Speaking Volumes: Ray Bradbury, October Country

(Published in the Business Standard, a few days after Ray Bradbury's death.)



In 1938, the pulp magazine Imagination! carried a story by a new and very young writer. Ray Bradbury, who died last week at the age of 91, was just 17 when he wrote Hollerbochen’s Dilemma, and neither he nor the title character survived this experience unscathed.

Hollerbochen was blown up. Bradbury discovered that when you’re writing for the pulps and your story stinks, readers will let you know. Bradbury survived. He even put Hollerbochen back together so that he could rescue the author, who was in this sequel held captive at his typewriter by legions of disappointed fans. For the next few years, Bradbury would continue to write terrible stories, until he started to write slightly less terrible stories. He ran a magazine of his own for a brief while—Futuria Fantastica, shortened to FuFa.

By the early 1940s, he had honed his craft; if pulp magazines like Weird Stories or Astounding Science Fiction gave him a sense of the technical tricks required, reading Steinbeck gave him a feel for the epic, which he would later use in the Martian Chronicles. He earned his place among the ABC of SF writers—Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke, shapers of imagination who were as influential as Heinlein or Philip K Dick.

The pulps are too easily dismissed today. Their lurid covers featured menacing aliens, improbable planets, space cowboys and the occasional wench of dazzling, interstellar comeliness. Many of the stories they carried were leftover werewolf trash or recycled tentacle terror. But as much as the New Yorker or Esquire, two US magazines that were also opening their doors to short story writers, pulps like Amazing or Weird Tales were excellent nurseries for a certain kind of writer. Bradbury wrote some of his best horror for pulps in the 1940s—many of these were later collected in October Country.

By the 1950s, his style had shifted, and many of the stories he wrote in the late 1940s and the early 1950s still carry resonance, especially for fellow writers. Junot Diaz found in Bradbury’s stories an echo of the experience of being an immigrant, a resident alien—Bradbury knew both kinds of alienation, the kind that came with having green tentacles, and the kind that came from being so different that you might as well have had green tentacles. His aliens were seldom repulsive (“dark they were and golden-eyed”, he writes of the Martians); Bradbury understood that just being different was enough to bring forth hostility.

For Neil Gaiman, who wrote a touching tribute on his blog, Bradbury’s realm of fantasy and alternate realities just beyond the human horizon opened up brave new worlds. (And sometimes, Bradbury’s world bleeds into Gaiman’s, or into Atwood’s, as though for a brief space, these very different writers occupied the same alien planet in a galaxy far, far away.)

The short story collections have an unusual quality, shared only by the very best science fiction and fantasy writers—from The Illustrated Man to The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun, they have dated well. Some readers today know Bradbury for his love stories, or for his exuberant Irish stories.

Many know him by the science fiction of his early and middle years, where an eager hunter travels back in time to bag a dinosaur, and discovers the butterfly effect in action or where children manouevre a pair of adults into an early, eerie version of a virtual reality game with a very nasty ending. And many know him for Fahrenheit 451, the novella with its dark refrain and with its warnings of a world where burning books for the ideas that they carry is institutionalised: “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner.”

In the same period, he wrote The Pedestrian, less well-known but equally terrifying in its vision of a time when men might be arrested simply because they don’t fit in, and because they make the police uneasy. “Business or profession?” the (robot) police car asks Leonard Mead. “I guess you’d call me a writer,” he says. “No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself.”

Bradbury wrote this in 1951, anticipating a time when writers wouldn’t be writing because television had taken over. “Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, [Mead] thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.”

After the soaring heights of the pulps, where he could take a reader to Mars and back, this was the grey reality he thought might lie ahead. But Bradbury’s dark future did and didn’t come true. The police states, the free expression debates, the iron rule of television, all of these happened; but the books didn’t die. It will always be October country, somewhere.

Speaking Volumes: From Pondies to Weight Loss

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2012.)

One of the perks of the reviewer’s job is that you will find deathless prose in the most unexpected places, even when it arrives concealed as, say, a weight-loss manual.

“Trying to lose weight? Running around in circles where you Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. Lose. Gain. No wonder it’s difficult to stay in shape. Because circles go on and on…. What if losing weight doesn’t begin with what’s on your plate but with what’s on your mind? Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind. Mind.”

Two decades on, “Eat.Delete” will probably be considered a classic example of vintage Indian pulp, right up there with Now That You’re Rich Lets Fall In Love or Anything For You Ma’am. The terse prose, the one-word sentences, and the attempt to grab the reader’s attention are all typical of the current pulp bubble in Indian English writing. The inadvertent, febrile surrealism may be easily lampooned, but it’s also the hallmark of the current crop of Indian bestsellers.




(Image from The Harappa Files, by Sarnath Banerjee)


Each month brings its new, derivative haul of books; if Chetan Bhagat inspired a slew of writers trying to capture the voice, love affairs and angst of contemporary urban Indians, Amish Tripathi is to blame for the current spate of terrible mythological-historical writing. But despite the effortless badness of their imitators, Indian pulp may have a larger story to tell.

If you’re trying to understand a country, pulp is far more useful than literary fiction. No matter how good it might be, the hallmark of what’s called literary fiction is its self-awareness. Pulp fiction is its sloppy, belly-scratching twin; pulp fiction is where a nation leaves the contents of its messy cupboards on display. If the job of serious fiction is to make sense of secret histories, or to shape our sense of history, what pulp fiction does is hold up an often mercilessly accurate mirror to what a nation really is, in all its ugliness and strangeness.

In India, it was the printing press in Pondicherry that began producing first English and then Hindi pulp—steamy, mildly pornographic paperbacks that would be called “Pondies” in tribute to the presses. The English Pondies, popular in the pre-Independence decades, were said to be written by Anglo-Indians, perhaps because they featured half-caste heroines called Helen and Linda. They were rapidly overtaken by their Hindi counterparts, which brought the attention back from vamps and cabaret dancers to more homely objects of lust—sahelis and bhabhis. The English Pondie died in about a decade, reviving only recently as an online cartoon strip that featured a well-endowed lady called Savitha Bhabhi; the Hindi pondie thrived, spawning sub-genres in detective and horror fiction along the way.

The two most interesting shifts in pulp fiction worldwide are happening in Japan and in Mexico. Japan’s long tradition of manga comics—cheap, poorly produced but enormously cross-categorised—is evolving yet again. Manga briefly went respectable as an American import, but the vogue for manga appears to be flickering out—and in Japan, mainstream manga publishers are increasingly challenged by the rise of self-published comics.

It is also impossible to talk about the manga industry—or manga comics—as though they represent a single, identifiable genre; instead, manga in Japan caters to an incredible variety of needs, from very dark porn to innocuous super-hero tales, romance or fashion-oriented manga for schoolgirls. This might be one of the directions that Indian pulp will take—more specialization, and as with Japanese manga, very little focus on quality.

Indian pulp is revealing in its prejudices and obsessions—weight loss, sex, money and arranged love marriages are all desirable and replace any political engagement beyond the superficial, stereotypes (of different communities, Americans, foreigners etc) crop up often and remain unexamined. But Indian pulp in English retains a kind of primal innocence—so different from contemporary Latin American writing.

The Latin American pulp market was once ruled by soap opera fiction—books that derived their plots from the “telenovellas”. Now Jorge Volpi writes about the “contamination” of the new narco-literature. The rise of the drug novel started in Colombia and has taken root in Mexico. Volpi’s grouse is with the shallowness of the genre: it “teaches no lessons, passes no moral judgments, and is barely an instrument of criticism”.

In both cases, Japan and Latin America, pulp thrives alongside good and often great literature. But Indian writing in English is in one of its periods of uncertainty and flux. Pulp takes up more space than any other kind of writing in English at present. It’s changing form and shape at high, almost viral speed. In another decade, perhaps this will be as dead as the English pondies of a previous era—unless it finds a way to evolve beyond today’s weight loss and arranged marriage clichés.

Speaking Volumes: "The Babu's style is clear and good"

(Published in the Business Standard, May 26, 2012. Happy Revolting Season.)





The Revolt of 1857 broke out on “a stiflingly hot Sunday” in May, as Christopher Hibbert writes. Summer was Mutiny season, and the British papers of the day mentioned both the unbearable heat and the unexpected betrayal.

The more seasoned British Indian papers were less surprised by either the weather or the fact of the Revolt itself. As historians of 1857 have chronicled, the warning signs were everywhere. Two tracts, in particular, would become part of the larger history of Indian writing in English—Kylas Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of Forty Eight Hours on the Year 1945 (published in 1835), and Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s The Republic of Orissa (published in 1845).

The Dutts were a fashionably literary family; Shoshee and his brothers were collectively dubbed the “Rambagan nest of singing birds”. Kylas was a cousin; the young poet Toru Dutt was also related to Shoshee Chunder; and Shoshee’s nephew, Romesh Chunder Dutt, was a well-known economic historian, whose first publication in 1877 was a history of the literature of Bengal. Shoshee and Kylas were Macaulay’s children, from Shoshee’s glad embrace of Christianity to their mutual belief (not shared by Romesh) that English was far superior to their native Bengali.

Indeed, Macaulay’s infamous Minute (“we have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated in their mother-tongue”) came out in 1835, the same year that Kylas Chunder Dutt’s work of speculative fiction was published. “The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar,” Macaulay observed.

And yet, the first serious work of fiction, speculative or otherwise, in English by an Indian writer was Kylas’s destabilizing vision of an India in 1945, rising up against the “subaltern oppression” of British rule, where “the dagger and the bowl were dealt out with a merciless hand” by the “British barbarians”. His projected rebellion fails; but the man who leads the Indians against Governor Lord Fell Butcher is a graduate fluent in English, using his education against the British.

In the light of the way in which the Revolt of 1857 garnered public support in India just 22 years after Kylas penned his fantasy, it’s interesting that he imagines a rebellion supported by “many of the most distinguished men—Babus, Rajas and Nababs”. And he is prescient when he writes that the “contagion of Rebellion would probably have infested every city in the kingdom, had it only had time to perfect its machinations”.

Ten years later, Shoshee could imagine a happier ending for those who would rise up in revolt. “The Republic of Orissa” is written as a page from the imagined annals of the 20th century, an alternate history imagined as the truth. Orissa is independent, and extending its borders into British India, ruled by “untamed men”, tribes who combine great strength with intrepid courage.

In Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s reworking of the Noble Savage theme, the tribes rise up against the British after a Slavery Act is passed in 1916. They are goaded into final action by the imprisonment of publishers, printers and the suppression of a free press. (Present-day governments might want to take note of Dutt’s assumption that the curbing of free expression would bring on rebellion faster than a Slavery Act, in his vision of India.) As the fierce and courageous Bheekoo Barik confronts “drunken John Bull”, the question the tribals aim to answer is crucial: Are the Juggomohuns and Gocooldosses, the Opertees and Bindabun Sirdars fit persons to be intrusted with the management of a vast empire? Shoshee’s answer is a stirring yes, and the rest of The Republic of Orissa introduces a full-scale tribal rebellion, aided by beautiful women disguised as fakirs and other little flourishes of the novelist’s art.

“The Baboo’s style is clear and good,” said The Englishman. “It will be a grand thing indeed for India when all her most influential families can be as much Anglicised as this Hindu gentleman,” wrote the Calcutta Literary Gazette. They were responding, however, to Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s poetry, and his articles on Hindu caste and practices—not to this vision of triumphant native rebellion that ends with the overthrow of the British.

In many ways, Shoshee was exactly the kind of Baboo Macaulay had imagined—in a rant that praised the superiority of English over Bengali literature, he also refers to the native press as “servile, low and indecent”. But as time went by, his writings made the British who had praised him for being such a good Baboo more and more uncomfortable, whether it was his diary of a Keranee (published in Mookerjee’s Magazine), or this subtly subversive early work. The natives had taken to English, as Macaulay had hoped, but they were restless. As the first two works of speculative fiction in Indian writing in English prove, what they had to say in that tongue was not just prescient, anticipating the events of 1857, but also unabashedly subversive.

Speaking Volumes: The case for context

(Published in the Business Standard, May 22, 2012)

(Three cartoons by Shankar. Note the way in which he uses whips and ropes to make his point in three completely different political contexts.)

It is unreasonable to expect the Dalit community to not take offence at the cartoon of Dr BR Ambedkar, drawn by the great cartoonist Shankar in 1949, withdrawn from NCERT textbooks by Indian members of Parliament earlier this month.
This is not because the cartoon is offensive, in its historical context. It depicts Dr Ambedkar holding a whip as he rides a snail, which represents the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution of which he was the Chair, with Nehru wielding a whip behind him.

In his November 1949 speech to the Constituent Assembly, Dr Ambedkar made it clear that he was aware of the complaints—one member had called the Drafting Committee the “Drifting Committee”, for instance. “It was being said that the Assembly had taken too long a time to finish its work, that it was going on leisurely and wasting public money,” Dr Ambedkar said, before rebutting his critics.

It is hard to argue, as many have, that Shankar’s cartoon was a deliberate attempt to depict a Brahmin whipping a Dalit. The cartoonist lampooned Nehru, Jinnah and other national leaders with as much sharpness. He was treating Dr Ambedkar as an equal to his peers, equally worthy of satirical treatment. Some Dalit commentators have made the more accurate point, which is that what was not offensive in 1949 may be felt as offensive in 2012.

To argue that the Dalit community should place freedom of expression above their sense of offence ignores the ground reality of the Indian experience in the last two decades. In recent times, few communities, political or religious leaders and groups have placed a principle ahead of the prospect of gain. Brahmins stung by Habib Tanvir’s criticism of their caste successfully shut down performances of Ponga Pundit in Chattisgarh.

The Shiv Sena, setting itself up as the guardian of Hindu sensibilities, has stalled all scholarship into the lives of revered icons such as Shivaji and Bal Thackerayji. And a handful of Muslim leaders found it easy to capitalize on vote bank politics in order to prevent Salman Rushdie from speaking at a literary festival, allowing fanatics who felt that even Rushdie’s image on a screen caused great offence to represent the entire community.

The Dalits, already underprivileged, should have their chance along with upper castes, politicians and religious leaders who put on their best performances in TV studios, to reap the benefits of claiming offence. These are considerable benefits, in 2012: claim offence and you claim valuable space, while shutting down art galleries, textbooks, scholarship, criticism and reasoned argument.

In all of these debates over the limits of free speech and the need to be sensitive to the dangers of giving offence, we have lost more than just our free expression rights, important as that is. One loss is a relatively minor loss of perspective: all of the threatened violence over books, cartoons, textbooks, art and cinema has been organized by political parties. Though we may choose not to acknowledge this, it makes that violence much more containable than the kind of spontaneous outrage over literature and art which, frankly, hasn’t happened in decades. (Unless you’re including the people who insist on asking paragraph-length questions at book launches in the ranks of the dangerously violent.)

The other loss is major. This is the loss of the idea that if you’re dealing with art and especially satire that has cut deep, adding context is better than deleting the offensive material. The late MF Husain’s paintings of goddesses lose their ability to offend when you place them besides similarly naked ancient sculptures of the gods. Rohinton Mistry’s criticisms of Indira Gandhi or Thackeray should be read alongside say, Shankar’s cartoons of the Emergency, or chronicles of the rise of the Sena in Maharashtra.

With the Ambedkar cartoon, why ask for erasure when you should ask, instead, for more? Why was a Dalit blamed for the delays in drafting the Constitution? Because he was the head of the Drafting Committee? Or because there were more subtle caste politics at work? Broaden the discussion, and ask why Dalit academics weren’t part of the process of critical pedagogy, but don’t tear the cartoons out of all textbooks.

In that 1949 session, Dr Ambedkar began by addressing the criticism that the Constitution had been drafted at snail’s pace. But a little later, he came to a point that concerned him greatly: “In India – where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new – there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship.”

He was echoing his colleague, TT Krishnamachari. In answer to a question about why the fundamental rights to liberty—including freedom of expression—were not stronger, Krishnamachari said: “If the Parliament of the future is not going to safeguard the liberty of the individual, I do not think that anything we put in this Constitution can possibly safeguard it.”

Perhaps once Parliament is done with protecting itself and any group that screams offence from any kind of criticism, past and present, it may have time to address Ambedkar’s fears.

User's guide to Indian free speech

A list of controversial subjects Indians shouldn’t write about if they want to avoid giving offence (and going to jail)

1) Dr Ambedkar, Mamata Banerjee, Bal Thackeray
2) Dead politicians
3) Living politicians
4) Mahatma Gandhi
5) And his sex life
6) Rama, Sita, Ramayanas, Ramanujan
7) Just kidding. You can write about Ramanujan.
8) Hindu gods and goddesses
9) The Prophet and Islam
10) Any other gods, goddesses, temples, mosques, gurdwaras, churches, systems of belief, places of faith past and present, religious rituals, scriptures, priests, followers etc.
11) Duh. Religion.
12) Sex is fine, especially if it involves starlets, but not if it involves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 11.
13) Savita Bhabhi. (All other Bhabhis are exempt.)
14) Maoists
15) Maoists masquerading as college girls
16) Anything about 1 to 15 on the Internet
17) Under the IT Rules, do not post anything on the Internet that might encourage terrorism, drugs, satire, political discussion, religious discussion, criticism of corporations, criticism of the Indian government, criticism in general. Spam and Shahrukh Khan jokes are fine.
18) If you intend to be disparaging about the IT Rules, do not write about it on the Internet, because the IT Rules make disparagement and certain kinds of criticism on the Internet illegal, even though they are legal forms of free speech. To clarify, you may disparage the IT Rules, which are about the Internet, anywhere except on the Internet. This is what literary theorists call “very meta”.
19) Since it is probably dangerous to write about sex, religion, politics, and the Internet, what can you write about? I suggest mangoes. This year’s crop is especially fine, and worthy of your attention.

Ctrl-Alt-Del: On being our own censors

It is always tempting to blame politicians for the sorry state of things, partly because a) that’s what they’re there for and b) it’s often their fault. But in the case of two recent controversies over cartoons—the Ambedkar cartoon controversy, and Mamata Banerjee’s persecution of a professor for circulating cartoons depicting the West Bengal Chief Minister in a poor light—there are good reasons why we shouldn’t blame politicians. Because the present situation isn’t their fault, it’s ours.

The Ambedkar cartoon controversy erupted when a few MPs drew Parliament’s attention to a cartoon by Shankar depicting Nehru’s impatience at the slow pace of Constitutional reform, which was carried in an NCERT textbook on the making of the Constitution. The argument was that by showing Nehru whipping Dr BR Ambedkar, the cartoon offended the sentiments of Dalits.

As far as I can make out, few members of Parliament pointed out the obvious: 1) Ambedkar was quite used to being caricatured, as were most politicians of that era in marked contrast to this 2) political satire may need to be placed in context, but it should be protected 3) to see the cartoon as anti-Dalit in the first place is stretching a point, given that Shankar followed the workings of government closely and spared nobody 4) if the image may now be perceived as anti-Dalit, and if the image of Ambedkar being whipped is a subtle reminder of centuries of discrimination against the community, the need is to open up a discussion, not shut one down. It is no longer important whether a cartoon, a book, an article, or any work of art actually is offensive, or whether that offence is so serious that it actually warrants censorship—just the claim of possible offence is enough to raise a demand for silence.

That’s why it would not have mattered if some MPs had spoken up and ranked themselves on the side of commonsense, because we have already allowed and tolerated a situation for decades where all any community has to do is to claim offence to shut down a discussion. In other words, it would have made no sense for any MP to stand up for free speech, or for plain logic. No one suggested that there was another way to address hurt sentiments that went beyond ripping pages out of a book, tearing cartoons out of the official history of India. If they had, those MPs would have risked being branded as anti-Dalit, for little gain: no party would have been willing to stand up and defend a supposedly anti-Dalit cartoon, even if, and this is where we enter the realm of complete absurdity, that cartoon was not seen as anti-Dalit in its time.

The reason why I don’t blame Parliament for demanding the withdrawal of the NCERT textbooks is not because they’re right—they couldn’t be more wrong, given the range of options that they had. They could have re-examined the chapter and included more cartoons, to give a wider range of opinion on the making of the Constitution. They could have asked for the chapter to be rewritten to include some context on how Dr Ambedkar was routinely depicted in cartoons of the time, and whether he was in any way depicted as different from the non-Dalit leaders of the national movement. They could simply have opened up a debate in Parliament on the right of satire to exist, but instead, they appear to have moved towards asking for legislation that would ban the use of cartoons and satire, and presumably humour, in most textbooks.

But they are only doing what any closed group will do, given a chance—ie, protect its own interests. All political parties understand the benefits that accrue with being seen as the protector of Dalit rights (the Ambedkar cartoons), Muslim hurt sentiments (the Jaipur Satanic Verses readings), offended Hindu sentiments (the Shivaji-Laine book), and so far, these benefits have been tangible and have translated into actual or perceived gains in different vote banks. The fact that these separate instances have also actively encouraged any community, religious or caste-based or political, to claim offense as a means of getting attention or gaining much-needed clout, is not the point. Until there are tangible consequences for politicians, in terms of losing votes or support, there is no practical reason for them to support free speech rights—only ideological reasons. As the historian Romila Thapar suggests, we should investigate claims that religious or other sentiments have been hurt much more rigorously seeing who stands to benefit, before resorting to a book ban or a withdrawal of a book.

Nor can you blame politicians for wanting to use existing laws to shut down criticism of political parties, as Mamata Banerjee and Kapil Sibal have done in very different ways. Any closed group, given a choice between upholding abstract free speech rights and upholding its own interests, will choose the latter. The problem may run a little deeper—ie, if our laws allow the arrest and prosecution of a professor for the “crime” of forwarding a cartoon, or if Internet laws can be used to silently shut down articles critical of politicians, we need to look more closely at how those laws are being misused.

Where the general community has failed is in convincing both politicians and its own members of the uses of free speech, and the need to allow widespread free expression, even when that expression is offensive to some. Almost all of what we write on free speech and censorship issues is in reaction to an event such as the Ambedkar controversy, but there are relatively few of us, including myself, who actually talk about the importance of free speech outside these controversies. Or we end up making obvious points—shutting down the Ambedkar cartoon and the Mamata cartoons will have a chilling effect on the media criticism of politicians, for instance. (As you might imagine, politicians are really, really worried that they might face less criticism as a consequence of their recent actions.)

On a few occasions in the past year—at a blogger’s meet on censorship, at a few readings and a literature festival—some of us passed around index cards where we invited people to answer two questions. Where did people feel censored or silenced in their own lives? And how would they feel if they could talk about these silences? It is not always easy to draw a direct line between apparently distant acts of censorship—the censorship of art, books, textbooks, cartoons—and censorship in one’s personal life, but the two are deeply connected.

End of rant, and meanwhile, here are some of the answers, shared with the permission of their authors.

Things people can’t talk about:

“I can’t talk about my childhood.”
“I want to tell my father how angry he makes me when he reads the papers and starts abusing Muslims, but my Muslim friends can’t even come home.”
“Censored about family violence and beatings.”
“Can’t share my political beliefs with my colleagues at the bank because then I might lose status with them.”
“Never could talk freely about my emotions and what I really wanted to do in my life.”
“Can’t tell husband he’s embarrassing me by shouting at servants in front of some of our friends.”
“Can’t say anything to my parents about my life or feelings, it’s not important to them.”

How they’d feel if they could speak without censorship:

“I’d cry and cry and let it out.”
“If he stopped it would make me so happy.”
“It would change my life. I want someone to understand why I’m so angry all the time.”
"I'd feel like less of a fraud and a liar in the daily office conversations. More my real self. More honest."
“I don’t know.”
“I would tell him how much I hate what he does and how small it makes me feel. Also, it goes against my beliefs, and that should be important.”
“I would feel like a real person at last.”

Speaking Volumes: The Bunderful Mr Lear

“What to do, my Dear Fortescue, when I return to England!!??.” At 36, Edward Lear had both of the qualities that make an artist an excellent traveler—an ability to feel at home anywhere, even in Devonshire (“Lord! How it rains!”), and an insatiable curiosity about other places.

“The more I read travels the more I want to move,” wrote Lear. It is difficult, reading Lear’s lively letters and journals, to believe that this is the 200th anniversary of his birth: there is little Victorian about either the prose or the mind.

In his thirties, the ‘Nartist Cove Named Lear’, known for his landscapes, would become famous as the Author of the Book of Nonsense. He was a seasoned traveler; Ireland, Italy, the Lake District in England and Corfu had already drawn him away from the rains he deplored so much at home, because they brought on his “assma”. He had given Queen Victoria 12 drawing lessons, but something in his nature balked at the comfortable life of a court painter.

He wanted to visit India, but as Corfu pulled him in and Jerusalem beckoned, Lear postponed his plans indefinitely. It stays there, off to a side—in 1857, he writes with great interest of the Mutiny, noting that The Times is probably wrong in its assessment that the fuss will blow over in a month or two. But it was only in his sixties that Lear would finally visit India, and by that time, he was not just a seasoned traveler, but a most interesting one.

Lear viewed the attempts of fellow Victorians to rescue their savage brethren with a gently caustic eye. “I’ve been reading Brooke’s Borneo lately. What do you think of a society for clothing and educating by degrees the Orang Outangs?” he writes to a friend. Nor does he stick to the conventions of travel writing, as this letter from Corfu demonstrates: “I meant to have written a lot about the priests & signori, and the good peasantry, & the orange-trees, and sea-gulls, and geraniums, & the Ionian Ball & what-not, but I am too sleepy.”

He was an accommodating traveler, and one of the few places that brought out the worst in him was Jerusalem—“uniting people in a disagreeable hodgepodge of curiosity and piety.” Travelling in the region, Lear nursed an understandable dislike of “marauding Arabs”, 200 of whom relieved him of his possessions in Petra. They took “things of no use to them but I believe taken as diversions for their nasty little beastly black children.” It’s a rare, ill-tempered outburst, one of the few times when the Victorian in him rose to the fore.

He approached India with curiosity and an open mind. In a letter to Lord Abedare, written just before his Indian journey, Lear thanks him for his good wishes: “But will you not tell me if you have any special wish for one view more than another. Shall I paint Jingerry Wangerry Bang or Wizzibizzigollyworrybo?”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lear found a way around the heat and dust and crowds. He noticed all of it—“heat always great here stuffy puffy muffy”—he writes in his letters, and elsewhere, he complains bitterly of the political gossip and exhausting parties of “Hustlefussabad”, his name for Government House in Calcutta. The ekkas and palanquins made him wish for an extra set of bones, and he cast a fascinated eye on certain native habits: “All these devout and dirty people carry out their theory of attendance on Public Wash-up on a great scale, by flumping simultaneous into the Holy Gunga at sunrise on April 1 squash.”

But Lear found his feet when he discovered the Dak bungalows, which suited him so much better than staying in private homes or in hotels. It was hard, he noted, to say to the lady of a house as you might in a dak bungalow: “Ma’am, I want tea at 5 a cold luncheon and wine to take out with me, and dinner precisely at 7, after which I shall go to bed and shan't speak to you."

The bungalows restored his sense of independence, and using them as staging points, Lear did some of his most beautiful work while in India, over 2,000 drawings of “old Indian temples and rivers” made as he travelled through Punjab, Bengal, fell in love with large parts of South India, explored the Ganges to his heart’s content.

The landscapes, collected in an out-of-print book by Vidya Dehejia, have almost been forgotten—but Lear’s Indian year is memorialized in The Cummerbund. “She sate upon her Dobie/ To watch the evening star/ And all the Punkahs as they passed/ Cried, “My! How fair you are!”

This was, if you like, his return present to India—many travelers had commented on the language, but only Lear could have given us “gold-finned Chuprassies”, “green Ayahs” perched in trees and the vision of a monstrous, fearsome Cummerbund, second cousin to the Jabberwock. It was, in his words, “a truly bunderful” journey.