The author is so identified with indigo, the true blue dye, its history and
present day use that it was inevitable she would jump at the news of the
unpublished journals of an indigo planter in 19th century India. The
journals, in the British Library, total nearly 3,000 pages and are what
the writer, Thomas Machell, called his 'Talking Papers' that he sent
home to his clergyman father. It is easy to see how the journals
attracted the author too, with their unpretentious watercolours, and
frank observations of an essentially lonely young man. Thomas was a
born traveller. Aged twelve he persuaded his younger brother Lancelot
to run away from their Yorkshire rectory. They walked three hundred
miles to Portsmouth, short of food and money, before a family friend
forwarded them back to their anxious parents. Thomas leaves home for
good, aged sixteen, becoming a midshipman on the East India ship
Worcester. He arrives in Hong Kong and is an eyewitness to the first
Opium War: 'We saw scenes so distressing it is still painfull to recall
them. Whole families laying dead or dying, women and children
stabbed, strangled or poisoned by their own frantic relatives, more cruel
in their frenzied fear than the enemies storming their town.'
The young midshipman then sails on a coaling vessel, the Ganges,
around Cape Horn to America. On a further voyage, to the Marquesas
Islands of Polynesia, he falls, Gauguin-like, in love with a local girl, a
'nut brown maiden of the Sea' as he describes her. One senses this was
the happiest encounter of his life.
But restlessly he travels from Calcutta to Suez by dhow, assuming Arab
dress and growing a long dark beard like his Muslim fellow sailors. A
little sketch of the crew performing a devotional ceremony at the start
of the voyage emphasises the unique experiences of this curious
wanderer. So where does the indigo come in? By 1850 Thomas is
unsettled and wandering round Bengal until he is offered a job as
manager of the Rooderpore indigo estate, near Jessore. This doesn't
suit him for long though, and he is off again, returning to England after
surviving cholera, but then back to India where he explores Kashmir
and the North West Frontier with Lancelot, who by now has forged a
successful military career for himself. Jenny Balfour Paul is right to
explore the tension between the two brothers - few siblings could be so
unalike. Lancelot, the handsome soldier, Thomas the wanderer with an
unspecified physical defect, possibly a club foot, from which he cannot
escape, no matter how far he travels. He dies, aged 39 in 1862, and his
tomb, discovered by the author and her daughter, still exists at
Narsinghpur, Madhya Pradesh.
Interspersed with Thomas's travels are those of the author, their paths
frequently crossing, particularly in southern India so 'that I couldn't tell
whether I was stalking him or he was stalking me'. This approach to
her subject, trying to enter the mind of a man long dead, even at one
point doing a 'past life regression' with an Indian psychotherapist, will
annoy some readers. It dilutes the content of the book - is it the story
of Thomas Machell, or the author? Despite a number of coincidences,
intuitions, and chance discoveries, this biographical and autobiographical
approach doesn't really work. All good biographers try to
get into the minds of their subjects, but there are ways of doing this and
imagining one is one's subject, removes the boundaries of objectivity.
There are two books struggling to get out here, both equally interesting,
for the author is a gifted story teller, but both are weakened by their
juxtaposition. There is a long diversion when an American great great
nephew of Thomas is found and two fictional chapters on how Thomas
might have recorded the last six years of his life, including a report of
his own death. A better editorial hand would have teased out these
various strands - autobiography, novel, and history and guided the
author more closely. Her achievement in rescuing Thomas from
obscurity is commendable and perhaps his journals will be edited and
published now. But one senses this book has been overlong in its
writing, since a number of acknowledgments are to people no longer
with us. There is no index, as there should have been.
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