Book Excerpt|Love In The Time Of Empire

It looks like a romantic novel from the cover and despite that famous warning, one has to judge Once Upon a Summer by the title and the cover illustration. A dreamy girl, a lake and the promise of summer. Manjul Bajaj’s book is one of those rare things, a simple love story set in colonial times. What makes it complicated is the fact that ihe romance is between a handsome Indian syces and the young bubbly Madeline, an English girl visiting her father in India for the first time.  

Bajaj combines different characters and voices to tell her story which opens in a publisher’s in New York – though the publisher himself turns out to be the son of a nawab and an Englishwoman who sailed out of India to find his fortune and met the woman of his dreams in a shipboard romance. Ali became Alfred A Allye though his English wife Rose stayed who she was making another white non white pair who survived in the more cosmopolitan New York presumably because Alfred was fair skinned and therefore missed the coloured divide. Through Alfred unfolds the story of Madeline and Azeem who came together in the summer capital of Nainital where love flowered despite the division of race. 

Bajaj fleshes out her characters and gives the supporting cast ample room to express itself. There is Mariam Das, for example, the prudent Indian Christian taught in a convent school, who has learnt to work with English families with dignity and prudence and who is aware that her change of religion has not freed her from the shackles of caste, though she had learnt to speak the language of the masters.  

In the end it is a tale of cross cultural ripples with the waters muddied by colour, creed and caste. Complicated backstories flesh out the characters – though the clean sweep she makes of Azeem’s vast family seems a little too convenient to be believable – however, for the purposes of the narrative he requires to be a poor orphan reduced  to grooming  horses against a background of nawabs and English hierarchies. Of course Azeem has a passion for horses and a cleft chin which makes him all the more attractive to the naive Madeline who is presumably joining Somerville College when she returns to India.

Bajaj is a little undecided as to what she wants to do with Madeline beyond making her vibrant and attractive, her eyes filled with innocence and love for everything around her. However, she fails to understand the divides that exist between the rulers and the ruled in India with shades of an intellectual Adela Quested thrown in – Azeem reflects Aziz in some uncanny way. However that’s reading too much into a  poetic novel where Bajaj paints different backgrounds, throws in an interesting way for lovers to meet with parental permission and refrains from padding out the story too much.  She leaps from past to present and location to location keeping the reader wondering what next. There are few attempts at pretention – though mentions of books like Umrao Jaan Adda relates to the times and enhances the poetic nawabi character of  Azeem and provides an added bond with Madeline so that her coup de foudre has more depth. How does Madeline draw her Indian suitor – who definitely knows better – into her net? Bajaj says that she manages to enchant all the Indians she meets, unlike her mother who is uncomfortable with them.   

Their story makes for a novel within a novel – Alfred is about to write it down and fulfil his promise to his wife or get his granddaughter to write it down.  

Bajaj weaves her story layering her atmosphere so that it goes beyond mere romance adding a little of the history of Nainital and the way the British manage to live there creating their own space while shutting  the locals out of their lives except as domestics. Madeline’s is the lens that highlights the shortcomings of the colonial masters, even as she falls foul of their laws and thinks of New York as a means of escape. 

At its heart, Once Upon a Summer is a tale about women and their right to choose—who they love, where they live, and how they shape their own stories. – whether it is Madeline who feels that her choices should be treated with respect or Serena faces the fluctuations of publishing – the problems women publishers face in every sphere, even in their own family companies. It is these aspects that take Once Upon a Summer beyond mere race relations, immersing the reader in problems of caste and creed and the fact that an understanding family or the lack of it can make a difference to one’s social existence.  With a leisurely pace befitting its title, Bajaj’s novel explores love, identity, and belonging in a world governed by rigid hierarchies.