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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The war of the colonizers
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The war of the colonizers

On translating a forgotten French classic, set during the 1857 uprising, that mocks the British

An illustration from the book.Premium
An illustration from the book.

Captain Corcoran, and his ever-hungry pet tiger, Louison, first appeared in my life in 2007, the year before Tony Mango died. Tony was my wife’s stepfather and was also, as Greek consul, the longest-serving member of Mumbai’s diplomatic community. He was born in 1915 into a French-speaking Greek family living in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman empire. At the age of 22, he moved to India to work for a trading company—and lived here, with a few breaks, for the rest of his life.

One lazy morning beside the sea at his home in Juhu, I asked him what he had known about India when he was a young man. “Very little," he admitted. “Romantic ideas really. But I had read Captain Corcoran." And he briefly told me the story of a book that I had never heard of but which I would come to love. “The hero," he explained, “marries a beautiful Indian woman. Just like me—and you." I thought no more of what Tony had told me until after he died.

In 2009, I began research for what became a book about foreign perceptions of India, published five years later as A Strange Kind Of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes. I would ask every foreigner I met to tell me about their childhood ideas and preconceptions of India, and it was then that I remembered Tony’s words about Corcoran. I searched online for the book, and there were very few references. I soon discovered that it had never been translated into English, and I tracked down a second-hand copy of the book in France that cost me the equivalent of 1,000. A few weeks later, a thin, well-read hardback arrived in the post, bound in red, with gold lettering on its cover, and illustrated with the most beautiful woodcuts.

I had studied French history at university, and I found it easier to read Corcoran than a modern French newspaper or novel. I thought it was a wonderful tale, full of adventure and humour, romance and politics.

Then, in 2015, I found myself working for the BBC in a country where good French is essential: Tunisia. And so, before and during my stay in Tunis, I worked at my French, trying to improve my ability to speak and understand the language—reading Le Monde, and the under-rated writings of Georges Simenon. My grown-up children came to visit me in Tunisia, and we went off to the coastal town of Tabarka for a weekend break.

We made a deal, my children and I, that none of us would take our laptops along. We talked a lot instead, in part about the man they knew as Tony Papou, their beloved step-grandfather. I told them about Corcoran, and how he married the princess, whose name I couldn’t remember. And so I searched the internet on my mobile phone for the book again, and found that the full French text of Corcoran was now online. And Sita, of course, was the name of the princess.

The following morning, I woke at 6.30. I knew my children would not be up for another 4 hours. And so I wandered down to the lobby of the guest house and stared out to sea. I was bored by the only book I had with me, and without my laptop could not get on with a book I was writing—a book about my father. And so I flicked listlessly through the open pages on my mobile phone. The text of Corcoran was still there, and I began to re-read it, and found myself laughing out loud at the opening passages. I wondered whether it would be as funny in English, and so I began to translate.

At that stage, it was not intended for publication. It felt more like French homework. I showed the first three chapters of what I had written to a friend who works in publishing, a fellow Francophile. She loved it, and so I carried on—thinking that someone might want to bring out a translation of this long-forgotten work. And there was something new and puzzling, in a way that appealed to me, about the act of translation. I felt for the first time that I was truly intimate with a text that wasn’t my own.

As I translated, I also began to find out more about the book. It had been a best-seller in its time, loved in particular by generations of teenage French boys. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had written about the book in his memoirs of childhood. He describes how he read Corcoran perhaps a hundred times—and how the moment he picked up the book, even when he was in middle age, and read its first lines, he could, in his words, “forget myself". The book was translated into several European languages, including Italian, and another great philosopher of the 20th century, Antonio Gramsci, incarcerated in prison for much of his adult life, wrote to his beloved sister-in-law about “the wondrous stories of Corcoran". But by the middle of the last century, the book had gone out of fashion—and today only the very old in France will know much about Corcoran and Louison.

The story of its author proved even harder to uncover. There is no biography of Alfred Assollant. We do know that he was born in central France, and became a teacher who lost his job because of his opposition to the imperial rule of Napoleon III. He was a democrat and a republican—who disliked kings, queens and emperors of all kinds—and trusted ordinary people more than scholars, officials and generals. After a series of family tragedies, Assollant died, in a paupers’ hospital in Paris.

Assollant never travelled to India, but tried hard to make his work of the imagination as true to life as possible. Tantia Tope and Nana Sahib are mentioned several times, as are Tipu Sultan and Aurangzeb. Most of the action takes place in a city called Bhagavpur, overlooking the Narmada river; it’s suspiciously similar to the old Holkar capital of Maheshwar.

The book is often extremely anti-English, which is presumably why it was never translated. The hero declares that “I care no more for the English than I would for a sour herring or a sardine in oil", and throughout the book the English are mocked for their obsession with money and protocol. It is a book of its troubled times, but also one whose humour and sense of adventure seem to transcend the centuries.

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Published: 01 Jul 2016, 07:44 AM IST
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