun's blast of a horn, 200 men with guns and 50 men on horses are summoned, and he joins in on the combat personally. The Patriots are victorious in the skirmish killing 25 royalists and routing their forces.
Meanwhile, in Lord Fell Butchers opulent palace, he receives the news of the skirmish.
JM:
This is so decadent. So like, the decadent conquerors like, I mean, it shouldn't be funny, really, because yeah, it's just probably was kind of like that. But it's just, yeah, it's, it can't help but be amused by this, this section, just describing what it's like to live as a conqueror.
Nate:
All the exploitation and amasses of an entire country's resources, which, again, being written in 1835 significantly predates the worst of the colonial oppression, you know, certainly in terms of scale, which, which again is pretty amazing at its foresight.
But in Lord fell butchers, incredibly opulent palace, this is where he receives the news of the skirmish and the royalist defeat, cursing an anger at the young ensign messenger butcher then writes to Colonel John Blood-Thirsty for reinforcements and places a PR statement in the papers basically blaming the Calcutta revolutionaries for the disturbance.
Mohun realizes that he must strike again soon to keep the momentum going, and resolves to attack the fort, even if some of his former supporters are now backing down. A messenger sent to the fort, goon ganarain is captured and cruelly hung on the ramparts, which causes the insurgents to mount their attack.
It's a colossal failure, and they're outgunned by the English and forced to fight from a disadvantageous position. Most of Mohun's forces are killed. Mohun himself barely is able to retreat, killing an English officer in single combat, a friend of an English officer he killed in the first skirmish, and he tries to regroup his surviving forces for one last assault.
This too is disastrous when most of his remaining men killed, and Mohun and a few others taken prisoner. Sometime later the cathedral bell tolls in grim silence as Mohun is brought out to the scaffold and he gives one final speech, saying:
"My friends and countrymen! I have the consolation to die in my native land, and tho’ Heaven has doomed that I should expire on the scaffold, yet are my last moments cheered by the presence of my friends. I have shed my last blood in defence of my country and though the feeble spark within me is about to leave its frail frame, I hope you will continue to persevere in the course you have so gloriously commenced."
He is once again met with enthusiastic reception, so the viceroy decides to conclude the scene by immediately ordering him beheaded.
And that is the end of the story, very promptly over, but presumably the patriotic spirit lives on. So yeah, that's this one, it's pretty brief. There is an interesting tie to one of the later stories. Another member of the Chunder Dutt family, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, wrote a story called "The Republic of Orissa, a page from the annals of the 20th century" in 1845, which was more frequently republished and extremely similar to this one, but a lot shorter, and with a different outcome of the revolution, this time they're successful. So another interesting angle and complimentary piece to this, as mentioned before, this story was also written in English, so pretty easy to find pretty much everywhere.
JM:
I think it is interesting that, so the rebellion was not successful, ultimately, at this point, but I don't know, I kind of think that makes the story more successful in a way.
Nate:
Oh, I agree, absolutely, yeah.
JM:
But that's kind of interesting because I kind of feel like some people wouldn't feel that way, like they'd be like, well, the rebellion should succeed at the end of the story or else it's not satisfying, right? But maybe they're like missing, they would be missing the, I guess, the political point of the story, right? I know it's like bringing up a kind of a less serious, like relevant example, like in the show Blake's 7 at the end of 52 episodes, the rebellion doesn't succeed. And that's like frustrated people for years, right? A lot of people are like, I hate that ending. And some people are like, I love that ending, it's perfect, right?
Here, you know, it's like, okay, the rebellion didn't succeed, but his speech at the end is really powerful. And hopefully that will inspire people and it will just get stronger from here on, especially because so many people saw that, right? And that's like, one of the things that conquerors do, right, is that they want to put on display the final moments of the enemy so that there's an example set. And they think that, you know, oh, that'll put them in their place, that'll show them what will happen to the dissenters.
But I think sometimes what people in power don't understand is that it doesn't just scare people, it makes them really, really angry, right?
Nate:
Yeah, the whole issue of martyrdom, I'm reading the William Faulkner novel, "A Fable", right now. And I just got to one of the classic quotes where he says, "all you can kill is a man's meat, you can't kill his voice." Yeah, that pretty much sums it up here is, you know, yeah, you can kill the leader of the rebellion, but you can't kill the spirit of the rebellion. And the more you try, the more you make it worse and provoke it, and it'll eventually become overwhelmed and overthrown.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, that's why you see sometimes where instead of the public displays of this, thinking of "1984", and that idea of having the person confess and turn away from the rebellion before they're quietly executed or gotten rid of or exiled, it's to prevent martyrs, because that that's what is powerful to see that a person die with dignity and with the knowledge that their ideas will live on that you can't kill those ideas. That's power.
JM:
So I guess we don't have any data about how this story was received.
Nate:
No, we do. Yeah, pretty much universally condemned by the British press. I don't know if it was officially suppressed and the journal was taken out of circulation, but the newspaper, again I couldn't find the full clip of the article that was basically trashing it and said we didn't bring colleges to India so we could teach people sedition.
JM:
Yeah, because it seems like like a fairly mainstream journal as well for India. I mean, obviously, probably it wasn't read outside of the country, but like, it seems like it was a fairly prestigious newspaper.
Nate:
Yeah, it was the Calcutta Literary Gazette. I'm not sure.... Let me just take a look at when it operated. So according to this, it was founded in 1784 and had a couple name changes around 1817. And then it might not have lasted for much longer after this was published. So I don't think it was a very long standing journal, even though it might have been an influential journal at the time.
JM:
Well, you said it lasted for about 50 years then. That seems good to me, but yeah.
Nate:
But afterwards, you know, stuff falls out of print stuff falls into obscurity, even as we see with some of the science fiction stuff with broader reach. And it doesn't look like this story was ever republished anywhere else until very, very recently in the modern era, when the initial issue of the Calcutta Literary Gazette was turned up in that used bookstore in Leeds somewhere. It had been mentioned in a couple bibliographic lists. And I think Tickell, the author of that article where he tried to track this down notes that there was some much much earlier criticism like from the 1930s or 1940s where somebody mentioned it in an offhand way but for the most part. Yeah, it was considered near lost for a while. And that just wasn't available for decades and decades.
JM:
Well, bold of whoever that editor was to publish the story in 1835.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, very, very bold. Bold for him to write it in the first place.
JM:
I guess the British Raj had this outward appearance of benevolence, because obviously they had this idea that it's the British Empire, the subjects of the empire should be they should be pleased to be part of the empire. Right.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's that patronizing paternalistic attitude you were talking about last time when we briefly mentioned "The Death of the Happy City" of yes, we as cultured people know so much better...
JM:
Than these people. Yeah, I mean, they may have had an amazing civilization at one point, but now it's fallen. And it's our job to pick them up again.
Nate:
Right. Exactly.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's the whole white man's burden. You know, it's like, oh, well, it's our duty to make sure that we look after them and take care of them.
Nate:
Yeah, that's the attitude that leads to exploitation and mass deaths throughout the colonial mismanagement and brutality of the system trying to force British ideas on a country that doesn't want them in the first place while in exchange just taking all of their resources and wealth and labor for their own profit.
JM:
Definitely a really interesting story. It's short, really interesting piece. I'm glad that we did this. I'd be kind of interested to see if there were too many others along these lines looking into the future and thinking of the independence movement. I guess we don't really, especially maybe here in the West, we don't really think of the independence movement there starting that early.
Nate:
Yeah, Republic of Orissa comes from 10 years later and from one of his cousins, which again was apparently widely republished. I think it was in one of the anthologies of the Dutt family poets. So the sentiment was definitely out there, and there was definitely some stuff out there that is mentioned in some of the criticism that doesn't fit into genre/speculative fiction, but more just literary commentaries on colonialism and exploitation, which would be interesting to revisit from another angle, but just probably not for the podcast, because this one and "Republic of Orissa" do have the speculative angle on that they're both explicitly set in the future.
I don't think we're going to do "Republic of Orissa" on the podcast as it's, again, pretty much exactly the same thing as this one, just with a different ending. But if you read this one, definitely read the other one as a companion piece, because it again, it does provide that other look at it.
All right, so that's pretty much all I had on this. Did you guys have anything else before we move on?
JM:
I think we've covered it pretty well.
Nate:
Okay, so let's take a quick break and we'll be back in another part of the world that we haven't revisited since the early days of the podcast.
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