White Elephant: A Novel

by Jeyamohan

Translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar

English 344 pages 1 edition

Aiden Byrne, an Irish police officer posted to Madraspatnam and a loyal servant to the Crown and Queen Victoria, knows that there is nothing he need fear in this heat-blasted land. The year is 1878 and the south of India is in the grip of a devastating famine. But when Aiden encounters two labourers from the Tudor Ice Company being brutally whipped in the countryside, he is dragged into a world whose surface he has only skimmed and whose cruelty and darkness will change him forever. At Tudor, mammoth blocks of ice, harvested from frozen New England lakes and transported across the world, are broken down for British banquets by workers from the lowest rung of the caste system under horrifying conditions. When the two labourers are found murdered, Aiden and Kathavarayan, a charismatic young activist, set out on a journey that brings them face to face with the bloody toll of the famine raging through the country – one that will kill more than eight million people before it is done – and forces Aiden to grapple with his own precarious role within the British Raj and the deadly constraints that the machinery of conquest imposes upon human agency. A vivid reimagining of what might have been the first labour uprising in modern Indian history, White Elephant is a soul-searing novel by one of India’s greatest living writers. It offers a stirring, indelible argument against the pitiless march and corrupting influence of power and empire.