John Lang: Wanderer of Hindoostan, Slanderer in Hindoostanee, Lawyer for the Ranee. Amit Ranjan. Niyogi Books. July 2021. 472 pages.
Foreword
John Lang, an Australian came to India at the age of 26 and died at 48, being buried at Camel’s Back in Mussoorie in 1864. He was forgotten; unfairly so because he was a man of many parts: wanderer of Hindustan, a linguist who slandered in “Hindostanee”, wrote prolifically and as a lawyer defended the Rani of Jhansi against the East Indi Company (he lost) in 1857 and an Indian, Persaud, accused of fraud by John Company that he won using the most scatological language a lawyer could possibly use! Within the span of his very brief ;life, Lang produced no less than 23 novels or serialised volumes of fiction published in Charles Dickens’ journal Household Words, plays, five volumes of poetry. And he was forgotten in the chronicles of our post-colonial history. Amit Ranjan resurrects the multiple personas of John Lang in a comprehensive history after Ruskin Bond’s attempts to bring Lang back to life that led to a volume of his short stories “Wanderings in India” (2015) with an introduction by Bond .
In the essay below, writer Mridula Garg, shares her own reading of Amit Ranjan’s work on the enigma of John Lang, using the metaphors of archeology, to excavate John Lang, piece by puzzling piece. And yet…
Mridula Garg
A
mit Ranjan’s “John Lang” poses a conundrum quite like the persona of the protagonist, John Lang. Who was John Lang; columnist, creative writer, lawyer, rebel, alcoholic or just a stupendous wit, masquerading as all of them? The only facet common to all these aspects was that he was a rebel. That was undoubted. In fact, it was the vital and primal source of his unfailing wit. Something he revelled in all his guises.
As for his being an alcoholic, I have grave doubts about that. Was he really an alcoholic or was it a rumour that suited his humour?
There is no such entity as almost an alcoholic. Either one is an alcoholic or one is not! There are no half measures. Drunk, yes certainly! But being drunk most of the time or some of the time is miles away from being drunk or in a hangover, all the time. Anyone who is a true blue alcoholic has no time or energy to be a prolific writer and a full time journalist to boot. Part time lawyer could perhaps fit the bill but certainly not, a full time wit! Wit requires thinking on your toes and having all your wits at your command to fashion, even a repartee or a riposte, let alone a whole exposition.
Lang’s wit was of a more killer brand than that of a verbal duellist.
It laid bare the working of the corrupt systems of not one but three countries. Not just one particular system but all of them. Be it the military or the judiciary or the bureaucracy. For that matter, the elite which considered itself racially superior; or the self righteous, pretending to be the guardians of morality were equally the subject of derision.
Is the memoir of John Lang written by Amit Ranjan a historical treatise; a researched discourse or a novel, mocking at every canon, accepted by the erudite scholars, who consider themselves worthy of determining the structure of a novel?
Which country did John Lang belong to; Australia, England or India? Born in Australia; educated in England and resident of India, no doubt. But his parentage in Australia was of a doubtful lineage. Was he the scion of convicts or was he not? He was not only educated in England but had the dubious or perhaps bona fide honour of being expelled by a British university. I consider being expelled from a self-righteous, conservative, rules ridden University, more vital to getting a real education than a degree earned by conforming to the dry rules of scholarship from that temple of learning. One corroded, rather corrupted by its own piety and narrow mindedness.
What more could a rebel want of education than what Lang got; so much more grist to his wit. Lang resided in India. Spiritually he supported the Sepoy mutiny of 1857 (or the rebellion of the wannabe citizens of an Independent India, if you prefer) but it did not make him an admirer of the Indian society. He was as caustic in his witty diatribes against the caste laden iniquitous and hierarchal Indian society with its endless customs and beliefs, as he was against their racist British overlords.
One could well argue that he was one with the hoary tradition of the Vidushak or the glorified court jester cum philosopher, essential to every Sanskrit drama and real life courts of Rajas and Maharajas of India. On that count then he was an Indian par excel lance.
The Vidushak was given latitude to critique and ridicule the Raja in every way possible. Rarely was he rebuked or told to hold his tongue. There were of course rare occasions, when egged on by other, envious, obviously less witty courtiers, the Raja baulked at the invectives levelled at him by a lowly courtier albeit from the protected species of Vidhushaks. The Vidushak was ordered to leave the court and kingdom and sometimes even incarcerated. But the disfavour did not last long. He was soon pardoned and brought back to court to continue to revile the Raja, which he did with complete lack of remorse. Perceptive people can well understand just how lonely it would be for a Raja or dictator to be at the mercy of sycophants, day in and day out! Hence the Vidushak!
Unfortunately Lang did not have to deal with an eccentric literature aficionado as his ruler but a faceless government, composed of banal men chosen by even more witless people. So he spent a year in jail in Vienna, Austria for an offense whose exact legitimacy could not be fathomed. The authorities failed to secure documents confirming or demolishing the charge. So after a suitable gap of time, he was acquitted. Quite like a Vidushak being jailed at a whim and acquitted at another. Not by royal decree but the incompetence of the system.
What we can’t help regret is that it was the witless system which had the last laugh as our gora Vidushak was finally punished in a most illogical and cruel manner. He was forgotten! While Kipling, who stole from him and Dickens, who fed off his numinous contributions to his Journal, Household Words, both became icons of literary history, Lang was thrown on its dung heap! As was the custom those days anything that was written in Household Words was appropriated by the founder-editor Charles Dickens. So however diligent and fascinating Lang might have been in his contributions to the journal, it went to swell Dickens’ reputation, more than his own.
Despite our illustrious institution of kings righteously suffering wits, who were more than court jesters, as they dabbled in poetry, statecraft and philosophy, Lang was not accorded any such distinction. He was not accepted in India any more than he was in England or Australia. After all he was white and of doubtful morals and parentage.
The grand irony of Lang’s life, in keeping with the whole tenor of his mocking at the establishment; is that history knows him as the lawyer for the Ranee of Jhansi, a case he lost, rather than as the lawyer for Lala Jotee Persaud, a case he won against all odds and with typical Langian wit. The Ranee never had an authentic legal case, which could possibly accommodate her as the future Ranee, so how could Lang or any lawyer have won it! In fact, it was not a legally fought case but a farce played by the British, of the British, for the British. Both the Ranee and Lang were but pawns used in a game of chess in which checkmate had already been declared.
It would be pertinent to talk about the Jotee Persaud’s case in some detail. Lala Jotee Persaud was a commissariat contractor for the East India Company throughout the 2nd Anglo–Sikh War. (1848-49). When he presented a bill of Rs. 3 crores, the east India Company administration accused him of fraud and slapped a case against him. The Lala called on Lang as his barrister who appeared for him in the trial in Meerut in December.1851. He heard the lengthy prosecution with a deadpan expression, reserving his right to cross examine till the last. The weakness in the prosecutor’s case soon became clear as he somehow managed to make the officers contradict each other and themselves.
The night before he was to sum up his defence, a few officers in the Artillery Mess asked him his opinion about the commission. Lang, who was, as they say in his cups, opined that the whole batch, president and the members, including the judge advocate- general were a parcel of d—-soors (pigs).” Several members of the audience then challenged him to voice the same opinion in court. Lang agreed and a wager was made. Lang did what he said with the use of inimitable wit that would have been enough to gain him a place in posterity, which it did not, given his sour relations with the British and pro- British Indian press.
He called the case a dead carcass in court and said he could compare the stink it raised only to his experience on the ship Nile which brought him to India, the day after a pig was slaughtered.
We had a pig’s cheek at the head of the table (indicating the President of the Commission); we had the roast leg of pork on the right (pointing to another member).
He went on in this manner till he had apportioned the whole carcass of the pig among the members. He then turned to the judge advocate-general and his assistant and pointing to each said, “And for side dishes we had chitterling and sausages…In brief the whole saloon smelt of nothing but pork and so it is gentlemen with this case. …this case is a disgrace to the Honourable Company and the Govt of India and to every servant of the Govt. who has had any finger in the manufacture of this pork pie.”
The judge advocate-general declared that he felt ashamed to be connected with the case and Jotee Persaud was acquitted on all counts and decreed to be entitled to his claims in full. Lang had won the case and the bet with a show of impertinent but superlative wit! Amit Ranjan rescues a unique wit from oblivion and makes him breathe again vigorously.
My favourite Lang witticism was his succinct response when Edgar Allan Poe‘s celebrated 1846 poem “The Raven” was read out to him by a friend. All he said was, it was very good Persian, meaning thereby that it was lifted from a Persian poem. The perfect example of not talking much but saying a lot! It’s a different matter that he went on to quote the original Persian poem. That no one has so far succeeded in pinpointing the obscure Persian poem makes the tale even more intriguing. The fact that both Poe and Lang were good scholars of Persian adds spice to it. When in 1855, a caustic article got published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, questioning Poe’s literary originality it was widely assumed that it was ghost written by Lang. A special feature of Ranjan’s book is that he gives ample space to dates and places to lend authenticity to what he is telling us.
Lang was also a translator of Persian poems and did it without subterfuge. I find the confluence of languages in both Lang’s works and Ranjan’s work about him, both interesting and meaningful.
When Lang translated the Song of Hafiz from Persian to English, he retained the refrain, Taza-ba-taza, nau-ba–nau in Persian, instead of translating it as Palmer does to English as ”Freshly fresh and newly new.” Even a lay reader can fathom the superior lyrical pungency of the original Persian compared to its listless English rendering. The whole verse reads:
O! minstrel sing a song to me
As fresh and new as it can be
And lt the liquid verses flow
Taza-ba-taza,nau-ba-nau.
The other witticism of Lang’s which made me laugh aloud to myself was what he did when asked to write a leader on the Gorham Case; Gorham being the Bishop of Exeter, whose case had gone all the way to the Privy Council, in 1850, where finally he was exonerated.
His entire article consisted of these words:
‘THE GORHAM CASE’
‘D- -n the Gorham Case.’
No wonder his readers were convulsed.
Lang wrote regularly in Mofussilite, a newspaper he founded in 1850s in Meerut, so prolifically that it almost became a synonym for John Lang. As pointed out earlier, Lang had sour relations with the British media the pro establishment Indian press who labelled his anti Raj novels as “hospital scenes” that is depicting the dregs of society rather than “real” representation. There was a column virtually in every edition of Mofussilite in the first year, where Lang replied to “our contemporary (editor of Delhi Gazette) with droll acerbity. Though many regarded Lang as a dangerous radical, he still excited their minds. That was why, even though he poked irreverent fun at both the Military and Civil services of British India; a lot was forgiven by his subscribers, who belonged largely to the military and civil services.
Lang not only attacked the government through his own newspaper but also employed native “moonshees” to pass on derisive matters to Urdu newspapers, who revelled in reporting them. Lang was always on good terms with the non- elitist, irreverent and non- conformist elements of the people of India, his country of residence.
Ranjan ends his treatise with a chapter entitled Ahead of His Times referring to John Lang of course. Of that there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind. In an era bristling with elitism, racism, casteism and male chauvinism, he was anti-racist, anti-elitist, anti-Imperialist and pro women. He knew many languages and revelled in them all, never considering English to be the master’s language and others inferior.
At the very end, Ranjan writes a poem for John Lang and his friend Alice Richman. Consider these lines from the poem about a man who lies in Camels Back cemetery in India…
….He could not become Dickens
But his poetry about Jenny Dale
And her name all around in the gale
Tells a very old tale
Of love.
It’s quite in keeping with John Lang’s persona that Amit Ranjan s book though written in the English language, so far as a language is a medium of expressing the verbal, resonates like a work (kriti) in the vernacular. By vernacular, I mean a glorious play of words which explores the bhav or the nihitarth and captures them effectively and aesthetically. Or we could say perhaps, a language that captures the multi-layered, more often than not, hidden meanings of the words. They surface out of feeling and knowing an experience in all its ramifications; not just verbalizing an experienced fact. That’s why in Hindi, we differentiate between anubhav or the experience and anubhuti or experiencing the crux of the experienced fact. Only when anubhav turns into anubhuti, can a creative work go into labour and the intercourse of facts, give birth to fiction. The question is; what is “John Lang” in essence; an English creative work (kriti) or a Vernacular one? Each reader may well decide for himself.
The interesting fact is that John Lang the Australian firangi learnt this enigma so well that he used it effectively in his novels ostensibly written in British/Australian English but with clear undertones of Hindi. As Ranjan points out, Lang had an Indian boy deliver a perfect Hindustani punch line to his British officers in his story “The black boy with blue eyes,” Khuda Lord Karein! Idiomatically in English it means May God make you an English Lord though literally it would mean May God do God! Oh well, that’s going too far with being literal. Still the irony is somewhat lost even in the non-literal rendition. Again the punch line lacks punch!
Thereby hangs a tale… is Ranjan following in the footsteps of Lang or casting him in his own image? In fact, there’s no subterfuge or deliberation here. The whole scenario occurs quite spontaneously and why not? A young man doing his PhD is so besotted with his subject, a writer like himself, a wanderer adopting so many countries and languages that he belongs to all of them or none at all. What would be more natural than that over the years spent together, they grow more and more alike?
Last but most certainly the least, I have to commend Amit Ranjan on the painstaking yet exuberant craft employed by him in penning this book, which does not allow one to fit it in any narrow category; novel, biography, literary history, historical, social and political commentary et al…
As the title of my critique makes amply clear, what Amit Ranjan does is to take a cluster of forgotten ruins and excavate it bit by bit, discovering new edifices and artefacts as he returns to it again and again. He explores the anatomy of a tale or incident but then feels the deed is not fully done. There is much more, the lost rubble might hide underneath the surface exploration. It needs excavation, not just examination or investigation. So he returns to the same tale again and again and each time excavates something new for the reader to freshly wonder at.
Impatient readers might sometimes find this repetitive process a bit tedious but if you are a true Aashiq (lover) of both truth and fantasy, you would thank Amit Ranjan for inviting you on an expedition to excavate a Site called John Lang with him.
It reminded me of my witnessing the excavation of the 4th century ruins of Aihole in Karnataka. What an adventure of mind and spirit it was! Just as I thought there was nothing more left to cherish in the void created by the intensive digging that had gone on for years; another half destroyed temple of exclusive and primal beauty would spring out of it. It would leave me stunned and I would remain in awe of my anubhuti for days on end.
I felt the same exhilaration while reading or rather co- excavating John Lang.
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Mridula Garg (b. 1938) writes in Hindi and English. She has published over 30 books in Hindi – novels, short story collections, plays and essays – several translated into English. She was a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013. E 421 (G.F) G.K part 2 New Delhi 110048 Phone 9958661937
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