John come lately

There is always a ready audience when History decides to rise.

On his recent visit to Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented documents pertaining to John Lang to his Australian counterpart. John who? John Lang. Now an obscure writer, journalist and novelist, who was born in Sydney in 1816 and died in Mussoorie in 1864. He spent almost half his life in India, penned witty jibes against the British, won a case against the East India Company, ran a newspaper from Meerut and Agra for 20-odd years, and wrote ambitious novels, many of which have an Indian setting. Most of my friends have believed for the past seven or so years that this John is a fictitious character, concocted out of a fertile, mischievous mind.

Let us draw another parallel to test the ‘ready audience’ theory. Ayodhya, before it came into the limelight in the late ’80s, was a sleepy temple town, known to be the holy land of Ramayana, but not important enough to kindle public imagination. Ayodhya was spur-red into action after 130 years — it had last seen the pitched battle of revolution in 1857. Just before 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims fought together, in 1853, there were communal riots fuelled by the now familiar issue of the location of the mosque on the probable site of Rama’s birth. Rumour-mongering on both sides — about preparing for attacks — led to bloody clashes. The history of 1853 re-emerged long after the details and the nitty-gritty of the events were forgotten. There was a ready audience for the play.

Since the metaphor of ‘play’ has been used, one may as well digress and invoke William Shakespeare. The great bard was populist and commercial; he wrote for the “rag tag hiss hass people” (a phrase he used for commoners in Julius Caesar ). Shakespeare was re-invoked by the Romantics, 200 years after his time. There was a ready audience for him. He had written to the future.

In retrospect, John Lang was forgotten by all the three countries he ‘belonged’ to. He wrote against the British incessantly, and also with great pecuniary interest. The gossip and scandal in his newspaper, The Mofussilite, sold like hotcakes to the bored English wives. He was critical of the legal and military systems of East India Company, and being an insider, he painted vivid pictures of the corruption in these institutions. All this formed great material for his witty novels. It is but natural that the contemporary British historians ignored him, the literary critics called him a ‘hospital bed’ novelist.

Lang did not live long in Australia during his adulthood, which makes him forgettable there. Having completed his law from England, he returned to Sydney. He was a part of the Emancipist group, or the group that believed in more rights for former convicts. (To the uninitiated, Australia was a convict colony or a penal settlement, where the burgeoning number of dangerous as well as petty criminals of the order of spoon-stealers were sent to work to build a new colony). In Sydney, the loudmouthed young lawyer Lang exceeded his brief on a couple of important occasions, and had his business in doldrums. The fiction that Lang wrote about Australia had convicts as protagonists. He was on the wrong side of the conservative critics again.

India should remember him well because he defeated the East India Company in its own court in an Indian contractor’s case, wrote novels about India, and was also the lawyer of the Rani of Jhansi for the Doctrine of Lapse case. The name of Lang appears in most of the scholarship on Rani of Jhansi, but only very briefly, for half a page, as a British lawyer who wrote the only firsthand account about the Rani’s appearance. Twentieth-century Indian historians hardly showed an interest beyond that. A man of convivial habits, a smoker, a drinker, with a romantic disposition, barely makes the cut in a nationalistic discourse. And so Lang lived with elan, but the teleological trajectory removed him from the clan that populates history. The curtains had come down on Lang, and he slept peacefully in Mussoorie till a few random researchers like me got curious. Ruskin Bond had discovered his grave a few decades ago, but he also had a specific interest in finding the grave of a writer who was buried in his town.

The reason why Lang was forgotten is also the reason for his re-appearance. In an age of hashtags, he bears a big hashtag — that of being the lawyer of the Rani of Jhansi, though it was just one meeting with her, and a case lost within a week. With Australia-India ties on the tide, there is hankering for common ground, for shared history. Shared history evokes empathy. Once you are tied, you can take the tide, and trade. There was a ready audience for this play to be played again.

(Dr Amit Ranjan has a PhD on John Lang and an upcoming book on the subject)