Dominic Edwardes interviewed @katehowereads

From the campaign to place a plaque in Westminster Abbey for Anthony Trollope

Friends and readers,

A briefer blog than usual (as to space): October 21, 2022, Kate Howe interviewed, the present Chairman of the London Trollope Society

Dominic Edwardes very perceptive on Trollope’s long fiction; he tells of Trollope’s place among his peers, his reputation then and now, his life, the mission of the Trollope Society to keep his books in print and read by as many people as the Society and internet can reach; Dominic also confides how he (DE) he came to read and love Victorian novels, then as among the best of them, Anthony Trollope, Dominic’s first introduction to the Society (he went to an event which he thought would be in costume and it turned out no such thing, so he was the only one there in costume) & what the Society is doing now: yearly dinner, lectures, trips, and a vast growing website where you find recorded information on Trollope’s fiction, on the illustrations to them, on editions, from many talks given at the every-other-week online general reading group, and information about other more local reading groups and lectures.

As prelude or preface to the interview, she includes a cornucopia of beautiful and effective illustrations from the fiction of the era — the sort of thing you find in the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels.

“Oh, George, if you knew all … ” (Francis Arthur Fraser, illustration for Trollope’s Golden Lion of Granpere, not included in Howe’s set, but the same sort of thing)

Posted by Ellen

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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a black slave narrative become a white middle class woman’s novel

Early illustration of Uncle Tom ministered to by Cassy (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1851-52)

I assigned Uncle Tom’s Cabin 3 times in the early 1990s when I was teaching a class called American literary Masterpieces. It was part of a unit I called The Civil War, and my other two books were a set of Lincoln’s speeches and The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas. I had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin between the ages of 11 and 12; it was on the shelves of one of the bookcases in our house. I found then (1992-93) it was not uncommon to find most Black good students (readers) and a few white students had read it.

Dear friends and readers,

Though Uncle Tom’s Cabin is by a woman, and fundamentally a work of genius that is at the same time a quintessentially American middle class white woman’s novel, based on the 18th century captivity and slave narratives that emerged from the first 2 centuries (17th, 18th) of ruthless colonialism aiming to grow super-rich by extraction of the natural resources and taking over the land of gun-less cultures, I am nevertheless going to place my brief essay-talk on it here (rather than Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two), because the still wide-ranging kinds of people it rivetingly engages transcends its author and immediate context. Its subaltern-extermination-slave or imprisoned-bondage labor story make it a universal post-colonial text too (see comments).

I am taking a course at OLLI at AU called “The Coming of the Civil War,” which I cannot praise too highly, for the teacher’s (a retired pro-labor lawyer who clerked for Thurgood Marshall) basing the course on original political documents, and the way he makes us understand quite how complicated were the laws passed, the customs protected, the reasons for the fierce polarization and violent behaviors, and hatreds, economic and political interests. I’ve learned about invasions by people who supported secession into Mexico, Latin and South America to extend slavery and renew kidnapping of African people to enslave thousands more. He knows so much and yet one book he has not been able to get himself to read is one of the central texts igniting it. I must suppose (from what I saw in the class too) that to many people Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes framed with the way many women’s books are regarded: as somehow inferior, this one as sentimental gush. So of course one needs to explain its extraordinary sale and central role. He seemed to think it was unique in some way. I learned too that quite a number of the mostly white 60+ year olds in both OLLIs have never read the book. It has not been on US high school curricula perhaps ever and especially not since the mid-20th century when it came to be reviled by leading black critics, who nonetheless had themselves read it as children.

So I wrote a short talk, and invite my readers to read it because Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a sina qua non text for understanding the literature and culture of the American 19th century and much of the twentieth until say the later 20th century period of progress for black Americans, jump started with the Civil Rights act of 1965. One might hope that if we were a post-racial society the book could be seen historically important rather than directly relevant, but we cannot — tragic: since the 1990s a massive incarceration of black men in the US began again — so UTC it can today be regarded as living witness and testimony. I will let my short essay speak for itself as about the book’s content, aesthetics, value, genres, and critical history; a second blog will contextualize it with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life and the immediate political fights over enslavement in the early 1850s.

Eliza leaping ice floes

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a powerful literary masterpiece, about the horrors of enslavement. It was an astoundingly wide best-seller (borne out by statistics), internationally acclaimed, prompting a ceaseless production of anti-Tom works, and parodic imitations on stage. Scholars seem to think, however, that the anecdote of Lincoln saying to Harriet Beecher Stowe, So this is the little lady who started this big war, is apocryphal. It is very pat: Lincoln being this very tall man and Stowe this very short woman. In the 20th century, her novel aroused terrific ire still, especially among Black readers (most notably James Baldwin’s loathing in his famous “Everybody’s Protest Novel”) and was dropped from college curricula mid-century. Its sentimentality was called an embarrassment; nevertheless, Edmund Wilson included it in Patriotic Gore for its “eruptive force,” “the irresistible vitality of its characters,” “the critical mind which on complex situations” sustains “a firm grip,” and its structure which “clearly controls and coordinates” the subplots.

So why did it hit an emotional nerve? Harriet Beecher Stowe writes vivid powerful prose; she writes very direct dialogue we can believe in, and characters whose motivations and emotions we recognize as real, its prose and action are rhythmic and scenes and descriptions effective & immersing. Stowe doesn’t mince words. She presents the issues she want us to understand directly and urgently reasons with us as her scenes make her points dramatically. She is a sharp ironist. Her major argument is you cannot make people into property; people are not things. Not all the scenes are of horrific punishment (Simon Legree enters the novel rather late), and many seem ordinarily probable, with the cause of the slave-traders and owners behavior making money, or a profit.

Here is just the opening section of George and Eliza Harris’s story, early on, an owner hates George Harris for being intelligent and hates how he is inventing machines and gaining respect when hired out, so brings him back, grinds him down with menial work, whips, debases him. We see George inwardly “The flashing eye, the gloomy troubled brow were part of a natural language that could not be repressed – indubitable signs, which showed too plainly that the man could not become a thing.” A little later, same passage, from the enslaver (“owner”): “It’s a free country, sir, the man’s mine, and I do with him what I please, – that’s it” (Chapter 2, 24-25). George soliloquizes: “I’m a man as much as he is, I’m a better man than he is, I know more about business than he does; I’m a better manager than he is, I can read better than he can; I can write a better hand – and I’ve learned it myself, and no thanks to him, – I’ve learned it in spite of him, and now what right has he to make a dray-horse of me?” (3, 27).

Our materials for this week’s class focused on the Fugitive Slave Act. Major scenes throughout the novel feature characters trying to escape and we see the immense difficulties and obstacles, the laws and actors empowered to help the determined owners to get their property back. Eliza jumping ice floes is just the most sensational but also (as Hedrick shows) Biblical in its intensity and use of allusion: “‘she’s clar ‘cross Jordan. As a body may say, in the land o’Canaan'”. Eliza crosses that river, her child in her arms. We are led to identity and ask ourselves, what if you were never safe, could never hold onto your children or parents? what if you had obtained, become a freed person and found yourself at risk of being kidnapped and re-enslaved? You cannot count on the next moment to plan anything. You may be sold anytime. And twice a set of characters are sold when “good” “owners” need money or go bankrupt.

No less important are chapters and whole sections of eloquent polemics against slavery, both out of principle and the lives such practices inflict on the enslaved and a society based on such practices.

Yes, there are cringeworthy comical scenes where Stowe condescends and shows racism in her descriptions of black people; yes the death of little Eva, and Uncle Tom and little Eva’s relationship is as drenched in sentiment as Joe the street sweeper’s death in Bleak House and Sergeant George and Esther Summerson’s sweet pity, but this is Dickensian stuff still popular today. There is condescension and romanticizing. But we do hear the voices of these people hitherto in white people’s books silenced — Stowe invents idiolects which are intended to mirror black people’s speech. Yes, in the ending the two races are separated, with one group going at first to Canada, and eventually two to Africa. But their fate is treated with respect and interest. Topsy is a black child, girl, who becomes Ophelia St Clair’s special property; Miss St Clair is a northern spinster who comes south to help her brother Augustine (sharp, humane man) because his wife is useless (not that much of a caricature). Miss Ophelia does beat Topsy trying to make her moral: the phrase used, “brought up by hand,” comes from Dickens’s Great Expectations. Miss O is anti-slavery and yet is complicit, but when household breaks up, she takes Topsy with her, and last seen, Topsy is freed, and both women living together. They have become a mother and daughter or aunt and niece pair.

What actuated Stowe? She was horrified by what she saw in the slave society of Ohio; she came from idealistic transcendental sensitive people, was surrounded all her life by Quakers, evangelicals who were abolitionists. She herself saw and understood and wrote against the economic slave system as spreading poverty and misery for most, but she was also a woman, was fired up by her lack of rights, well-educated, her situation with her husband left her supporting him, and she found herself too often pregnant. She finally got separate rooms. Crucially important too was a conversion experience in 1843, a culmination of several years of immersion in religious sect behavior all around her: we do not today sufficiently emphasize what a religious culture the US had (in different varieties) and how the understanding of desperate was filtered through religious ideas (see Joan Hedrick, pp 143-160). Her brother, George, killed himself during this time. Harriet had dreams where she identified with a bleeding enslaved person being whipped. Then around the time of the writing of the book her beloved young son, Charles had just died. The death of this son is poured into this book; and she is particularly careful to show women as effective and important influencers to get the men around them to help enslaved people escape.

Elaine Showalter in A Jury of Her Peers (a history of American women writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx), argues Stowe is a major 19th century career writer; Joan Hedrick, Stowe’s biographer, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a quintessentially women’s text (growing out of parlor literature and women’s periodical writing). Of course Stowe is also very religious, with this book following the usual providential patterns: being Stowe these are graphic. Gilbert and Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic) share this common view among those who’ve read 19th century American women novelists (see Writing [for Vocation] and Immortality by Anne Boyd Rioux). The attic prison becomes a refuge. Stowe’s style recalls Louisa May Alcott – think of Little Women; also Sarah Orne Jewett. Early on when Stowe wrote her first book, a didactic geography adolescent school children, it sold very well. Stowe is an equivalent of Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton for example) in social conscience; she corresponded with George Eliot who wrote reviews of Stowe’s work praising it highly.

In the 1990s when I taught it to undergraduates, the book was written about as combining the very popular slave or captivity narratives of the 18th and 19th century centuries. Stowe took a black form and made it white and middle class. Stowe drew especially from the slave narratives of Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb. One of the many ironic chapter headings is “Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind,” whose point is the will to be free is compelling and ceaseless and immediate active (or at any time) among enslaved people. It’s revealing to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the context of the several other slave narratives too that Henry Gates has published over the years.

A Dover edition

Also in the context of books where the attribution is difficult. With, for example, Lydia Maria Child’s books, with which the 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was once placed. In The Incidents, once attributed to Lydia Maria Child, we experience a closely similar terrain to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Child was an American abolitionist, activist, writing stories strongly for women’s rights. In 1971 Jean Flagan Yellin, a feminist scholar discovered in the archives of Quaker life and letters at the University of Rochester documentary proof that Harriet Jacobs wrote the narrative. It’s based on Jacobs’ life, and she went to Child to help her put it together and publish it. We should call Child Jacob’s editor and mentor.

Fast forward to 2022, today. People remark on how uncannily Uncle Tom’s Cabin anticipates Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The last sequence where Cassy, Legree’s much abused concubine (who also bullies him) hides in the attic with a young Black girl, Emmeline, whom Legree had bought intending to use her sexually is gothic, ghostly, haunting. The sequence anticipates the ghost of a murdered baby in Beloved, and two of the many incidents told more briefly also repeat parts of Margaret Garner’s history. There is in UTC another enslaved woman who kills her child rather than allow her to become the sexual toy of whoever can buy her, later this woman’s son seeing he is about to be re-captured drowns himself. Garner’s story is sometimes told as if it was somehow unusual to experience such abuse. Not at all: read the last two chapters of Fanny Kemble’s memoir, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-39: you will be horrified at what the women endured as matter of course (made to work from dawn to dusk in heavily pregnant stages, and immediately after birth driven back to the rice fields again was just ordinary non-sexual life)

The sticking point is Uncle Tom: what do we do about this noble man who refuses to escape, who is all goodness to the Shelbys and then St Claires who sell him. It’s not enough to say he’s a Christ figure because for some of us that doesn’t work. I’d like to emphasize that a much of his behavior and passivity is simply idealistically ethical when he is treated with respect (much of he book) and, when not, we see him holding out against snitching and against demands he be cruel to others, become complicit in abominable practices; paradoxically Uncle Tom’s not even for rent. When he’s whipped to death, he is refusing to tell where Cassy and Emmeline are hidden. He’s admirable: his story is a bondage narrative, where usually a woman is at the center, yoked to a freedom narrative, where usually a male escaping is the center. Stowe’s reversed them, putting a male in female story (captivity narratives often have females at the center) and a female and child, Eliza and Henry in the usual male escape story (this is Hedrick’s idea). I find Uncle Tom endurable and can admire him at the end. He receives a decent burial and moving honors by Eliza and George’s son, Henry.

Stowe did write another novel of enslavement in 1856, now in print, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The hero is a violent vengeful escaped enslaved man, a sort of Spartacus. In conception I’d liken Dred to David Walker’s 1829’s Appeal to the Colored People of the World, where Walker, a black Bostonian publisher of among the earlier periodicals by and for black people, analyzed the horrors of colonialism as at the core of this new world, and called for immediate abolition of slavery and threatened (urged) black people to rebel. Like many a black male who threatens the white hegemony David Walker died young, in his thirties as did Malcolm X, MLK, and Medgar Evers. Alas, it is said to be poor novel, rushed, the characters insufficiently imagined. It is, however, of interest equally as a “sharp response to the male or patriarchal culture of Andover” (where Stowe was at the time), and contains strong criticism of hypocritical clergymen (Hedrick 258-62).

1875 photograph of Harriet Beecher Stowe

To sum up, why did Stowe’s book become so famous and why was it distributed so widely. It’s a powerful work of literary genius. You will laugh but I liken the spread of her book to the influence of Shakespeare’s plays on his fellows — enormous. Like Shakespeare, Stowe was writing in the same genre and idiom as fellow novelists and pamphleteers.  Her book’s literary power soared because of what she was actuated by and her abilities to combine several popular genres and come up with something that for a while felt new. It helped that one thread of the novel dramatizes the human results (often ironic and so patently unjust) of the fugitive slave act, an understandably electrifying issue at the time (even though out of 4 million enslaved people it’s estimated only 30-100,000 escaped) but it is just as much a novel about the bondage and horrific conditions under which chattel slaves are coerced into surviving. Remember the old Roman saying, What father when he is a slave?, well a bit modified for Stowe, What father or mother or husband or wife or children or even friends when you are a chattel slave?

When I’ve finished reading Hedrick and a few other essays, I’ll write an accompanying blog-narrative of Stowe’s life and other fiction writing. In the meantime here is Lincoln’s moving eloquent argument against ending the Missouri compromise of 1850, whose purpose was to stop the spread of slave societies; let no one think that this man did not loathe slavery:  he is continually precisely on point for every philosophic and humanitarian argument against it — and by extension, racism, human hierarchies. Stowe does not cover all this ground of objections because her stories do not go that far (stories must be ambiguous if they are at all real). Lincoln’s argument is just beautiful at the end because it is a refutation of what’s happening in the US today — his speech is still utterly relevant.

Ellen

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Indian Summers, Season 2, Episodes 6-10: Alas, la commedia e finita

Hill Station still to be seen in Penang

I feel so sad I’ve finished these blogs. I want to know what happened to the characters under the pressure of WW2 and the changes inflicted on them by their friends, associates, surroundings. How they each reacted, what they became …

Dear friends and readers,

It’s overdue time to sadly finish my account of this sometimes sublime series, Indian Summers. Rhik Samadder said rightly of the first season, it was one of the most narratively satisfying dramas of British TV and of real interest in its depiction of the Raj, besides which, gorgeous; and from ordinary watchers on IMDB provided further rave reviews for the second, I’ll content myself with quoting “it’s a feast.”

One of the intriguing elements across the series which I’ve not mentioned thus far is many of the actors act against character; Julie Waters is a cruel hard woman, lonely, desperate (usually so humane); James Fleet an amoral sexual harasser (usually the one bullied), Art Malik a sybaritic amoral creep of a maharajah (usually austerely moral or the subaltern).

Lord Hawthorne (James Fleet) looking sinister!

Leena (Amber Rose Reevah)now gone to jail (because she protected Adam from Hawthorne’s rage when Adam burnt him for sexually harassing her) I believe would have been brought back, having been in prison and got out early.

I also loved how it ended so ironically: the white British who had been born in India leave their home (the club), but find they have no home in Britain they can or want to return to. The series is Anglo-Indian, yes about the English centrally, but seen from a very different angle, as the ruthless dangerous often harmful but finally relatively vulnerable oppressors.

Cynthia posed in her fashion show outfit captures something of this

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Indian Summers 2:6 The gift for the king

In this episode, half-way through our season, the stories come to a (literally) explosive climax. In this case it’s the information that Ralph gets from Aafrin about the bomb about to be set off during the celebration of the king’s birthday – or a jubilee. The two have a terrific quarrel when Aafrin admits he was not coerced, not originally, but they act together towards the end.

Ralph (Henry Lloyd-Jones) confronts Aafrin (Nikesh Patel)

King-emperor is so absurd as a title. Ralph sends Rowntree and his men to the tea plantation and elsewhere. They can find nothing. Naresh Banerjee (Arjun Mathur) is wandering about in a mad rage – tries to kill Sooni (Aysha Kala) but Ian McCleod (Alexander Cobb) is there and promptly tries to save her, and then chase Banerjee who is taken to jail, but cyanide is slipped into his hands and he dies before they can question him. The journalist is also following Sooni about – worried for her.

Ralph and Madeleine now Wheelan (Olivia Grant)

We watch all the characters behaving characteristically – Cynthia (Julie Walters) won’t leave the club house; Mr Dalal (Roshan Seth) scolds Alice (Jemima West) when she comes to the house in effect to try to win friends. Madeline (Olivia Grant) is doing her best to support Ralph. Mrs Raworth (Fiona Glascott) we are told has had her baby in Delhi – with Raworth (Craig Parkinson) now ever so eager to return to England and be a wonderful family man – he is the most pathetic of the characters . His wife despises him.

Banerjee has sent a small Indian boy off with his wagon and the lit bomb to blow at 4 pm. This provides the suspense of the second half of the episode. As luck would have it, the boy is just outside the compound when Raworth spots him, runs over to him, attempts to see what’s what and the bomb blows up – killing Raworth and the boy (several small Indian boys are simply blown up in this series).

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Indian Summers 2:7: The Proposal

The proposal is that in return for his support for the India Bill Ralph wants to pass in Parliament, the Maharajah (Art Malik) demands that Ralph let him go to bed with Madeline, Ralph’s wife. The whole hour is taken up with Ralph’s state of mind – on and off. It opens with his memories of his mother going to bed with Cynthia’s husband, and then ironically he is on the other side of the door by the end of the episode with Madeline and Maharajah on the other side. The maharajah’s mistress tries to goad Ralph into fucking her, and while he begins, he gives it up in disgust.

Sirene, her “real” name, something of a joke, said to be Phyllis, she is from Australia (played by the hard looking Rachel Griffiths)

Sirene rages within at this man she is mistress of who has no respect for her. Ralph is driven or needs get this position, the Viceroy, where the princely states will give up their independence because he’s in debut but also his father (he says) wanted him to have it (Viceroy) but it’s not clear if Ralph is remembering his legal father or the biological one (Cynthia’s philandering husband by whom she had no children). He is also bitter about Cynthia’s pressuring him all these years, about her manipulations. Early in the episode the maharajah goads Ralph into a game whereby they loosen a goat, tied up as a temptation to tiger and then replace the goat with a boy. The maharajah wants Ralph to use his own son, Adam (Dillon Mitra), but he demurs and uses Bhupi’s son. Yes both he and the maharajah stand there to shoot the tiger to stop it devouring the boy, but, as Bhupi (Ash Nair) says, if the boy was safe, why not use Adam? And it’s the maharajah who shoots the tiger. Bhupi is infuriated, but still obedient. Had there been more seasons eventually Bhupi would have rebelled.

Art Malik (the maharajah) — this is not from Indian Summers, but a minor role in Doctor Who Series 11 where he embodies just the type character we see him inhabit here

At the opening of the episode we see Aafrin sent away to Delhi to help with the earthquake. This is to get him out of the way after the bombing death of Raworth which Aafrin is partly responsible for. He is to make up his mind to be loyal to Ralph; he says he has but he has to reach Alice on the side. During the episode we again hear the misery of Alice on the other side of the same door (it seems) now being buggered and sadistically used by her mean vicious husband Charlie (Blake Ritson). For them the episode ends with Alice and Aafrin kissing and going off to that room, and from high Cynthia watches – rightly she loathes Charlie who needles her.

Soon after this first opening with Aafrin leaving, Sarah Raworth is found with her recently born baby living in quarters provided by Cynthia – or she’d be in miserable 3rd rate hotel. It appears that Sarah has not been told how her husband died. No one is willing to tell her Matthew (Connor McCrory) is finally coming home (India is home here) but when he does she at first instinctively (this is what she is) lies, tries to hide his father is dead. But the Sumitra (Anitha Abdul Hamid) who he clearly loves more and loves him is dressed in white mourning and manages to convey his father is dead. He demands how and now Sarah says she has no idea. We see that Matthew like his father is a truth teller, decent to the Indians, and will not pretend to the hypocrisies of this Raj.

We can see the young lover paradigm here between Sooni and Naseem Ali Khan (Tanmay Dhanania) — they are a contrast to the Maharajah and Sirene and also Ralph and Madeleine

Sooni is being pressured by her mother to marry another Pashi (with big eyebrows). This is a third new semi-comic substory for this episode. He is shown to be decent but what he wants is an obedient wife whose life is spent having children and serving him. Aafrin is not there to help her fend off the mother (Lilette Dubey). She visits the tea plantation and Ian manages to ask her to be his wife. She demurs and says she needs time to think about it. She goes to the newspaper journalist, Naseem Ali Khan , who seems to be the only person to take her politics truly seriously. Aafrin does but he does not see politics the way she does and tries not to confide in her, and Khan and Sooni go off to a gathering where Ghandi is coming to speak. A huge crowd. During their time together Naseem tells her he loves her, and she clearly responds to him …. She is the closest we have to a traditional heroine, including the many suitors. And if the proposal to Ralph is probably the one the title refers to, she has 3 proposals in this episode.

The way the details are brought in make me feel there is a novel or memoir Rutman was using – it would help explain many details outside the story line. I so yearn to know what happened to these characters’ stories as the years go by. That is what was intended.

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Indian Summers 2:8: The Birthday Party

You can glimpse the rocking horse being brought in

In this episode I find matter put before us which I both background and s a preparation for what’s to come. It’s a bit clunky (the way in the first season the film-makers did not manage to tell us who was who quickly enough). Perhaps this shows they knew they were not going to be renewed … or the lack of direct thrust is part of why they lost audience ….

For example, around the time Sooni rejects Ian McCleod, he has noticed (because he’s paying so much attention to her) that Bhupi behaves strangely around the river where Jaya was drowned. We realize Bhupi is led to go there regularly because he feels Jaya’s ghost is luring him there and he then re-enacts how he drove her into the river and thus she drowned. He didn’t quite himself kill her but of course he was responsible. Ian knows that’s where Jaya died because he has not forgotten Ramu Sood. He tries to grab Bhupi who flees. Well after rejection from Sooni, in town now (like his Scots uncle) Ian is drinking heavily and sees Bhupi from far, chases him down and demands to know who he is and whose servant Bhupi at first tries to avoid telling but then he’s Bhupinder and works for Ralph Whelan.

I suggest in the next season Ian would have brought this information out, wanted an article written by Khan, and the injustice of the murder of Ramu Sood come home to hurt the WW2 destruction of the Raj further.

Charlie Havistock (Blake Ritson) — this is very much against type (Ritson is usually sensitive and kind)

Things between Alice and Charlie come to a head – she cannot stand him, he loves to humiliate her and in front of others refuses to give her the money or permission to buy their son a wooden bike of some sort. She persuades Aafrin, home from Delhi, they must run away. Cynthia gets them secret tickets Alice couldn’t manage.

But on that night Charlie (ever following her) discovers they are gone within minutes and then breaks Sumitra’s hands (he has been paying for information and she has instead lied to him) and hurt Bhupi’s son whom Ralph was willing to use as a target to please the maharajah theirs. We see the anguished pain Charlie puts her through and after Charlie has raged into the room the pair thought they were safe in and waiting for a rickshaw (bad idea of Alice’s), and dragged Alice and his son away, We see Bhupi and Sumitra (Bhupi’s wife) commiserating. Bhupi is gradually having enough.

I suggest in the third season, maybe another 2-3 years on Bhupi and his wife would be angry revolutionary hindus. Like Aafrin has been half-heartedly. Oh they did have the birthday party, Charlie did himself buy the bike for the boy, and this was part of why the scheme to run away fails. There is a delay over getting the party started.

The plan was Aafrin would flee to Australia with Alice. Not such a crazy idea had they gotten to the boat to Bombay and then gotten onto another boat This is the one kind of thing Alice has dared – once before. But for Aafrin that means leaving his family who are economically dependent on him. Not only do they loathe the idea of an English daughter-in-law (the father tried to bully her away) but they need the income. He leaves but feels terrible. Sooni is also rebelling when she says she is going to marry the journalist, Khan: he is a Muslim and her mother hates. How can you be happy if you leave us broken-hearted asks the father. Well you shouldn’t be is not a strong enough answer.

Sooni and her and Aafrin’s father, Darius Dalal (Rosh Sethan) hugging — this is earlier and shows their affection for one another

Now Matthew Raworth’s son is home, he will not allow the hypocritical Sarah to lie and she keeps having to run away from him or shout him down. She can successfully half-lie about her relationship to her late husband, but she cannot get him to say he liked the English. He hated the school and does not want to go back. He is another figure who would have been central in season 3.

Cynthia losing out

Last there’s Cynthia insisting on pulling down a Indian flag put over the Club. Ralph cannot defend Alice because Charlie bankrolls him through influence in the bank and threatens to withhold approval. Ralph badly in debt and says he will not sell Chotipool (the house). Ralph’s bill fell on its face; no prince went for it even the man Ralph gave his wife to. Madeline says this prince hated you. And now it seems Cynthia is badly in debt too — she had hoped for Ralph to get that position so she could manipulate it into money for herself.

And then a reconciling wedding party to give hope for the future and good feeling as an ending: Sooni tells Aafrin they will be the pioneers of this new amalgam; we
see her dancing with her husband, Naseem Khan, and from Aafrin’s point of view Ian and Alice talking, moving as if to dance

They intermingle Indian (Muslim, Parsi) and English and Scottish in the closing wedding festival. I enjoyed this moment too.

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For Indian Summers Episode 9, Winner Takes All; and Episode 10: Leaving Home (ironic title) click (in the comments)

Making a little England … what the English tried to do

Ellen

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