With Rare Grace

Famine, flood and the exposing of British 'policy and proficiency' aside, the novel provides a readable trot through Anglo-India (yes, indeed, here we go again) because it holds a magnifying-glass to the 'gaps and silences' that stretched between the words and deeds of imperial men in the thro(n)es of power, and because the one who interprets them for us through that ubiquitous (enlarging, distorting) lens is she who was powerless to speak in her own age and time. The novel is chockful of home-truths—about Us as much as about Them—and Ranga Rao manages to convey them all with a kind of quaint charm that is, at its best moments, rather endearing. There are no magnificent revelations here, and Grace Clare's letters constitute no grand narrative, but there are, instead, a string of quiet epiphanic moments that are sometimes worth a ponder, though there are almost as many (unfortunately) that are singularly trite.

There is not much here, ultimately, that is in any way truly new or novel. When Grace writes to her mother, 'I believe I know now, mama, I think I am getting some idea—the essence of our Indian encounter is a moral challenge: not to go overboard, either way. But develop instead a rational poise, a humane balance, a spiritual equipoise', one can hardly escape the clutches of a literary deja vu: we have been there, read that, but that is not to say, of course, that it cannot bear repeating. Did not the good doctor in Brussels advise Marlow as he prepared to enter the Heart of Darkness, 'In the tropics one must before everything keep calm'? But that was Conrad, a hundred years ago, who wrote a masculinist (master) text about the intricacies of male camaraderie in an oppressive wilderness, and this is Ranga Rao, giving poor young Grace Clare a voice, allowing her to throw back into the sea the 'sword-fish' that she has caught in her marital fishing expedition—the gallant and promising servant of the Company, John Campbell—simply because she cannot bring herself to endorse his policy even if she admires his proficiency. She has certainly come a long way (a-ha!), and so have we, because now we can parody Them and poke fun at Us, all at the same time. And if that tiresome postcolonial literary angst creeps in, willy-nilly, Ranga Rao can always blame it on the Eng Lit syllabus he has taught for so many years.