Over the top

Over the years I have had the opportunity to research some of the remarkable Western – mostly British – characters that have resided in and impacted on Sri Lanka in some manner, and then broadcast their knowledge of the enigmatic island to the outside world. I am regularly amazed at the way Occidental biographers often ignore or marginalize such characters when they happen to interact with their biographical subjects. Sri Lanka is, it seems, far removed from the Home Counties and West Country milieu of successful biographers.

The major disregarded character is Robert Knox. Sixteen-eighty-one saw the publication of the first book about Ceylon in the English language – in some ways it’s still the best. Titled An Historical Relation of Ceylon, it was written by Knox with the help of Dr Robert Hooke, then Secretary to the Royal Society, and had a commendation by Sir Christopher Wren.

Knox had been confined to the mountainous and autonomous Kandyan Kingdom in Dutch-held Ceylon from 1660 to 1680. The book was widely read and discussed in London’s coffee houses (where Knox spent much time with Hooke). It’s simply the finest jewel in Sri Lanka’s two centuries of English literature. Moreover, Knox has long thought to have been the primary source for the character of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

It is hypothesised by Donald Ferguson in Captain Robert Knox (1896-97), and James Ryan, editor, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1911), that Knox and Defoe at least met each other. John Masefield in A Mainsail Haul (1913) and Arthur Secord in “Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe”, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, (1924), go further and assert they were acquaintances.

What is certain is that Defoe possessed a copy of Knox’s book. Its ownership may have proved useful, for Secord comments: “So similar in tone are the two works that many passages could be transferred bodily from one to the other without noticeable effect upon them.”

That Defoe seems indebted in part to Knox for the resourceful character of Crusoe is commented on by Secord, EFC Ludowyk in “Robert Knox and Robinson Crusoe”, University of Ceylon Review (1952), and SD Saparamadu, editor, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1958). Saparamadu notes: “If you peer into the features of Crusoe you will see something of the man who was not the lonely inhabitant of a desert island, but who has lived in an alien land among strangers, supported by the strength of his resolution to resist acceptance of his fate.”

Yet authors of the slew of Defoe biographies mostly disregard Knox, and in an instance when he is mentioned, astonishingly maligned: Paula R Backscheider in Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989) dismisses Knox as an “inferior writer”. Even a specific book on the subject, Tim Severin’s Seeking Robinson Crusoe (2002), ignores Knox. Severin believes the source was a surgeon, Henry Pitman, who wrote a short book, A Relation of the Great Suffering and the Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman, (1689) about his escape from a Caribbean penal colony and being shipwrecked and marooned on an uninhabited island off Venezuela.

Another possible source is examined by Diana Souhami – who like Severin overlooks Knox – in Selkirk’s Island (2001). Alexander Selkirk was the Sailing Master of the Cinque Ports, sent to plunder Spanish ships along the coast of South America in 1703. Selkirk had a difference of opinion with his captain and was put ashore on an uninhabited island off Chile, where, due to his lack of initiative, he barely survived before being rescued by Captain Woodes Rogers. Selkirk’s account was published by Rogers’ in his Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712).

The circumstances are similar enough to Crusoe’s and Defoe may have been influenced by them but moulded his hero’s character on Knox, the more adept survivor. Assuming this was the case Masefield laments: “It is sad that the comparatively colourless Selkirk should have robbed him (Knox) of much credit properly his.”

An example of related research is Linda Colley’s Captives (2002) that covers a assortment of prisoners in various parts of the British Empire from 1600 to 1850. It’s amazing that Colley, like Souhami, fails to mention Knox though she covers Defoe and Crusoe in her opening chapter.

An astonished American-born but England-based biographer remarked to me: “Is Knox really so forgotten?” Mysteriously, he is. Yet Ernest A Baker concludes in The History of the English Novel (1929): “Knox might well have been the author of the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe.”

The success of Robinson Crusoe encouraged Defoe to write The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720). In this instance Knox’s contribution is unquestionable, which reinforces the theory that Knox is likely to have been a source for Defoe. Captain Singleton includes an incident in which the eponymous hero’s pirate ship goes aground off the south-eastern coast of Ceylon. Military forces arrive to entrap the pirates but don’t succeed, partly because a similar situation faced by an earlier English sailor, as remembered by the ship’s surgeon, provides a forewarning.

The surgeon recalls the Englishman’s name “was Knox, Commander of an East India ship, who was driven on Shore, just as we were, upon the Island of Ceylon: That he was beguiled by the Barbarians, and inticed to come on Shore, just as we were invited to do at that time . . .”

The answer as to whether Defoe did borrow Knox’s character for Crusoe will become clearer in 2011, for the astonished biographer mentioned earlier, Katherine Frank – A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (1986), A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë (1990), Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (1994), and the contentious Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (2002) – has been stirred into writing the first complete biography of Knox.

Richard Boyle is the author of Knox’s Words: A study of the words of Sri Lankan origin or association first used in English literature by Robert Knox and recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (2004). Robert Knox also makes an appearance in Richard Boyle’s  ‘Dagger-clawed little people’ on the search of an early hominid on the island of Ceylon in Himal’s March issue.

by Guest Blogger Diwas Kc

During a tribute to Faiz Ahmed Faiz hosted by his daughter Salima Hashmi, poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar was invited on stage to share his first encounter with the Pakistani ace. Below you can hear Akhtar reminisce endearingly of a small thrill experienced during a constricted period of India’s history and an unhappy stage of Akhtar’s own career.

[audio:http://himalmag.com/blogs/files/2010/01/Akhtar-Faiz.mp3|titles=Akhtar-Faiz]

For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.

by Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi

Why are people willing to trade freedom for prosperity and material comfort, asked John Kampfner. His book, Freedom for Sale, looks at eight countries as examples of places which have traded in freedom for material security and prosperity. He was born in Singapore and lived in China and Russia—where except for a group of “fearless troublemakers,” most people have bowed down to the imperatives of prosperity in exchange for public freedoms. The UAE and Dubai have a Disney quality about them, says Kampfner, where everyone is trading freedoms for other things, including slave labor. In India, pollution is the tradeoff, while in Italy, Berlosconi has dismantled the independent judiciary and media. In the UK, the ascent of the Left has dismantled civil liberties, and in the USA, self-censorship after 2001 is at an all time high, with people trading in public freedoms for public security.

Niall Ferguson tried to play the Oxford don and questioned Kampfner about his assumptions. Ferguson brought up Tocqueville. He said that there was a tradeoff between liberty and equality. He talked about totalitarianism. The Oxford questioning (in a nutshell, he said that some freedoms had to be given up for material prosperity, and that material prosperity in turn brought freedom) brought forth quick retorts from the author, who pointed out that his questioner didn’t seem to have read the book. “I am not talking about totalitarian regimes—North Korea, etc. I am talking about liberal democracies. When a government says: we need to do whatever must be done to protect you, that’s fishy,” he said.

Steve Coll, jumping in this fray, said that one freedom he was glad of was the freedom from an Oxford education! The middle class is always trying to protect itself, he said. He said he was recently in Saudi Arabia, a place with no culture of public freedom, no free press, no human rights organizations, no tenured professors, and no Constitution other than the Koran. Even though people were consigned to these private spaces, they still talked about public freedoms because the discourse of it was global, and it was everywhere. In the USA, private security took over public freedoms after 9/11, he said. Americans were deeply frightened. Like India, Americans are now learning to deal with the notion of persistent terrorism, he said. Despite everything, there is a pervasive culture of redress in places like India—people speak out fearlessly even when the state is murdering its own citizens. In the USA, people don’t challenge the state as much as in India, he said.

Tarun Tejpal of Tehelka concluded the session by saying that “India needs a lot of activism on the part of its elites. I’m agnostic, but I was born a Hindu, and philosophically we have to do what has to be done. India has a social contract but it’s still a country in progress. The promise of democracy still has to be delivered.”

Sushma Joshi blogs at www.sushma.blogspot.com andwww.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com. For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.

–Guest Blogger Diwas Kc

Here’s a poem on another pair of neighbours: Dalit and Thakur. This is a poem by Omprakash Valmiki, a Hindi Dalit poet, and translated by Naresh K. Jain. Valmiki delivered this poem at one session of Bhaskar Bhasha Series at Jaipur Literature Festival. Look below for the recital in Hindi.

Thakur’s Well

The hearth is made of soil,
the soil is from the pond,
the pond belongs to the Thakur.

Hunger demands rotis,
the rotis are made of bajra,
bajra comes from the field,

the field belongs to the Thakur.
The ox belongs to the Thakur,

the plough belongs to the Thakur.

The hand that grips the handle is our own.

The harvest belongs to the Thakur,
the well belongs to the Thakur,
the water belongs to the Thakur,
the farm belongs to the Thakur,
the lane and the streets belongs to the Thakur.

What then is ours?
The village, the city, the country?

[audio:http://himalmag.com/blogs/files/2010/01/Valmiki.mp3|titles=Valmiki]

–By Guest Blogger Diwas Kc

As a visitor from Nepal, I am sometimes baffled by the optimism and sense of progress at the Jaipur Literature Festival. There is more to it than the congenial, celebratory sort of affair that is ordinary to festivals. Somehow to me the euphoria here appears directly connected to the wretchedness I hear expressed often in Kathmandu.

There is neighbourly feeling at the festival – a gathering of intellectuals from various parts of the world, sharing their worlds, getting to know each other. There is, in other words, an air of tolerance and empathy. But I also feel sneaking in me the other neighbourly feelings: envy and annoyance. Experiencing this neighbour country through the exhilaration of this festival tends to nag and disturb me. It has a way of underscoring exactly those moods and modes of life – the various walls of economic and cultural circumstances – that broadly separate India from my home country. These differences are what I frequently find myself pondering about here in Jaipur.

These differences though, I have come to realize, are the results not of great disparities but in fact of unalterable closeness. This is an epiphany I reached here at the festival at one of Gulzar sahab’s Hindustani poetry recitals during which I sat moved profoundly. Distance that arises from too much proximity, strangeness that results from familiarity – these are themes that play out remarkably in some of Gulzar’s poems and which I find so appropriate to my own thoughts on Nepal and India. I am daring below to rise above my station and offer a meager translation of one of his poems, whose title I do not know but which I have called “Neighbour”.

NEIGHBOUR

As long as there is light in the house across from mine
the shadow of that house creeps on the wall of my room.
One wheelchair gets shoved left and right, it keeps turning.
When the pet birds of that house fight, they collide against my wall.
A cage hanging in that house now looks like a cage in my house, one window shuts close and its mesh casts a prison door on my wall.
Now everyone who passes by seems like a prisoner to me.
A naked, suspended bulb sometimes rocks back and forth
and the people start flying around in the air, like in a circus.
After some while the window is open once again. A light is on.
Two swaying shadows in embrace come to stillness on the balcony.
Perhaps they are looking at my courtyard.
Sometimes the smoke of that house makes a shadow on my wall.
Then it feels as if both houses are on fire.

Gulzar in Jaipur has left me with the two sides of neighborliness – intimacy and intrusion.

Gulzar’s ‘Neighbor’ –Link to the audio of the Hindi version of ‘Neighbour’

[Editor:  For poetry from another neighbor see Bol! Bol! Bol! from our archives]

For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.