“Home-leaving, homecoming, home-losing. The only word they shared in common was home.”
We are delighted to introduce the author of The English Problem, Beena Kamlani. She won a Pushcart Prize and the Yeovil (UK) Fiction Award for her work, as well as numerous fellowships and residencies. As former senior editor at Viking Penguin, she edited a wide range of books, including ones by Nobel, National Book Award, Pulitzer, and Booker prize winners and nominees. New York University, where she taught courses for editors, gave her an award for teaching excellence. In these excerpts from an exclusive interview, she tells us about the history and inspiration behind her brilliant debut.
What is “the English problem”?
In 1835, Lord Macaulay, a representative of the British in India, in an address to Parliament in London, advocated that the native languages and culture of the India the British had colonized was not worth much. The British decided that they would educate a superclass of Indians to be as British as themselves, and thereby institute the superiority of the English language and of British culture. Those who arrived in England—like my uncle, who inspired this story—soon discovered how deeply they were required to be good emulators. But along with that process came the disabling realization that to be accepted by the English as one of them was a very different thing from imitating them.
To my generation, growing up post independence, but yet under the shadow of colonialism, what we felt was a deep frustration. Ironically, we began to look down on what was distinctly Indian, and voluntarily embraced British culture. Deep scrutiny of that process of transformation and dislocation, of acceptance and exclusion, would come at some later date. The English Problem is an articulation of that process through the life of one man.
One of the inspirations for The English Problem was your own family history. Tell us about your uncle, and the information that influenced Shiv.
Atma S. Kamlani was my father’s half brother, from my grandfather’s first marriage to a young woman who bore him two children and died very young. When I began writing the novel, there were few facts at my disposal, and these were confined to what my father told me: a young man, precociously brilliant even at a young age, whom Gandhi had picked as a future bright star in an independent India, and had convinced my grandfather to send him to England to qualify as a barrister and return to India to join the fight for freedom with the rule of law on his side. Against all odds, Atma succeeded in gaining the requisite formal qualifications, but was eventually claimed by illness—what? how? when? I asked; my father didn’t know. I gradually found out a few more details: he qualified as a barrister and then became the only Indian on a four-person editorial team at The India Bulletin, a journal that broadcast Gandhi’s ideas on nonviolence as a means of educating the British on what was happening in India; he eventually returned to India, exhausted and depleted. Some information came too late to be considered for the novel: after a particularly grueling day in Derbyshire, he fell out of a window in his hotel, hit his head, and was taken to the emergency room in the local hospital in Belper. My grandfather arranged for his travel home accompanied by a British doctor and a male nurse. It is unclear to me if he recovered—Atma never returned to England, as far as I know, and died while still quite young. But he haunted me and I began imagining his life in London, so different from mine when I studied there a good half century later, and yet, somehow, still the same.
How were the literary giants featured in Shiv’s story, especially the Woolfs and Forster, actually involved in the Indian independence movement?
There were close connections between artists, writers, politicians, and publishers at the time. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press at the time was anticolonial in stance. Indian writers, along with émigré writers and intellectuals from parts of Europe routinely stopped to visit the press when they came to London. Their catalogues from the time do not represent much from India—hardly anything at all from “the Orient.” Perhaps the one writer most responsible for spawning interest in Indian literature was E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf’s friend, whose opinion she valued so highly. Forster visited India three times, cultivated friendships removed from the colonial sphere in India, and single-handedly supported the work of R.K. Narayan, G.V. Desani and others. He came to know Indians, did the thing Churchill, in his final years, admitted the British in India had not done, to their detriment: mingled more with the Indians in their time in India. The thing about Virginia Woolf is, as one reader of her work put it, “What you do matters enormously.” And she was greatly interested in India, on account of her ancestors and those in her family who had worked and lived there. Her politics were firmly on its side in its war for independence.
Why did you want to write this book now?
This novel chose me. It began with two ships—the Rajputana that brought Shiv to England and the Empress of Scotland that took him away, and these became the bookends of the story. (My curiosity was piqued when I found a small brooch in a bric-a-brac shop that was layered with blue butterfly wings and had an image of The Empress of Scotland on it.) The novel was like a carved door hidden by coverings but quivering with its own inner movement. It was asking to be seen, to be opened. At times, I felt I was just pulling away, layer by layer, the trappings that obscured it. It took nearly ten years before it let me fully in!
You can find The English Problem by Beena Kamlani in your nearest bookstores and on Amazon.