Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief

Sometime in November 1873, a myopic sexagenarian, prone to fits of ‘morbids’ lands in Bombay will spend the next fourteen-odd months crisscrossing the subcontinent with his painting paraphernalia, his journal, his Suliot manservant Giorgi, and his vivid imagination. Many of us would still be under the impression that Edward Lear only ‘wrote nonsense verse and created funny drawings to entertain children’, but he was also a celebrated artist, a personal painting tutor to Queen Victoria, and was commissioned by the Viceroy Lord Northbrook to paint the mighty Kanchenjunga for his ancestral home, Stratton Park. Skillfully blending fact and fantasy and merging his voice with Lear’s until the two are almost indistinguishable, Anindyo Roy crafts a historical fictional account of Lear’s sojourn in this ‘Jewel in the Crown’ where the ‘syllablubbery’ of hypocritical and sanctimonious cant is the patina covering the machinations and manoeuvres of Empire, and it is Roy as auteur who gives us a complex and nuanced perspective on the ‘white man’s burden’ and its aftermath. In the process we are also privy to Lear’s ‘curiosity and compassion’ and the presence of the half-concealed, subterranean layers of his traumatic childhood and adult attachments, that he carries in his psycho-emotional portmanteau. As the journey comes to an end, both reader and traveller are transformed by it.