If you look up the Poetry Magazine, you will find Edward Lear—the famed Victorian painter, poet, and author of nonsense verse, born in 1812—described as ‘a wandering nonsense minstrel, never completely free of physical and emotional pain,’ whose ‘health steadily deteriorated until he died, alone except for a servant, on January 29, 1888.’ Lear’s final words before dying ‘expressed gratitude for the kindnesses of all his absent friends.’ His well-documented trait of wandering, one that suppressed his ostensible ‘rootlessness, aimlessness, loneliness, and uncertainty,’ also metaphorized his emotional life, in ‘the sense of melancholy that so often peeps through the playfully absurd surface of his nonsense verse.’ Being the twentieth-born of twenty-one children, most of whom died in infancy, destiny afforded Lear a delicate and star-crossed personal life, a fact that his idiosyncratic humor was often at pains to conceal. It is almost the same Lear that we find as the titular protagonist in Anindyo Roy’s novel, The Viceroy’s Artist (Hachette 2024), albeit in a much closer and humanized perspective.
Roy’s novel does not digress from the Lear we recognize from his biographies and stock-life-sketches. Set in 1873-74, featuring a 62-year-old Lear on his sojourn in British India, it opens with the artist himself, frail and ‘overweight, asthmatic, and prone to attacks of epilepsy,’ commencing with his commission to paint the Kanchenjunga for the Viceroy of India. Our introduction to him is set in the foothills of Darjeeling, while Lear is recovering from a fall off his sketching stool. Soon, we are plunged into Lear’s extensive travels across the subcontinent, bouncing along dusty roads by pony cart or jhampauns, enduring weeks-long slow journeys on the Indian Railways—an institution still in its early years—and stays in far-flung dak bungalows in hilly interiors. The Viceroy’s Artist takes us on a grueling journey—comprising the infamously sluggish mid-nineteenth-century train ride from Bombay to Calcutta followed by a Himalayan trek up to Kurseong’s Weathercock Point (three days by rail)—that poses severe trials for Lear’s health. In the absence of a single suspenseful plot—that one seems to readily expect of any work of historical fiction nowadays—Roy stitches together Lear’s journeys and inner reflections, as if his artistic representation of the Kanchenjunga was meant to correlate with the narrative’s flitting between the past and the present, flashbacks from his childhood, lost romances, to-and-froing friends, and lifelong struggles with his health. The novel is told episodically, showing Lear in the midst of his wanderings and moments when he composes nonsense verses, entertains children with fables, or converses with his loyal Albanian manservant Giorgi Kokalis—his most meaningful aide in the novel and perhaps even in his life. While it is not easy to confirm, or deny, thoughtful observation might suggest that Roy’s protagonist is to Roy what Kanchenjunga is to Lear—a ‘mighty’ mountain meant to be reproduced on canvas. My reasons for this conjecture are manifold.
Roy’s Lear is complex and richly human, in his playfulness, melancholia, eccentricities, jocularity, and the fate of being inwardly haunted by pain and longing, what with his physical vulnerabilities—his asthma, his epilepsy and fainting spells, and his ‘indy-gestion.’ On the other hand, Lear is replete with instinctual admiration for nature and science, devouring encyclopedias of Himalayan flora, devoted to the laughter of children, and well-aware of his streak of Victorian pomposity which he tempers with his self-deprecatory humor, whose humility many ears fail to discern. Besides, Lear’s world is populated by grandiose historical personages, including Maharaja Duleep Singh, Lockwood Kipling (whose son’s shadows are felt in Lear’s persona in that the latter writes limericks like ‘The Cummerbund’), Franklin Lushington, and even Queen Victoria. However, it is through Giorgi that we see Lear’s softer sides, as the former becomes a confidante to Lear who confides in him, bemoans his artistic doubts, and lovingly rebukes him. Few things in the novel surpass the authenticity of this bond. Perhaps it outshines Roy’s attempt at modernistic prose—the vaunted stream-of-consciousness, which the author, in the ‘Afterword,’ confirms as having been moderately derived from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)—whose languor, laced with Lear’s interior monologues, retains the monopoly of narrative and dialogue for the artist himself. This is, at once, the novel’s highlight and its frailty—for it to appear in the twenty-first century, just a year shy of the centenary of Woolf’s magnum opus, at a time when readers’ attention spans seem to have plummeted to their worst lows.
For readers compelled to be woefully unexposed to the essential substance of the great Victorian novel or novella—built with frightful loyalty by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and even Indian masons like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Shoshee Chunder Dutt—the knowledge that atmosphere and ambiance can also be characters is so often counted in the list of our literary casualties. The fact that this aspect of Roy’s novel makes us travel with Lear, in a most sensory way, might well be lost on the cynical eardrum.
For those looking to drench themselves in Raj nostalgia, there is plenty of ‘punkahs’ and ‘kitmutgars,’ ‘khansammahs,’ sahibs and memsahibs, kettledrums and Hobson-Jobson-lingo in the novel, although these are not, I suppose, Roy’s intended cornerstones. Rather, it is to recreate Lear as a sympathetic outsider, imbued with childlike curiosity and generosity and emotional intelligence that—like Ezra Jennings from Collins’ classic, The Moonstone (1868)—is chiseled by trauma. The bloated corpses of Banaras impress him with their chaotic beauty instead of shocking him, as much as a Rajput fortress against the blue horizon. Lear is a half-willing participant in the benefits of the British Empire but never wholly identifies with it—for he is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by it. To Roy’s Lear, the incidents of 1857 recall the horrors inflicted on Indians; imperial and Indo-Saracenic architecture is loathsome; ruins are safe spaces, being ‘astonishing spectacles without any embellishment’; and he longs for the reconciliation of his and his ilk’s split psyche. Lear, the most serious face of the novel, if not one of the most serious of the Victorian century, becomes absurdly lighthearted in the face of the performative imperial gravity of colonials. I daresay, Roy’s cast of colonial officialdom represents more than the nineteenth century—it also represents the sclerotic seriousness of officialdoms and their official opponents of the twenty-first century.
Roy’s fictional raconteur is a very thinly disguised historian; beneath that visage lies an abyssal philosopher who instantly recognizes the eerie familiarity of the end of an era when he sees it. To many eyes, Roy may seem to be filling in the shoes of E.M. Forster, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh. To me, his novel is more of a legatee of the early Victorian-era diaries of Emily Eden and Fanny Parkes who may be said to have painted the Himalayas of Simla and Mussoorie with their words in the manner Lear sets out to paint the Kanchenjunga.
Arup K. Chatterjee 