Brinda Charry exposes dark truths of colonialism, indentured labour in new novel

Brinda Charry’s last work of fiction, First Love, a collection of short stories, was published in 2009. Since then, the Indian-born author, who has lived in the US for over two decades, has focused mainly on academic writing: books and articles on English Renaissance literature, including William Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Alongside, she also read about the presence of South Asians in colonial America and about South Asians in Elizabethan and Jacobean London and was so intrigued that when she decided to return to fiction writing after a long hiatus, she homed in on this project.

That was the genesis of The East Indian (HarperCollins), a novel revolving around a young Tamil boy Tony, son of a courtesan in Armagon on the south-east coast of India — one of the earliest British settlements.

Larger arcs of globalisation, colonialism

The sweeping, quasi-historical novel, which dates back to the 17th century, is centered on Tony’s unexpected life’s journey and adventures, from India to London to America, following the death of his mother. Tony is among the first East Indians to land in America and the book is inspired by the ‘east Indian’ presence in colonial North America.

Trade and colonialism, dislocation and exploitation, immigration and identity, inequality and racism, inevitably form part and parcel of the 250-page book. “I was not particularly interested in simply writing the modern immigrant story. I wanted to write something that would also tell a larger story of early globalisation and colonialism,” underlines Charry.

“The English settlement of Virginia as well as the East India Company’s presence in India is an integral part of this story. I wanted to paint on a big canvas, not in terms of length but in terms of scope and magnitude,” she adds. The East Indian is also a bildungsroman that puts the spotlight on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from a troubled childhood to a poised adulthood.

Tony, the hero: From the margins of history

By going back in time, Charry has brought a character from the margins of history to become the hero of her novel, endowing him with an authentic voice, thus blending fact and fiction skillfully. It was a discovery she made based on historical evidence of the earliest recorded East Indian in North America in the year 1635.

“I tracked down Virginia land records to make sure of this and there he was — Tony, an East Indian (as in the case of most non-white people at the time, he is not given a last name). And, in fact, another East Indian boy in America is described as an apothecary’s assistant, hence my decision to make my protagonist a medicine man,” shares Charry, adding that the rest of the story was largely made up. “But everything that happens to him is within the realm of possibility.”

The novel has a Dickensian feel and Charry’s characterisation of her protagonist Tony, who is also the narrator, engenders empathy in the reader. Tony is neither white nor black. He is brown and it is in London that he is called ‘the East Indian’ — which gives the book its title. During his short stay there, he is kidnapped and shipped off with a few other youngsters and indentured workers to Jamestown, an English colony in Virginia.

“Apart from us spirited boys, all of whom ceased struggling and protesting after the first few hours on board, our fellow passengers were dozens of men and women — carpenters, cordwainers, candlemakers, bookbinders, beggars, leatherworkers, minstrels, plowmen, grooms, spinsters, wives, widows, rogues, vagabonds, and other sundry folk — some of whom had been lured on board with food, drink, tobacco, and promises of a better life, some of whom had been bound to masters already settled in Virginia,” Tony recounts.

Spectres of brazen racism, child labour

Curiously enough, a fortune-teller’s prediction that Tony will “cross all the seas in the world and go to the place where the sun sets,” turns out to be true. And Tony is sold into servitude. His life in Virginia is fraught with hardship, with each day an arduous struggle, as he toils under successive ruthless masters for sustenance. While he longs for a return to his homeland, the means remain elusive. He and his companions resign to a wretched life, slogging in the tobacco plantations. Tony, in particular, grapples with his ethnicity as a man of colour, and sense of self: “What manner of moor, where are you really from, black imp, little brown shit.”

When Tony, well into his teens, visits his lover, a black girl named Lydia, the mistress of the house sneers: “Oh, I suspect he has come to see our girl, Lydia. He is sweet on her? Will we have a young ‘un soon? Black and a little less black makes what? I am of the mind it somehow makes even blacker.”

Tony must confront the grim spectres of brazen racism, anti-semitism, sodomy, witch-hunts, child labour and exploitation. But life gradually gets better as his dream of becoming a physician’s apprentice is fulfilled. He finds contentment as he gains medical knowledge although the death of his former master lands him in a sticky situation. He finds his love, escapes slavery, has a child and begins life anew with Lydia in nearby Maryland.

In exploring an era of American history and indentured servitude in the Colonies, Charry’s enormous research all the way back to the 1600s of India, England and America is noteworthy. Her area of academic expertise is the 1600s which helped to an extent, but she candidly admits she knew little about the English settlement of Virginia and not much about the East India Company in South India.

“I read and read and read … I wanted to immerse myself in the time period, understand the larger socio-political changes, trends, familiarise myself with the little details of food, landscape, the seasons … It was challenging, but it was also fantastic. I felt transported, and I want my reader to feel the same,” says Charry.

Finding home inside

With immigration, race and identity as running themes in the novel, does Charry, an immigrant herself, feel more American than Indian as her protagonist Tony felt after some years? And how has she coped straddling two cultures? “It would be strange if I did not feel a bit of both and it is disorienting at times certainly, but I have learned (or resolved) to make the most of it,” she says, with an air of honesty.

“I consider myself as being fortunate to have access to two worlds, two ways of being. Besides, both ‘American’ and ‘Indian’ are such broad identity categories. There are all kinds of variations on what it means to be “American,” and I suppose I am one,” she adds.

Pertinently, this is what Tony declares when he realises America is home: “I would thrive wherever the wind laid me……I will be my own shelter, my landing place. Like a snail, I will carry home on my back, find it where I happen to be, make it from what I bear inside me.”

Parallel with the Indian prince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

As a scholar of English Renaissance Literature, Charry, revisits the little Indian boy (‘changeling,’ an East Indian prince) in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his fate at the end of the play. Tony, during his short stay in London, happened to see the play at the Globe. As a Shakespearean by profession, Charry couldn’t help but draw parallels between Tony and the boy in the play.

“I simply could not leave out the boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; it is fascinating that he is Indian,” she reckons. “The very fact that Shakespeare makes that reference to the boy’s origins is a reminder of how the playwright was aware of an interconnected, changing world, one in which an Indian child could make his way into a very English play. It is the same kind of world I write about in The East Indian, where an Indian boy finds himself in the wilds of colonial Virginia,” she says.

Charry, who teaches at a college in New Hampshire (US), pulls no punches in saying that although her academic background and her creative writing are two distinct fields of endeavour, The East Indian draws on her academic expertise. “My study of early globalism, etc., in the 1600s and my interest in Shakespeare inform and influence my creative work,” she says. Even the language — the dialogue, in particular — carries hints of the 17th century English, she adds.

A magician in America

Although Charry’s story is spun around the first East Indian in America, it is commendable how she uses the novelist’s creative licence and her imagination in putting together this untold tale, strikingly different from the many stories in recent times — fiction and non-fiction — about contemporary immigrants.

As Tony, the first East Indian in America, says just before the novel ends: “Others of my kind will come here, and still others, and they will tell their stories, tales filled with loss, doubt, wonder and hope. But mine, such as it is, is a first story.”

With four works of fiction under her belt — The Hottest Day of the Year (2001), Naked in the Wind (2006), First Love (2009) and The East Indian — Charry reveals she owes her American publisher (Scribner), a second novel. “I am madly writing. It is about a magician (as in, a performer of stage magic) who actually performed in Boston in the early 1800s. The world of early US popular entertainment is quite wild and wonderful.”

Charry, who grew up in Bengaluru before moving to America, has juggled academics with creative writing. “Each of them has enriched me in its own distinct way, so I will continue doing both at least a while longer.”