When the Fight Was Done

(A Novel of the Maratha Wars)

Frank Rogers

ISBN 0-14302880-4

Penguin. Pages 281. Rs 250

The journey of the Princess (the beautiful Lakshmibai, daughter of the Bhonsle kings of Nagpur), escorted (accidentally, but almost pre-ordained) by Robbie (Captain Robert MacKenzie, of the Poona Subsidiary Force of the British Indian Army) to where she should have been received by the Maharaja of Satara as his bride, ends precipitately, but quite forlornly, in jauhar en route. After a long wait at Poona, diverted by the political manipulations, and social propaganda, of Peshwa Bajirao-II, a powerful minister of the Maharaja of Satara, she is not allowed to reach her destination, either way.

The ‘Fight’ turns out to be not a mere series of ground skirmishes and battles, but a significant symbolism that simultaneously deconstructs the expression into three parallel sinuous scripts: a war of wily, sly and desperate contemporary Maratha political intrigues; Captain MacKenzie’s battle with his persistent haunting spirits of guilt - his psyche suffers with qualms of a disgrace scandalously inherited at the battlefields of Waterloo - and his blurred ambitions of recognition and self-esteem; and Lakshmibai’s personal struggle to break free of the fetters of formless philosophy of propriety, almost transforming her conflict, in thought, into the first movement for woman’s emancipation.

Any clue to the architecture of the novel and its concomitant ambience is not betrayed by the title of the novel: apparently derived from Shakespeare’s Henry IV. One can detect, throughout, the flavour of oriental contemplation: the fatalist premonitions emanating from the capsizing paper-boats, shattered reflections in water of a melancholy moon, deadly Kali carrying a fragile lotus, the curvaceous figure of the undressed Princess dancing in the flame lit in tiny earthen-pots, the turban of the Pindari chieftain Wazir Khan shaped like a poisonous mushroom, the self-annihilating and honourable instinct of jauhar, to wit.

The context and content: the fatal flaw (self-gnawing guilt), the political ambitions (illegitimate British colonial policies, Peshwa Baji Rao’s illicit yearning to dominate the Maratha ruling clan), strategic miscalculations by military dominated politics, the dastardly role of the malcontent (Madhav Rao Khale, the ignoble vakil of Satara), are yarn that is the weave of the web that holds the tenuous waft of contemporary life. Trampling by royal elephants in Poona and the excitable and incite-able crowds, the littering of the landscape with gouged and mutilated bodies, butchering every member of the Princess’ escort party, including the father-figure Rajkumar Sambhaji Bhonsle, the jauhar by the Princess and her friends-in-waiting, the final Pindari slaughter: these are legacy engendering an immense sense of utter ignominy!

The deconstruction resolves the Captain’s conflict with his sense of dishonour - by an exemplary deed of valour that exorcises the persecuting demons of Waterloo, culminating with the London Despatches. It, however, politically correctly, leaves open any comment on the intricate, baffling and bewildering machinations of the Maratha clans against each other, incomprehensible to the Western mind. But above all, the deconstruction penetrates into the fierce but fruitless resistance of the shackled Princess against the traditionalist rigidities of a social reflection that tend to strangle the immaculate freedom of her blooming and unsullied womanhood.

Love - a malaise that gets oddly mixed up with passion that is stubbornly denied, till the royal princess boldly initiates the first steps - consummated in an unearthly locale, is uncharacteristically pristine. But such are the idiosyncrasies of the greatest emotion experienced by humans, that a new remorse displaces the material ambitions and old guilt, and drives the hero to his last honest action - the ultimate act of escape - in heart-rending memory of his love, the Princess!

Frank Rogers, the sixty-plus American professor of Literature, transports temporally into the second decade of the nineteenth century (September 1817) English Empire, and plunges spatially into the exotic Indian Deccan - no doubt he has worked hard. The single thread of the plot searches eagerly, and sometimes desperately, for new openings. The local landscape is keenly etched. The deep-rooted conspiracy, typically oriental contortions included, to force the Princess into a corner sustains curiosity. The details of the darbar of Peshwa Baji Rao at Poona, the dresses and the battle strategies, the caravans and their mundane routines, the banjara camps tailing the marches of various Indian Armies - all are a source of nodding agreement.

But, critically, the characterisation of the cast lacks a direction. Robert MacKenzie remains memorable only when he is all alone, lost in his trance fervently fumbling for the courage to rationalise his own conduct, and an acceptable distinction between love and passion. Princess Lakshmi scarcely ever lets one transgress the formal stiffness of correct conduct - her encounter with passion is almost unexpected - and Rogers seems to hurry through the only delicate and beautifully romantic episode, only to rudely shock the senses with a grossness, apparently aimed at ‘modern’ readers. The short description of Baji Rao’s fury - who "...tried to speak but in his vehemence stuttered inarticulately until red spittle flew from his lips" – provides occasional live histrionics, but the only humour in the novel trickles from the cameo by Dr MacPherson who pretentiously displays his needle and thread ready to embroider "the hide" of Capt Robert.

This is Frank Rogers’ debut novel, published in 2003, and is a weird and wonderful mix of curious depiction, delicate description, and parched passion. It, intermittently, provokes an intensity of emotion rarely encountered now - I read it a second time after a gap of four years - and leaves one scorched, when the desiccation is done!