An Indian In A Changing World: Review Of 'The Imitation Englishman'

Devki Pande’s debut novel The Imitation Englishman (Bloomsbury) finds its starting point in her own family: it follows in the footsteps of her great-grandfather, who travelled from Almora to Heidelberg as a young law student during WWI. Pande retraced his journey while researching the novel, in Heidelberg, through a Columbia University grant. The family connection gives the book a personal impulse, but she expands that into a much larger story. She takes a young Indian student in Europe during WWI and places him at the intersection of empire and revolution, handicapped by the fact that he has never been abroad before.

In 1916, Madhusudan Chandra Joshi, a young clerk from Almora, leaves India to study law in Heidelberg. His journey takes an unexpected turn when he meets Amir Farooqui, a mysterious revolutionary who draws him into the Hindu-German Conspiracy—an actual plot for Indian freedom operated by Indians in exile, which became better known during World War II when Netaji Subhash Bose joined hands with Hitler and the Japanese. Germany, however, is too brief a part of this story.

Pande brings into view a world of Indian students, lawyers, soldiers and revolutionaries who are seen as outsiders by both the Germans and the Allied forces, regardless of their attempts to belong or fight a war for freedom. It also shows how WWI complicated loyalties. Indians were fighting in the British Empire’s armies even as others abroad were trying to undermine that empire. When Indian regiments of the British Empire begin fighting the Germans, it becomes impossible for Madhusudan and Amir to remain in Heidelberg. Madhusudan leaves for London while Amir travels to San Francisco and drops out of the story.

Pande leaves out well-known Indians in London at the time such as Indra Lal Roy who became a flying ace in the British Royal Flying Corps, often compared to the Red Baron and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh who supported Indian soldiers and lascars. Even Mahatma Gandhi made his way through London at the time, though he obviously has no role to play in Pande’s narrative. Their absence does underline how deliberately Pande narrows her focus to the particular group of Indians whose lives cross Madhusudan’s and the issues of confronting racism.

Despite Pande’s fluency of storytelling, the novel occasionally feels caught between two impulses: the desire to tell a gripping tale of war and conspiracy and the desire to examine the frustrations of those striving to make an impact in a world determined to marginalise them. For example, the American episodes are too fleeting, possibly because they did not fit into the general context easily. Pande throws in details such as the first Christmas in 1914 when the armies came together in spiritual harmony, to make the role of Indians in the war more atmospheric. This allows the larger conflict to filter into the everyday lives of her characters.  Occasionally, the wealth of detail does tend to slow down the narrative.

What remains to the fore is the idea of the young Indian abroad as outsider grappling with suspicions of swadeshi inclinations and the colour of his skin. Madhusudan has the education and the social connections to enter spaces closed to many Indians, yet, colonialism keeps reminding him that access is not the same as equality and makes him self-conscious. We repeatedly hear of his clumsiness during social occasions and his inability to handle cutlery at the dining table so that he comes across as a kind of fall guy—unlike his more confident friends—despite his brilliance at studies.

The title highlights the novel’s focus. Madhusudan is not simply an Indian in a white man’s world; he is an Indian trying to understand what it means to become, or appear to become, English. The question is not merely whether he can enter English society, but what he must give up or imitate in order to become acceptable in a world where he is seen as an intruder. And just when he is succeeding in this, becoming a leader of an Indian alliance, circumstances force him to reconsider both his ambitions and his relationship with the country he has left behind.

The Imitation Englishman does not always manage to balance its many strands equally, but it brings a relatively unfamiliar part of Indian history to the reader’s attention. It reminds us that the story of India’s freedom went well beyond the subcontinent. It was also being played out in lecture halls, railway stations, cafés and boarding houses across a world at war.

(Anjana Basu is a writer and an advertising consultant based in Kolkata. Her recent works include The House the Press Built and Translating for Rituparno)