John George Lang - The Usual Compliments

A sketch by John Lang.

It is some years since I first landed in Calcutta. I was in no way connected with the Government, and was consequently an "interloper" or "adventurer." These were the terms applied by certain officials to European merchants, indigo-planters, shopkeepers, artisans, barristers, attorneys, and others. It was not long before I made up my mind to become a wanderer in the East...

Too few Australians have heard of John George Lang (1816-1864). He deserves renown as Australia’s first novelist – he was an associate of Charles Dickens - but also as a traveler, an adventurer, a pioneering journalist, an orientalist and a prominent Hindoopile. He must count as one of the most colourful Australian characters of the first half of the 19th C. and yet he remains almost unknown in his native land. His Jewish father had been sent to Botany Bay as a convict with the First Fleet for the heinous crime of stealing spoons but was later emancipated and became a free citizen of early New South Wales. The colonial-born John took William Wentworth as his model and pursued a career in law as a path to better standing. With a gift for languages, he studied Greek and Latin, which won him passage to Cambridge. After that he travelled to British Hindoostan and it was there that he made his mark. His grave is there, in the hill station of Mussorie, and has recently been relocated and restored from neglect by the noted writer Ruskin Bond who has also advanced the cause of bringing Lang’s life and work to wider attention.

It was in the Modern Book Depot in Calcutta – an esteemed establishment run by the articulate Mr Prem Prekash – that the present writer encountered the new edition of Lang’s primary volume of travel writings ‘Wanderings in India and Other Sketches of Life in Hindostan’ – first published in 1859, with sections appearing earlier in Mr. Dicken’s magazine Household Words - and has been reading it during the sticky Calcutta afternoons. It is indeed a series of sketches, largely but not completely autobiographical, relating life in India with sympathetic insights into the land and people in the period prior to the Mutiny of 1857. 

Having himself first arrived in Calcutta, Mr. Lang, not being an employee of the East India Company, found himself regarded as an interloper, and taking to the role, he immersed himself into the India of his day by quickly acquiring the Hindoostanti and Persian languages. Thereupon, he entered into adventures in both law and journalism, bringing to both fields a characteristic Australian swagger, always on the wrong side of the Company. Most famously, he represented and won a landmark case for the Mahometan princess, the Ranee of Jhansi, in her struggle against the Company’s despotic policy of land seizures under the so-called Doctrine of Lapse. Where there was no male heir the Company would seize land from Indian nobles. Mr. Lang fought this injustice on her behalf with antipodean vigor and imagination and scored a major victory against the Company’s despotism.

Similarly, his journalistic career was marked by fights with the Company and with other vested interests. He led a newspaper in Calcutta called The Optimist and then, more famously, one called The Mofussilite, founded in 1845. He used these as vehicles for his quite prolific writing – stories, poems, essays, translations - and as forums for exposes of the maddening incompetence of British authorities in their dealings with Indians. This won him enemies in high places, sure enough, and he was at one time jailed for libel. Afterwards, he travelled throughout the land, enjoying the patronage of wealthy clients. In 1851 he again defeated the East India Company in a landmark legal case, on this occasion defending the rights of Mr. Jottee Prasad who had provided for British troops during the Sikh Wars but had then been cheated of what he was owed. Mr. Prasad, like the Ranee of Jhansi in the earlier instance, showered Lang with expensive gifts which enabled him to live as he pleased, game hunting, trekking and living a life of flamboyant indulgence among Indian nobility. He was, as his volume of Wanderings attests, a great lover of the Indians, often a champion of their rights, and an attentive student of their ways and customs.

For all of that, thankfully, he fails to qualify as a multicultural relativist sop in the contemporary mode. Wanderings is not a book that will please the post-colonial intellectual of our time. Lang is a British man through and through, although an Australian one, with a typical Australian disdain for overwrought authority. His advocacy for the rights of the Indians was not politically ideological. He was no traitor to the Empire. He merely believed – in an entirely English manner – in the rule of law, with an Australian egalitarian application of the same. He disliked rogues and corruption. In his untarnished view the good peoples of Hindoostan were subjects of Her Majesty, Empress of India, and as such had rights. 

Nor, might we say, was he a great writer, although he is certainly an entertaining one, direct, light, cogent, with keen observation and a good sense of humor, usually at the expense of the natives whose company he loved to keep. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of Wanderings where he describes the exchange of “compliments” with a Maharajah:

THE USUAL COMPLIMENTS

Here sat the Maharajah on a Turkey carpet, and reclining slightly on a huge bolster. In front of him were his hookah, a sword, and several nosegays. His highness rose, came forward, took my hand, led me to the carpet, and begged of me to be seated on a cane-bottomed arm-chair, which had evidently been placed ready for my especial ease and occupation. After the usual compliments had passed, the Maharajah inquired if I had eaten well. But, perhaps, the general reader would like to know what are "the usual compliments."

Native Rajah: "The whole world is ringing with the praise of your illustrious name."

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj. You are very good."

Native Rajah: "From Calcutta to Cabul—throughout the whole of Hindoostan—every tongue declares that you have no equal. Is it true?"

Humble Sahib (who, if he knows anything of Asiatic manners and customs, knows that he must not contradict his host, but eat his compliments with a good appetite). "Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "The acuteness of your perceptions, and the soundness of your understanding, have, by universal report, became as manifest as even the light of the sun itself." Then, turning to his attendants of every degree, who, by this time, had formed a circle round me and the Rajah, he put the question, "Is it true, or not?"

The attendants, one and all, declare that it was true; and inquire whether it could be possible for a great man like the Maharajah to say that which was false.

Native Rajah: "The Sahib's father is living?"

Humble Sahib: "No; he is dead, Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "He was a great man?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj. You have honoured the memory of my father, and exalted it in my esteem, by expressing such an opinion."

Native Rajah: "And your mother? She lives?"

Humble Sahib: "By the goodness of God, such is the case."

Native Rajah: "She is a very handsome woman?"

Humble Sahib: "On that point, Maharaj, I cannot offer an opinion."

Native Rajah: "You need not do so. To look in your face is quite sufficient. I would give a crore of rupees (one million sterling) to see her only for one moment, and say how much I admired the intelligent countenance of her son. I am going to England next year. Will the Sahib favour me with her address?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj."

Here the Native Rajah calls to the moonshee to bring pen, ink, and paper. The moonshee comes, sits before me, pen in hand, looks inquiringly into my eyes, and I dictate as follows, laughing inwardly all the while: "Lady Bombazine, Munnymunt, ka uper, Peccadilleemee, Bilgrave Isqueere, Sunjons wood-Cumberwill;" which signifies this: "Lady Bombazine, on the top of the Monument, in Piccadilly, Belgrave Square, St. Johns Wood, Camberwell." This mystification must be excused by the plea that the Rajah's assertions of his going to Europe are as truthful as Lady Bombazine's address.

The Maharajah then gives instructions that that document shall be preserved amongst his most important papers, and resumes the conversation.

Native Rajah: "The Sahib has eaten well?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "And drunk?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "The Sahib will smoke hookah?"

Humble Sahib: "The Maharajah is very good."

A hookah is called for by the Rajah; and then at least a dozen voices repeat the order: "Hookah lao, Sahib ke waste." (Bring a hookah for the Sahib.) Presently the hookah is brought in. It is rather a grand affair, but old, and has evidently belonged to some European of extravagant habits. Of course, no native would smoke out of it (on the ground of caste), and it is evidently kept for the use of the Sahib logue.

While I am pulling away at the hookah, the musahibs, or favourites of the Rajah, flatter me, in very audible whispers. "How well he smokes!" "What a fine forehead he has!" "And his eyes! how they sparkle!" "No wonder he is so clever!" "He will be Governor-General some day." "Khuda-kuren!" (God will have it so.)

Native Rajah: "Sahib, when you become Governor-General, you will be a friend to the poor?"

Humble Sahib (speaking from the bottom of his heart). "Most assuredly, Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "And you will listen to the petition of every man, rich and poor alike."

Humble Sahib: "It will be my duty so to do."

Native Rajah (in a loud voice): "Moonshee!"

Moonshee (who is close at hand). "Maharaj, Protector of the Poor."

Native Rajah: "Bring the petition that I have laid before the Governor-General."

The moonshee produces the petition, and at the instance of the Rajah, reads, or rather sings it aloud. The Rajah listens with pleasure to its recital of his own wrongs, and I affect to be astounded that so much injustice can possibly exist. During my rambles in India I have been the guest of some scores of rajahs, great and small, and I never knew one who had not a grievance. He had either been wronged by the government, or by some judge, whose decision had been against him. In the matter of the government, it was a sheer love of oppression that led to the evil of which he complained; in the matter of the judge, that functionary had been bribed by the other party.

It was with great difficulty that I kept my eyes open while the petition—a very long one—was read aloud...

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black