White Elephant

‘You may beat the elephant, hurl invective at it, drive it away. But it is the elephant that will determine the length to which you can go.’

That the elephant, a being that can overpower man in the blink of an eye, allows itself to be subjugated by him is one of the eternal mysteries of this world. However, as Jeyamohan writes in his historical novel White Elephant, it is the elephant that will ultimately decide unto what point man may wield his power over it.

White Elephant (வெள்ளை யானை, Ezhuthu, 2013) speaks of such a moment of truth in the lives of oppressed Dalit workers in India. Set in 1878 against the backdrop of the great famines in British India, it presents a fictionalised account of what is, arguably, the earliest Dalit uprising in the country. Though a short-lived strike that was quashed within two days, it galvanised three hundred otherwise mute labourers into a unified action of protest. The protest gains greater significance when seen in the context of a section of society, which for ages past was treated as ‘untouchable’, and formed the lowest stratum in the caste structures of India. As the author says in his preface, it records the story of the ‘first fist raised by the slave against a history of oppression’, making it an important work and a landmark novel.

The story unfolds in Madrasapatinam (present-day Chennai). The township of Madras was born in 1640, when the East India Company constructed Fort St. George on a strip of beach it had leased from a local ruler. The area in and around the Fort, which Europeans made their home, came to be known as the White Town. Over time, native Indians arrived from different parts of the region in search of work and settled down to form the Black Town. Dalits constituted a large part of this servant class, which catered to the needs of the white sahibs.

The Dalit workers in the novel are employed at the ‘Ice House’, a warehouse in Madrasapatinam maintained by Tudor & Co., an American business venture engaged in the thriving ice trade. Ice was shipped from New England to India for use in banquets thrown by the British all across the country. During this time, India was in the throes of the worst famine it had ever seen. The policies of the colonial government, including the cultivation of cash crops and the disastrous export of food grains, exacerbated the droughts faced by the people in various parts of the country. With the death toll exceeding ten million, the Great Famine of 1876 – 1878 caused large-scale migration from Southern India to other British colonies, where the migrants went to work as indentured labourers on plantations.

Locating itself in the Madras Presidency, which saw a great number of such casualties, the novel juxtaposes the mammoth but absurd effort involved in delivering ice from the lakes of New England to the glasses of British officials, against the abject starvation of the Indian masses, thereby raising not only questions of caste, but those of class and morality too.

The book’s title is a reference to the massive blocks of ice stored at the Ice House and sawed into cubes by bare-bodied Dalit workers, toiling under sub-zero temperatures. It is also a metaphor for the British bureaucracy, which seemed to function merely to maintain itself, while turning a blind eye to questions of welfare or justice. Through this, the author reverses the typical colonial characterisation of India as a huge, unknowable elephant.

Interestingly, the story is told from the perspective of Aiden Byrne, an Irishman who serves under the British crown as a police officer. A poetic man greatly inspired by Shelley, his sense of morality is jolted by the scenes at the Ice House as well as a painful but deliberate journey he undertakes into the famine-stricken Tamil land. The novel reminds us that history always has a plural quality to it and that the notion of an absolute truth that applies equally to all is a dangerous and divisive illusion. Jeyamohan explores this in his work by bringing forth how an extremely self-servient rule left in its wake the seeds for the upliftment of a people. In this aspect, the author presents a Tolstoyesque view of history as an uncontrollable web of events.

The novel also brings to the fore the forgotten legacy of Pandit C. Iyothee Thass, the first anti-caste leader from the Madras Presidency, on whom the character Kathavarayan is modelled. In the novel, Kathavarayan, a social activist and Dalit leader, illuminates Aiden about the caste dynamics behind the oppression that he witnesses. In many ways, the Dalit leaders of later years, including B. R. Ambedkar, are inheritors of Iyothee Thass’s legacy. The first notable Scheduled Caste leader to embrace Buddhism, he issued a revolutionary declaration around the time in which the novel is set, asserting that Dalits were not Hindus,  urging them to register themselves as casteless Dravidians.

Jeyamohan is a pre-eminent writer in Tamil literature. Apart from White Elephant, his seminal works include the Venmurasu, a stunning reimagination of the Mahabharata epic, spanning 26 novels and 25,000 pages; Vishnupuram, a fantasy that weaves through myth and philosophy; and Kottravai, which explores the symbol of a mother goddess. With more than 300 short stories and 200 books to his name, his writing is steeped in India’s spiritual and cultural traditions, while addressing universal questions of human existence. He is an author the world must read for the sheer depth and expansiveness of his body of work. Quite surprisingly, though, he is yet to be published in English in a meaningful way. I have just completed the first English translation of any of Jeyamohan’s works to be published by a national publishing house in India. I have also been awarded the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)’s open-language mentorship for 2022, for which I am working on translating White Elephant with the guidance of award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid. A prominent publisher in India has expressed interest in the project, but I do not yet have a publishing contract for it.

White Elephant is a critically acclaimed work that layers the history of a people, the history of a city, and the histories of nations to form a complex narrative that stirs our conscience. As a novel documenting the lives of the subaltern in the most testing of times and as an alternative, yet balanced view of colonialism, it is critical that this work reaches a wider audience through translation.

Thank you for considering my application to the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants 2023.

 Priyamvada Ramkumar’s book outline for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant