India

Review: The Father of Modern India: William Carey

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Cover image of "The Father of Modern India" by Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi.

The Father of Modern India: William Carey, Vishal & Ruth Mangalwadi. Sought After Media (ISBN: 9798988783107), 2023

Summary: Proposes that missionary William Carey, and not Mahatma Gandhi, is rightly to be considered the father of modern India.

Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi make a bold proposal that is no doubt controversial in some quarters. This is that the English cobbler missionary to India, and not Mahatma Gandhi, should be reckoned the father of modern India. Their opening chapter makes the case for what a sweeping impact Carey had on India. Not only was he a missionary who brought the message of Jesus, he was a botanist after whom a variety of eucalyptus is named and he brought the English daisy to India. He introduced the steam engine, the savings bank to fight usury, humane treatment of leprosy patients, printing technology, agricultural societies that laid the groundwork for the Green Revolution of the 1960’s. He translated important works and taught indigenous languages, liberating lower castes from high caste dominance that functioned by keeping them in ignorance. This also worked against the interest of British colonizers. He introduced the science of astronomy, countering superstition. He established lending libraries, pioneered forest conservation and crusaded for women’s rights including the ending of the practice of sati. He was the catalyst of a cultural transformation.

All of this was rooted in the conviction that India was a country to be loved rather than exploited. This led him to fight for practices like those above that contributed to cultural flourishing while opposing evil, exploitive, and unjust practices. He believed in the power of a gospel that proclaimed the dignity of all classes, of women as well as men as those loved by God and redeemed by Christ. This led to opposing practices of female infanticide, of language barriers that kept the poor in ignorance, and fostered female education, giving women increased economic power.

This work, while arguing for Carey’s influence on modern India, avoids hagiography. It can be argued that he used emotional manipulation to force his first wife against her will to come to India, threatening to leave her behind. She endured poor conditions and the loss of a child drove her into insanity, leading to a twelve year confinement until her death. It seems he was wiser in his second marriage to a Danish countess, who was much more in support of his efforts and a partner in them.

The book goes on to share how Carey’s faith provided the bedrock ideas of reform, contrasted with the humanists of his day. Carey saw this as a work of God accomplished through conversion. He also saw God as the source of all rationality, hence his focus on various disciplines of science education. As previously noted, he recognized how important was the language of the people, and not just that of the elite. His literacy efforts raised the status of Bengali, in which Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel winning work was written. His worldview offered the premises for a modern society. His belief in a creator led to the emphasis on science. His belief in human beings in God’s image led to treating all human life as precious. His comprehensive efforts reflected a comprehensive view of the world shaped by his faith.

The tendency today is to lump Carey into Western cultural imperialism. The Mangalwadis challenge this narrative by showing Carey’s love for the country that often put him at odds with both indigenous and British overlords as he sought the flourishing of the nation’s people. At the same time they argue that Carey’s theologically shaped convictions led him to seek to supplant practices, whether harmful superstitions or the oppression of women or practices of health and hygiene, that increased human suffering and damaged the land and its economy.

This gets at the heart of the challenge of cultural relativism. The Mangalwadis argue that Carey’s work did transform India’s culture. Dare we say there are things in every culture that are evil and ought be rooted out? Is it not love to do so if it helps a society to flourish? How, for example, can we say that female genital mutilation is wrong and should be stopped, even though such practice has long been part of some indigenous cultures? The Mangalwadis argue that the change Carey brought both addressed evil and the country’s flourishing and that efforts to repudiate his influence (and his worldview) can lead to the dissolution of democracy, of egalitarian advances, religious liberty, and economic development.

I found the book an illuminating treatment of a cobbler who eventually taught several languages and had a transformative influence in so many areas. It makes a compelling case for how Carey’s Christian beliefs and deep love for the people of India was the source of his impact. In our post-colonial mood, I hope scholars and other readers will have the discernment not to uncritically tar all western mission efforts with the same brush. At very least, the Mangalwadis make a case for a closer look at Carey.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Covenant of Water

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The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese. New York: The Grove Press, 2023.

Summary: The story of three generations of the family of Big Ammachi of Parambil, the ever present reality of “the Condition” resulting in a drowning in every generation, a story both of love and the hope in advances in medicine.

Twelve year old Mariamma has been engaged in a brokered marriage to a forty year old widow, the owner of a 500 acre estate near the town of Parambil. Her mother tells her, “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding….After that, God willing, it gets better.” I began reading with a sense of foreboding of what would happen to this girl in the house of this man. And I was surprised. At the wedding, he runs away, mortified that she is a mere child. But they wed. And he leaves her to her own room, and lets her learn the management of the household, lets her mature, lets her bond with his son, JoJo, and lets her realize that he has loved her by providing her time to come to love him. And so begins this incredible story spanning three generations within the Mar Thoma Christian community of South India.

When JoJo falls into what is little more than a puddle and drowns, she learns of “The Condition.” It explains the distance of the house from the river, the fact that her husband will not travel on the water. She is shown a genealogy. Every generation has a death from drowning. And JoJo’s name is added. Eventually Mariamma, who has become Big Ammachi, a capable manager of her household, bears another child, a girl with a developmental difficulty leaving her a perpetual child. Baby Mol brings perpetual love and an uncanny prescience about events. Fifteen years pass, and at a point of giving up hope, Big Ammachi has a son, named Philipose.

Philipose has the condition. Sent to college in Madras, he soon quits due to deafness that impedes his ability to follow the lectures. On the carriage home, he meets Elsie Chandy, an artist, and is smitten. They’d had a brief encounter when Philipose risked his life carrying a dying child on a river barge during floods to the nearest hospital, and was given a ride home by Elsie and her father. He strives to educate himself and becomes a writer, producing a column, “The Ordinary Man” widely followed throughout the country. Eventually, through a broker, Elsie’s family agrees to the marriage. It seems like a beautiful love affair, that sadly ends with the tragic death of their child Ninan. They blame each other and Philipose, injured trying to rescue Ninan, falls into opium addiction. Elsie leaves but returns when she learns Baby Mol is pining for her, and in failing health. Philipose and Elsie are intimate once and it is soon evident that Elsie is pregnant. As she approaches delivery, she has a seizure. Big Ammachi assists in a difficult breech birth, nearly costing the mother her life.

The baby is named Mariamma, after her grandmother. Soon after her recovery, Elsie disappears after going to the river to bathe, her body never found. Philipose sorts out his life, becomes an exemplary father, and continues his writing work, turning over his estate to Shamuel, and eventually, Shamuel’s son Joppan, to operate. Big Ammachi has dreamed of both a hospital in Parambil, and that her grand-daughter would become a doctor and find the cause of “The Condition” that plagues her family.

The book also involves a parallel plot line in which a young Scottish doctor, Digby Kilgour, goes to India to acquire surgical experience. Working for an incompetent superior, he has an affair with the superior’s wife, ending in a tragic fire that only he survives, with his right hand badly burned. A couple, grateful for an earlier medical intervention on his part, shelter him and connect him with a doctor working with lepers, who operates on his hand. He is helped by a young girl who helps him recover fine movements in the hand through drawing. Through much of the novel, we wonder what the what the connection of this plotline is with the main plotline of Big Ammachi and her family. Hang in there. There is one.

The story spans the period from 1900 to 1977. India goes through huge transformations through this time that serve as a backdrop for the novel, from a British colony par excellence to an independent country, seeking to modernize amid political ferment, with the electrification of the countryside and advances in medicine and modern technology. We get some sense in the novel of how this presses against traditional caste divisions, particularly in the relations between the family of Big Ammachi and Shamuel and his son Joppan.

I found the writing particularly engaging. It felt to me that Abraham Verghese writes with the same reverence for his characters that he has for his patients (he is a Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford). One senses a deep sympathy for his characters, even as they struggle with tragedy, estrangement, and the vicissitudes of life and death. He portrays a community shaped by faith, love, and purpose. And he conveys the noble possibilities of the medical profession, evident in Rune Orquist, the doctor of a leper mission who operates on Kilgour’s hand, and in Mariamma, and the professors who train her. To read Verghese is to read a consummate story weaver who has thought deeply about the human condition in its frailty and fallibility, in the powerful bonds upon which our lives and loves depend, and in the hopes and holy aspirations that represent the best in human striving.

Review: Hangdog Souls

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Hangdog Souls, Marc Joan. London: Deixis Press, 2022.

Summary: A fugitive English soldier in southern India makes a Faustian bargain winning endless life at the cost of countless others over three centuries.

John Saunders is a fugitive English soldier in the Dravidian highlands of southern India as the British colonials are invading. He has a beautiful wife and an adorable son, who has captured the eye of the corrupt ruler with a mysterious machine in the dome of his castle complex. John is feigning that he is Portuguese and has brought seeds of eucalyptus trees that he hopes to establish in the highlands, making his fortune. As the British lay siege, he plans an escape for himself and huis family, but is found out by the ruler, who offers him a Faustian bargain, to become the “bridge” for souls, offering them a better world for their lives.

His trees are saved, and recur throughout the succeeding vignettes. But his wife and son are not. But John cannot die, even from a wound that nearly beheads him. He must live with his shame while ushering others to their fate. The story unfolds as a series of vignettes over 300 years. A priest burdened with the death of his wife Emma who encounters John. A butterfly enthusiast seeking the Black Papilio, and finding so much more. A functionary of the Sarpal Tea Company sent to the Kalisholi estates to investigate accounts ends up offering himself to a snake at a time when the local gods demand five garlands, five lives. A tourist glimpsing the mysterious woman in a blue sari, An embalmer who must create images of three gods using human corpses. A boy indentured to an uncle who immolates himself after listening to John’s story.

On it goes until three hundred years later, a Keralan particle physicist, Chandy John, involved in an experiment that has driven the previous scientist mad. Will he succumb to the burden of his own losses and griefs, having lost his wife in a tragic accident or will he break the cycle?

The book revolves around the question: What weight can balance the death of an innocent? How much grief must John bear for the grief he causes, and for how long? When will the scales be balanced? John is able to do what he does because of the griefs others bear. The appeal of escape through death, perhaps atoning for one’s guilt and shame. But the question makes us wonder if in fact whether there is any human counterweight to the death of an innocent?

I’ve seen this book classified in the horror genre. It seemed to me to have elements of horror, historical fiction, and magical realism about it. I’m not sure I know what it is. For the first hundred pages or so, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Yet as story after story unfolded, variations on a theme I found myself wondering how or whether this would all end, and drawn into the storytelling to find out.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Midnight’s Children

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Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie. New York: Random House, 1981 (25th Anniversary Edition, 2006).

Summary: Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight when India won its independence. He believes his life is “twinned” with the fate of the country, even as he is telepathically linked with the other “midnight children”, all of whom have unusual powers.

Salman Rushdie is a native of India of Muslim descent most often known for his book The Satanic Verses, the publication of which resulted in a fatwa calling for his assassination. Since 2000, he has lived in New York City. This novel, his second, brought him to the attention of the literary world and was awarded the Booker Prize and was selected one of the hundred best novels of all time by the Modern Library.

The central figure, Saleem Sinai, is narrating his life to Padma, “the pickle woman” who is taking care of him. Central to his life story is that he was born at the stroke of midnight at the moment India gained its Independence. He sees himself as a twin with India, and that his experiences and actions are intertwined with that of the country. His life and family dysfunctions and travails parallel those of India. In his personal history, he gets caught up in the Indo-Pakistan wars and Bangladeshi independence.

He and the other babies born in the first hour of Independence all have unusual powers. Saleem’s is the ability to telepathically link them together in the “Midnight Children’s Conference” where they deliberate how they might use their powers in their young country. The hopeful promise of these children is not attained, and one, Shiva, who was switched with Saleem at birth is a destroyer, symbolized by his powerful knees, while Saleem’s sensitivities are symbolized by his nose that can sniff out not only smells but dispositions and longings.

Rushdie writes in the genre of magical realism, similar to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Noses, knees, serpents, and impotent men recur through the book. When Saleem’s wife goes into labor, at the beginning of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, she labors thirteen days, until the emergency lifts. In all of this, the life story of Saleem is mystically linked with the nation.

The challenge in reading this work is both remembering this connection and understanding the history of India during the time spanned by the novel (1947 to 1979). One wishes, particular in the newer edition, that it would have been annotated for those not deeply acquainted with this history. Rushdie himself observes that western readers tend to read this novel as fantasy while readers from India see the book as almost a history.

We trace the central figure from the hopefulness and growing awareness of boyhood to a growing sense of pathos, sadness and, indeed impotence, perhaps reflecting the frustration of India’s hopes, particularly during the Indira Gandhi rule. A life story, that of its own seems sad, and at points dysfunctional, in fact becomes commentary for the early years of India’s statehood. Sadly, this narrative could be the story of many post-colonial states. But Saleem has a son, and perhaps a new generation…. Perhaps.