review of
Jules Verne's The Demon of Cawnpore
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 15, 2013


Verne's popularity was catapulted by his fantastic travel stories, such things as Five Weeks in a Balloon & Around the World in Eighty Days, a series his publisher entitles "Les Voyages Extraordinaires". While many of these were too fantastic to be based on actual traveler experience, Journey to the Center of the Earth & From the Earth to the Moon, eg, others might've had their details based on Verne's hypothetical readings of travelogues.

That seems to be the case here. The Demon of Cawnpore, Book One of The Steam House consists largely of description of areas traversed in India. In other words, Verne seems to've done his research.

The introduction by I. O. Evans writes that: "The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 had threatened Jules Verne with financial ruin. His fortunes were restored not so much by one of his most successful stories, Round the World in Eighty Days, as by the play based upon it. The star-performer in this was reputed to be the elephant, lent by the London Zoo and warmly welcomed by the Parisians; they had not seen such a creature for years, most of the animals in the Jardin des Plants having been killed during the siege of Paris for food." [..] "His biographers suggest ironically that he may have this debt to this creature in mind when he excogitated "Behemoth," the mechanical elephant whose adventures dominate both of the books which form The Steam House." (p 5)

The Steam House being The Demon of Cawnpore followed by Tigers and Traitors, a sequel wch I, alas, don't have a copy of - thus my reading of The Demon of Cawnpore seems incomplete. & therein lies a problem: many series bks leave the reader hanging somewhat but The Demon of Cawnpore mostly just seemed inadequate by the end. It started off very promising w/ a steam engine run mechanical elephant capable of pulling 2 houses, a sortof Recreation Vehicle on a grand scale - placed in the context of an anti-imperialist revolt in British-occupied India. But it fizzled out in anticipation of its sequel. Evans' intro continues:

"Impressed and at the same time horrified by the stern efficiency with which the British had suppressed the Indian Mutiny - for in his time the world was not so accustomed to reprisals as it is today - Verne ingeniously worked into his narrative the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. In the original version he devotes a whole chapter to the Mutiny and its suppression,* [*Omitted in the present edition as holding up the story and lacking in interest.] so tendential that his original translators disavowed responsibility for its "facts or sentiments" in a foot-note!" - p 6

I call the reader's attn to the admission here that the publishers omitted a chapter present in the original bk! Shame on them!! This is the Fitzroy edition published by Ace! Don't bother to read this one, try to find an edition w/ the chapter omitted here! I will. Evans continues:

"He realized with some prescience that the quelling of the Mutiny had not put an an end to nationalist aspirations in India, and this gave his plot a dramatic interest which otherwise it would have lacked, as well as a somewhat tenuous factual basis. Nana Sahib was in fact a ringleader in the mutiny and is accused of being responsible for the massacre at Cawnpore; defeated, he took refuge in the jungles at the foot of the Himalayas, and is believed to have perished there. As, however, his actual fate is uncertain, Verne could plausibly represent him as having survived and plotting a further insurrection." - p 6

& this use of Nana Sahib as a character couple w/ the mechanical elephant gives The Demon of Cawnpore fabulous promise. Interestingly, the racism of The Begum's Fortune, written only a yr before, is largely gone here (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17611386-the-begum-s-fortune ). Yes, the only black character is a cook &, therefore, a servant - but one so esteemed for his cooking abilities that a negative opinion from him is respectfully feared: "He presided over his saucepans with the air of a high priest and distributed his condiments with the accuracy of a chemist. Monsieur Parazard was vain, it is true, but so clever that we readily pardoned his vanity." (p 52) Captain Hood, the hunter, is out in search of game to bring back to the travelers w/ the steam-powered mechanical elephant but is unable to find anything: "He had only come out now in the character of a purveyor, and thought of the reception Monsieur Parazard would give him if he returned with an empty bag." (p 137) But the social world of servants & the filthy rich marches on in Verne as both a sign of accepted classism & as a gimmick to justify the wealth that enables certain fantastic things to get done. It's mainly criticized in connection w/ the Indian Rajas & not w/ the British heros.

There is, however, a criticism of British imperialism somewhat implicit in the sympathetic treatment given to Nana Sahib, who's described as a murderer but still credited w/ much justification of the Indian rebellion. EG: "In one day twenty-eight rebels were blown from a cannon's mouth - a fearful sentence, many times afterwards carried out during the mutiny of 1857." (p 21) Verne does not approve.
The novel starts w/ ""A reward of two thousand pounds will be paid to any one who will deliver up, dead or alive, one of the prime movers of the Sepoy revolt, at present known to be in the Bombay presidency, the Nabob Dandou Pant, commonly called...." - commonly called Nana Sahib; a "presidency" in this case meaning a district.

""Woe betide those who fall now into the power of Dandou Pant! Englishmen have not seen the last of Nana Sahib!"

"Nana Sahib! This name, the most formidable to which the revolt of 1857 had given a horrible notoriety, was there once more, flung like a haughty challenge at the conquerors of India." - p 17

"It was but too true. The Mahratta prince, Dandou Pant, adopted son of Baji Rao, Peishwar of Poona, known as Nana Sahib, and perhaps at this period the sole survivor of the leaders in the great insurrection, had dared to leave his inaccessible retreats amid the mountains of Nepaul. Full of courage and audacity, accustomed to face danger, crafty and skilled in the art of baffling and eluding pursuit in every form, he had ventured forth into the provinces of Deccan, animated by hatred intensified a hundredfold since the terrible reprisals taken after the rebellion." - p 29

The trip by mechanical elephant is somewhat born out of the narrator's criticism of traveling by train. When asked how his cross-India trip was he complained of having been "blinded": "I don't want to speak evil of railroads, Banks, since it is your business to make them; but let me ask you whether you call it travelling to be jammed up in the compartment of a carriage, see no further than the glass of the windows on each side of you, tear along day and night, now over viaducts among the eagles and vultures, now through tunnels among moles and rats, stopping only at stations one exactly like another". [..] ""Ah, well, then, you had better take to the great trunk road and walk!"" (p 18) Wch is what the character has decided to do. This leads to an alternate seemingly fantastic proposal that is eventually realized:

""The best plan of all," said I, "would certainly be to carry one's house with one."

"Oh, you snail!" cried Banks.

""My friend," replied I, "a snail who could leave his shell, and return to it a pleasure, would not be badly off. To travel in one's own house, a rolling house, will probably be the climax of inventions in the matter of journeying!"" - p 25

""Well said!" exclaimed Captain Hood. "Hurrah for the steam horse! I can almost fancy I see the travelling house, invented by Banks the great engineer, travelling the highways and byways of India, penetrating jungles, plunging through forests, venturing even into the haunts of lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and leopards, while we, safe within its walls, are dealing destruction on all and sundry! Ah, Banks, it makes my mouth water!" - p 28

Yes, this depiction of Hood may be comical but the undertone is that he's a bit of a murderous maniac - & he's British. Hood is 'comical' but I can't help but think that Verne is taking more than a little crack at cultural insensitivity:

""My dear Maucler," answered Banks, "the strictest rules will give way before the offer of a few rupees! The Brahmins must live."

""I don't see why they should," bluntly said Captain Hood, who never professed toleration towards the Hindoos, nor held in respect, as his countrymen generally do, their manners, customs, prejudices, and objects of veneration. In his eyes India was nothing but a vast hunting ground, and he felt a far deeper interest in the wild inhabitants of the jungles than in the native population either of town or country." - p 68

It's fun for me to see the occasional Latin expression creep in - an indicator that this bk was written at a time when education wd've more commonly included such things: ""A first-class engineer who is an artist, a poet in iron and steel into the bargain, is a rara avis amongst us!"" (p 43) Rara avis = rare bird. While today's 'necessities' might be a cell-phone & a laptop, these travelers 'needed' "sideboards and buffets loaded with all the wealth of silver, glass, and china, which is necessary to English comfort." (p 46)

Yes, things were different in those days, it's casually mentioned that one place "is the wealthy center of the opium trade" - a destructive addiction imposed on much of the world by British military mercantilism. There's also plenty of the 'exoticism' one wd expect from a writer of popular travel stories targeted at people not likely to ever travel to India themselves:

"Here some of the faithful, stupefied with "bang" (which is liquid opium mixed with a decoction of hemp) were suspended on branches of trees, by iron hooks plunged into their shoulders. Hanging thus, they whirled round and round until the flesh gave way, and they fell into the waters of the Phalgou.

"Others, in honour of Siva, had pierced their arms, legs, or tongues through and through with little darts, and made serpents lick the blood which flowed from the wounds." - p 71

But in these days when people like Fakir Musafar have rediscovered the Sun Dance ceremony of Plains Nation Native Americans & in wch piercings & the like are common fashion accessories, such physical events are probably less potently described than they were in Verne's times. On the other hand, passages like the following still pack a wallop:

"Several alligators of great size lay on the white sand, as if drinking in the early sunlight. Motionless, they were turned towards the radiant orb, as if they had been the most faithful votaries of Brahma. But the sight of several corpses floating by aroused them from their adoration.

"It is said that these bodies float on the back when they are men, and on the chest when they are women, but from personal observation I can state that there is no truth in the statement. In a moment the monsters hard darted on the prey, daily furnished to them on the waters of these rivers, and with it plunged into the depths." - p 80

The image of women reputed to float chest downward is presumably meant to evoke the weight of their breasts causing that position. Verne even comes up w/ some unexpected etymology: "The darkness within the room contrasted strongly with the lightning that flashed without. We had presently a proof that we were ourselves strongly charged with the electric fluid, when, to our infinite astonishment, we perceived our saliva to be luminous. This phenomenon, rarely observed, and very alarming when it is so, has been described as "spitting fire."" - p 123

One has to wonder whether Verne's somewhat sympathetic depiction of other cultures than his own fails here: "The musicians, who played tambourines, cymbals, and tom-toms, belonged to the school which thinks more of noise than of harmony; but there were besides scrapers on guitars and four-stringed violins, though their instruments had never been in a tuner's hands." (p 147) Methinks Verne's description here is based on something he read by someone very underknowledgable about music.

Verne even gets into some sympathy for exploited workers: "the working of his mines, the product of which are most esteemed in the markets of Benares and Allahabad, employs a large number of Hindoos. They are very hardly treated, condemned to the severest labour, and running a great chance of being decapitated as soon as their work is no longer required: so it is not to be wondered at that the Nana found many amongst them ready to fight for the independence of their country." (p 169)

All in all, this was a good bk - but its fizzling out in anticipation of a sequel that I might never read was a bit disappointing.
( )