Review: The East Indian by Brinda Charry
The East Indian begins at an interesting time. The Dutch have already arrived on the southern shores of India and set up shop. The English have just landed, lured by the lucrative prospects of trade. In the small city of Armagon, an unnamed courtesan’s son flits between castes and religions refusing to be slotted by virtue of his unknown father. Over time, he learns English from one of his mother’s regular patrons, an officer of the East India company, as they sail up and down the Coromandel coastline. A series of events leads to the family shifting to the Portuguese settlement of Sao Tome in present-day Chennai. Here, the boy is given the name Tony and it is prophesied that he will travel to the far lands where the sun sets. A cholera outbreak leaves Tony bereft of his family and his mother’s English patron promptly charts a plan for him to travel with the company’s officials to London to make his fortune. There, Tony transforms into the East Indian, lumped with others united by nothing but the colour of their skins. His troubles and the novel itself truly begins once he is kidnapped and shipped off to Virginia to work on the plantations.
In America, Tony struggles to reinforce his identity as he is often mistaken for the other kind of Indian, a Moor, a Turk or a member of any other dark-skinned race. As he gets indentured to a master, he makes friends with the only people who’ll take him in, other slaves. For a long time, his one form of contact with the outside world are the letters he writes on Little Sammy’s behalf to his parents. His master picks on him relentlessly and he is often whipped and forced to work alone. Switching hands as slaves often do, Tony follows another master on a grand adventure through dense jungles and deep caves. The new master, however, catches an errant Indian arrow in the back and Tony finds himself masterless for a bit before he is apprenticed to a physician. It’s the one job he has dreamed of since setting foot on foreign shores. But he ends up being more slave than apprentice, relegated as he is to domestic duties and household chores. Fed up, he begins to hawk love potions on the side, which leads him to unemployment once more.
Tony ends up in the good Doctor Herman’s employ where he spends a short period tending to the sick. Patients heal rather hastily on the days when the doctor is absent, and Tony himself must administer the treatment. But the calm doesn’t last and when he becomes a part of a local rebellion, he must choose between his physician’s oath to do no harm and to fight for his rights as a brown man next to his friends. On the night of the rebellion, his moral compass is put to the test in the most unexpected ways and his Hippocratic oath and his very future is put on the line as he discovers the kind of man he is destined to be.
The author Brinda Charry does not shy away from tackling the big questions of race and identity in this ambitious three-continent-spanning novel. In London, Tony is surprised by the shunning of his landlady Mistress Jane, who has taken an East Indian husband. He contrasts her relationship with that of his mother and her English consort back home. Mistress Jane teaches him of the fundamental hypocrisies regarding interracial couples. She points out that rules rarely apply equally to all and that gender, privilege and the ritual of marriage hold great sway even across cultures.
At the theatre, Tony remarks to his friend Peter that the Indian boy in the Shakespearean play they are watching has no agency or role at all. Peter calls it a fit depiction of East Indian workers in London aptly naming them, “a people who live in the shadows.”
The section set in Virginia reminds the reader that Frontier America and the ideas of “freedom” and the free market were built on the backs of slaves. It turns out that Trump’s idea of an exclusionary wall is not a novel concept either. Years ago, the Americans sought to protect their stock by enclosing themselves within great walls that would keep out Indians and wolves. Tony’s botched love affair with Anne is emblematic of the racial and social hierarchies of the day. She wrongly accuses him of slipping her a love potion and then attempting to ravish her, for why else would she flirt with a Moor? This, when relayed at the local tavern causes the men, former servants without land or money, who, until that day had been disdainful of Anne, to turn into gallant knights ready to defend her honour. When Tony’s employer Dr Herman steps in to testify on his behalf, he is berated for trusting a Moor and taking him on as an apprentice. The women, who were not fond of Annie, use the incident to insult her by saying that she chose to lie with a “negro”.
Charry’s moving prose brings out the ambiguity of identity and the worry with which everyone looks at brown Tony in Virginia. When he is beaten up, he is told that the white man cannot abide Saracens, Mahometans, Moors, Orientals, Powhatans, Gypsies, Arabs, etc. The in-between hue of his skin makes him the monumental other, far more dangerous and despicable than the known African American. As he is beaten up, the men of African descent too join the white ones in landing blows on Tony. The loneliness of being the only one of his kind haunts him throughout his journey.
The East Indian is a moving meditation on the idea of home. Virginia, despite all its promises of riches, is not thought of as home by any except the Virginian Indians. Tony realizes this when he looks at Master Menefie’s dwelling. Big though it is, it has been put together in a hurry and reeks of impermanence. All the landowners think of Virginia as a halting place to reverse their fortunes before they head back to England. Tony’s changing views on home are a sign of emotional maturing as he finds out what it means to survive and endure in a foreign land and eventually become his own shelter. He muses that, like a snail, he carries his home upon his back; he will find it wherever he happens to be, and will make it from what he holds within himself.
This is a moving novel with rich characters and a pacy plot. Brinda Charry does a wonderful job of marking the passage of time through the evolution of relationships, rituals and culture. Her prose does not get lost in the evocation of a time and place but carries within it strong emotional thrusts that are amplified through the novel’s setting. The emotional and moral conundrums that the characters go through are, at heart, universal in nature and touch upon love, friendship, belonging and home. The tri-continental journey that Tony takes is as much internal as it is external and that is perhaps what makes Charry’s work truly unique and relevant for our times.
Percy Bharucha is a freelance writer and illustrator with two biweekly comics, The Adult Manual and Cats Over Coffee. Instagram: @percybharucha
The East Indian begins at an interesting time. The Dutch have already arrived on the southern shores of India and set up shop. The English have just landed, lured by the lucrative prospects of trade. In the small city of Armagon, an unnamed courtesan’s son flits between castes and religions refusing to be slotted by virtue of his unknown father. Over time, he learns English from one of his mother’s regular patrons, an officer of the East India company, as they sail up and down the Coromandel coastline. A series of events leads to the family shifting to the Portuguese settlement of Sao Tome in present-day Chennai. Here, the boy is given the name Tony and it is prophesied that he will travel to the far lands where the sun sets. A cholera outbreak leaves Tony bereft of his family and his mother’s English patron promptly charts a plan for him to travel with the company’s officials to London to make his fortune. There, Tony transforms into the East Indian, lumped with others united by nothing but the colour of their skins. His troubles and the novel itself truly begins once he is kidnapped and shipped off to Virginia to work on the plantations.
In America, Tony struggles to reinforce his identity as he is often mistaken for the other kind of Indian, a Moor, a Turk or a member of any other dark-skinned race. As he gets indentured to a master, he makes friends with the only people who’ll take him in, other slaves. For a long time, his one form of contact with the outside world are the letters he writes on Little Sammy’s behalf to his parents. His master picks on him relentlessly and he is often whipped and forced to work alone. Switching hands as slaves often do, Tony follows another master on a grand adventure through dense jungles and deep caves. The new master, however, catches an errant Indian arrow in the back and Tony finds himself masterless for a bit before he is apprenticed to a physician. It’s the one job he has dreamed of since setting foot on foreign shores. But he ends up being more slave than apprentice, relegated as he is to domestic duties and household chores. Fed up, he begins to hawk love potions on the side, which leads him to unemployment once more.
Tony ends up in the good Doctor Herman’s employ where he spends a short period tending to the sick. Patients heal rather hastily on the days when the doctor is absent, and Tony himself must administer the treatment. But the calm doesn’t last and when he becomes a part of a local rebellion, he must choose between his physician’s oath to do no harm and to fight for his rights as a brown man next to his friends. On the night of the rebellion, his moral compass is put to the test in the most unexpected ways and his Hippocratic oath and his very future is put on the line as he discovers the kind of man he is destined to be.
The author Brinda Charry does not shy away from tackling the big questions of race and identity in this ambitious three-continent-spanning novel. In London, Tony is surprised by the shunning of his landlady Mistress Jane, who has taken an East Indian husband. He contrasts her relationship with that of his mother and her English consort back home. Mistress Jane teaches him of the fundamental hypocrisies regarding interracial couples. She points out that rules rarely apply equally to all and that gender, privilege and the ritual of marriage hold great sway even across cultures.
At the theatre, Tony remarks to his friend Peter that the Indian boy in the Shakespearean play they are watching has no agency or role at all. Peter calls it a fit depiction of East Indian workers in London aptly naming them, “a people who live in the shadows.”
The section set in Virginia reminds the reader that Frontier America and the ideas of “freedom” and the free market were built on the backs of slaves. It turns out that Trump’s idea of an exclusionary wall is not a novel concept either. Years ago, the Americans sought to protect their stock by enclosing themselves within great walls that would keep out Indians and wolves. Tony’s botched love affair with Anne is emblematic of the racial and social hierarchies of the day. She wrongly accuses him of slipping her a love potion and then attempting to ravish her, for why else would she flirt with a Moor? This, when relayed at the local tavern causes the men, former servants without land or money, who, until that day had been disdainful of Anne, to turn into gallant knights ready to defend her honour. When Tony’s employer Dr Herman steps in to testify on his behalf, he is berated for trusting a Moor and taking him on as an apprentice. The women, who were not fond of Annie, use the incident to insult her by saying that she chose to lie with a “negro”.
Charry’s moving prose brings out the ambiguity of identity and the worry with which everyone looks at brown Tony in Virginia. When he is beaten up, he is told that the white man cannot abide Saracens, Mahometans, Moors, Orientals, Powhatans, Gypsies, Arabs, etc. The in-between hue of his skin makes him the monumental other, far more dangerous and despicable than the known African American. As he is beaten up, the men of African descent too join the white ones in landing blows on Tony. The loneliness of being the only one of his kind haunts him throughout his journey.
The East Indian is a moving meditation on the idea of home. Virginia, despite all its promises of riches, is not thought of as home by any except the Virginian Indians. Tony realizes this when he looks at Master Menefie’s dwelling. Big though it is, it has been put together in a hurry and reeks of impermanence. All the landowners think of Virginia as a halting place to reverse their fortunes before they head back to England. Tony’s changing views on home are a sign of emotional maturing as he finds out what it means to survive and endure in a foreign land and eventually become his own shelter. He muses that, like a snail, he carries his home upon his back; he will find it wherever he happens to be, and will make it from what he holds within himself.
This is a moving novel with rich characters and a pacy plot. Brinda Charry does a wonderful job of marking the passage of time through the evolution of relationships, rituals and culture. Her prose does not get lost in the evocation of a time and place but carries within it strong emotional thrusts that are amplified through the novel’s setting. The emotional and moral conundrums that the characters go through are, at heart, universal in nature and touch upon love, friendship, belonging and home. The tri-continental journey that Tony takes is as much internal as it is external and that is perhaps what makes Charry’s work truly unique and relevant for our times.
Percy Bharucha is a freelance writer and illustrator with two biweekly comics, The Adult Manual and Cats Over Coffee. Instagram: @percybharucha
