[BITList] Fwd: [INDIA-BRITISH-RAJ] Book Review - ''The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain'' (India touch)

[John Feltham]

Book Review - Little stories, big picture from

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Little-stories-big-picture-/articleshow/5254837.cms

21 November 2009

The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain
By Ian Jack
Jonathan Cape 325 pages, Rs 1050

Ian Jack, co-founder of Granta magazine and veteran journalist, is a
familiar name in Indian literary circles. In this collection of essays, he
takes us on a tour of places and things that once defined Britain, but
are now forlorn memories. Some of the writings are intimate portraits
of Jack's family and their working class milieu. Others are extended
ruminations which often have their origins in a contemporary event
such as a train accident or a film.

Many of the essays in the book are about a Britain that is now virtually
extinct - the mining towns and villages of Fife or the cinemas of Farnworth.

The essays are not confined to the borders of Britain. Given Jack's interest
in India there are excellent pieces on the British empire and its curious
legacies. He writes on McCluskiegunj, the now-forgotten enclave of
Anglo-Indians in the Chota Nagpur hills. Jack first visits the place because
his wife's aunt and uncle have a bungalow there. McCluskiegunj and its
re-creation of an English rural idyll in India initially charm him. But the
more he becomes familiar with the place, he discovers that it represents a
"pathetic desperation of a people struggling - and failing - to assert their
self-worth".

In a fine essay, Jack goes looking for the story behind India's first steam
engine, which William Carey and his fellow missionaries had got to Serampur
in 1820 to help in the operations of their famous printing press that
churned out Bibles, dictionaries and school books. But more than traces
of Carey's missionary legacy, Jack finds in Serampur remnants of the old
industrial civilisation of Britain. He concludes , "What had changed the
town, and even the way the town spoke and behaved, was not Carey's religion
but the puffing machinery he thought would disseminate it; not the idea but
the idea's tool." Yet another gem is a brief essay on a Mr Goonawardene of
Colombo who furiously reads up the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the British
Council library every day and is locked up in the asylum at night.

Jack is able to effortlessly connect apparently unrelated events, such as
a ferry disaster in Bihar and a stampede in a football stadium in Sheffield,
and their aftermath. Whereas the British media speaks about the stadium
disaster uniting people, Jack points out that in India no such thing
happens since the Biharis are not a "self deluding people" .

Jack has the rare ability to tease out larger insights from seemingly
obscure places and people. That's what makes his writing stand out.




ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.