THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN?
Tanika Gupta’s play is a sprawling, angrily intimate epic about Indians in Britain during the height of empire, thirteen years running up to old Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It was an RSC commission ten years ago, when there was not yet quite the current popular emphasis on the abuses of Empire, and our failure to acknowledge and teach its ‘problematic’ history. It occurred to me during early, irritable moments of Pooja Ghai’s production that this time lag may explain just why the first half feels feels so cartoonishly didactic ,at the expense of any subtlety of character.
We begin on a ship, with impressive ratlines and mass swabbing by Lascar seamen (someone tell the movement director that is NOT the way you climb ratlines, and that to convey a ship’s movement it helps if everyone lurches in the same direction). Our central heroine, Tanya Katyal as Rani, is a teenage Ayah for a posh British family who abruptly sack her on the dockside. The Indian seamen are beaten and cursed, even distinguished Indian passengers are not allowed on the white passengers’ decks (they include a young lawyer called Gandhi, and Naoroji, a politician later to become the first Asian WestminsterMP and the man who at her jubilee bravely called Queen Victoria the “empress of famine and queen of black death”). Thus it is firmly made clear within minute that Britain is robbing India blind. The colonialists are even unloading an elephant’s tusk, to make them even more hateful.
Teenage ayah Rani, a studious autodidact reading Coleridge, is flirting happily with sailor Hari (Aaron Gill), though the majestic Abdul Karim, who is about to be given as a gift-servant to Queen Victoria, chivalrously checks she isn’t being harassed. In no time at all she finds herself alone and fighting for her virtue in a low den ( the full joyful RSC-at-the-Swan scene – whores, corsets, brawls and booze) . Brits ignore her pleas for work, but a Gujurati woman encourages her to get some so she does . And is promptly raped by her Anglo-Indian master and chucked out pregnant. Hari meanwhile learns about a British shipwreck where all the lascars were carelessly drowned because no lifeboats. Back at sea, he gets flogged for mutinously asking for equal pay.
Meanwhile Abdul – a fine and subtle performance throughout by Raj Bajaj – is presented to old Queen Victoria, and takes her fancy as a table servant in his magnificent regalia, despite the contempt of her lady-in-waiting (Francesca Faridany, splendid). Abdul delights the bereaved Queen with accounts of the beauty of the Taj Mahal as a symbol of Shah Jehan’s love and grief: he doesn’t mention the warlike Mughal brutalities, obviously, for the moral being hammered home to us yet again is that India is beautiful, innocent, artistic, loving and exploited, while English people are grasping and brutal and horrid, “a nation of slave traders, it’s in the blood”.
Even the charity ladies who found a home for destitute Ayahs to “bind colonials in a web of gratitude” are sneered at by the Indian women, who reckon Englishwomen can’t look after their own children and the Christian Bible is despicable. The only English character not ghastly is Lascar Sal in the sailors’ pub, who is a working-class diamond (Nicola Stephenson is terrific, cheers us up no end).
Historic cruelties must be honestly told, but the unsubtlety of the Dickensian hardship-romance of Rani and Hari wears you down a bit: until very late on they aren’t allowed characters beyond innocent victimhood. Better is the growing relationship between Victoria – a beautiful rendering by Alexandra Gilbreath – and Abdul, who becomes her “Munshi”, much rewarded and equally hated by the court and the Prince of Wales. That’s subtly done, touching and funny and nuanced, for while the sight of an ‘exotic’ being treated as a pet accessory is grating, there is a real relationship: Victoria was remarkably open-minded, keen on the idea of India and anxious to be taught Hindustani and listen to his orotund recitations from the Quran about peace and gentleness.
I am happy to say that the second part becomes less strident and more interesting: properly fascinating is the figure of Dadabhai NAoroji, the aspiring Liberal MP (too little known, and too briefly at Westminster: on election he had congratulations from KEir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Florence Nightingale). Could have done with more of him, though neatly Gupta makes clever Rani , now housed by the despised charity, into his aide and secretary. Victoria meanwhile comes under pressure from the Prince of Wales and Lord Salisbury to stop treating her “Munshi” Abdul as an equal and has to compromise; Cecil Rhodes sends her keen letters about how Britain should rule the entire planet for its own good.
The interplay of politics, race, immigrant community-building and colonialism starts to become properly interesting. And as Victoria fades, it is shamingly true that her Munshi was thrown out of the country and all his mementos and awards burnt as if he was an embarrassing aberration. And good that ,although the words are not sung clearly enough , Gupta marks the Jubilee moment not with Rule Britannia but with Kipling’s startlingly uncompromising verse about the arrogance of those who
“….made up the white man’s burden
To serve the Empire’s need
To hide their guilty conscience
And justify their greed.
It helped them plunder freely
Convinced of their self-worth –
This precious sceptred island
Brought famines to the earth”
It would be a better and more gripping play if more of that internal Victorian conflict had pushed its way in, past the mere indignation.
Box office. RSC.ORG.UK. To 18 november
Then at the Lyric Hammersmith, lyric.co.uk. From 4-28 October
Box office. RSC.ORG.UK. To 18 november
Then at the Lyric Hammersmith, lyric.co.uk. From 4-28 October
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