Tectonic collisions and fault lines produced the Himalayas, but they also serve as metaphors in Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire. Here are continual, transformative shifts in geography and milieu: From the pastoral quietude of Cat Bells, in Cumbria, to the Ranigunj coalfields in Burdwan, to a classroom in the Zurich Polytechnic University, or the camps of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) in the Tehri Garhwal.
Deborah Baker
The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire
Penguin Random House, 2018
These displacements reveal landscapes and characters so polychromatic, it’s almost confusing. Is the book a fictional reimagining of historic events, you might wonder, before correcting yourself with a glance at Baker’s notes and bibliography.
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Baker is a lively chronicler, who introduces surveyor and mapmaker Michael Spender as a ten-year-old racing his siblings to the top of Cat Bells: “With his golden locks and bright blue eyes, Michael was his mother’s favourite.” Geologist John Bicknell Auden is first seen with luggage and a steamship ticket for Bombay, on the brink of a journey to Calcutta, for a posting at the GSI. While history accounts for him as the lesser-known older brother of poet Wystan Hugh Auden, Baker, attentive to the silent traumas of historical characters, is quick to mention that 22-year-old John Auden is incurably shy: “He was more at ease watching lascars swab the deck with Dettol than raising toasts in the smoking lounges with strangers.”
His all-consuming interest in mountain ranges, which leads up to an expedition to conquer the summit of Everest, is also introduced through a minuscule detail – a pamphlet titled ‘The Cinematograph Record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922’, acquired at a school lecture given by George Mallory, who was part of the first expedition to reach the summit of Everest, in 1922. Mallory had disappeared in a subsequent attempt to climb the highest mountain in the world in 1924. John Auden, who was traveling to India in a second-class stateroom, “…wanted to succeed where Mallory had failed.”
North Face of Everest. Credit: deborahbaker.net
This grand imperialist undertaking of placing an Englishman on the summit of Everest, in a desperate bid to reaffirm dominion over a crumbling Empire, is accompanied by another – mapmaking. In the book Mapping an Empire, Matthew H. Edney writes: “In the case of the British conquest of South Asia in the hundreds years after 1750, military and civilian officials of the East India Company undertook a massive intellectual campaign to transform a land of incomprehensible spectacle into an empire of knowledge.”
Michael Spender, who has drawn a detailed map of two islands off the Great Barrier Reef, undertakes the onerous task of building this empire of knowledge. He lugs the Royal Geographical Society’s Wild photo-theodolite to unlikely places, trudges up and down slopes, collects angles, confronts corpse butchers and a sick goat, in order to draw a large-scale plan of the North Face of Everest.
Baker documents with cinematic clarity and wide-angle landscaping, making one privy to the often hilarious thoughts of her protagonists: “The yaks, both the wisest and most stupid animals he had ever encountered, took the most roundabout routes and invariably got jammed between trees or tangled in vines, having forgotten they had his equipment on their backs.”
The Last Englishmen has a motley cast. There are men of letters and secret diarists, fishing fleets bearing young women hopeful of marrying English Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers, poets, district officers, young artists at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, viceroys, sahibs and Sherpas. In poet Sudhindranath Datta (Sudhin), a worthy representative of the Set – a consortium of the Anglo-Bengali elite – one observes the charming torment of a Bengali babu at odds with himself.
Sudhin is yet another last Englishman – his maternal grandfather’s home has a Paris-style salon with alabaster nymphs by way of interior decoration. Many members of the Set “acquired a taste for English mustard, marmalade, cheese and roast beef,” Baker writes, humouring the Set even as she attempts to dismantle the Empire.
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Deborah Baker.
Sudhin launches Parichay, a literary journal, in 1931, and it immediately gains popularity with the Set. He then organises gatherings of Parichay’s editorial board, which evolve into the Parichay adda. The adda is attended by impeccably-tailored Oxonians, Russophiles, nationalists, even an Englishman who Sudhin thought was a ‘jackass’. Samosas are consumed, and, as the years progress, the politics of milieu alter the tincture of the meetings and the allegiance of sparring partners.
While The Last Englishmen is an effervescent, metaphorically-rich historic account of forgotten geologists and photogrammetrists, there are passages in it that read like history textbooks. Dull prose is deployed to explain the nationalist movements in India. For instance, Baker’s observations about the Non-Cooperation Movement reads like a summary of events and people: “Many in Congress felt that Gandhi’s calling off of his Non-Cooperation Movement had been a mistake. Motilal Nehru, a prosperous Kashmiri barrister and Congress leader, was one. His Harrow-and-Cambridge-educated son, Jawaharlal, along with Subhas Chandra Bose, a young firebrand of the All India Youth Congress, agreed.”
The Last Englishmen, ambitious in its scope and dappled with wit, does get knotty and unwieldy in its rendering of multiple stories and shifting points of view. But it is expansive – much like the Himalayas – and often surprisingly smooth, once one gets a foothold into the narrative. Baker, the biographer, navigates expertly through treacherous terrain.
Radhika Oberoi is the author of Stillborn Season.
