Black Narcissus

"She was fond of these people. She could not remember when it was that she began to think of them as people; not as natives, persons apart, but as people like themselves, and she was beginning to see with their eyes. Ayah's brown hands carrying a bowl of water no longer seemed alien, but, rather, her own hands stretched out to take it seemed insipid."

I have no idea if Rumer Godden is a name which appears within discussions about post-colonial literature. It's not my field after all. Without checking though, I have a feeling that there probably hasn't been too much academic writing about her work. She wouldn't seem to fit into any obvious syllabus or academic paradigm. Her earliest fiction appearing in the 1930s, she wasn't a late modernist. Nor has her fiction achieved the fame of Kipling or Forster, so I imagine she's the sort of writer post-colonialists would probably overlook in favour of writing from formerly colonised subjects. Which I wouldn't argue with necessarily.

Not that all of her writing belongs in such a potentially limiting pigeon hole, but this novel certainly does. Adapted by two of Britain's greatest filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1947, it's jewel-like colour achieved through Technicolor and the genius of Jack Cardiff, in many ways it's a very odd film. David Thomson describes it wonderfully as "that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns". Reading the novel, even when it's been some years since I last saw the film, it's hard not to hear the actors' voices in my head, with so much of the film's dialogue lifted straight from the book.

Sister Clodagh leads a group of nuns in to a remote part of the Himalayas, in an attempt to found a nunnery in a palace which used to be used as a harem by a previous ruler of the area. The blurb on the inside page of my copy describes it, in rather over the top fashion as an "...evil haunted palace...". A supernatural explanation is occasionally gestured at, most clearly towards the end of the novel by the current General of the area towards the novel's close, but even he is far too subtle to fall into such a clear cut explanation. It's not ever quite clear what happens to this isolated group, as they slowly lose their grip on their identities. Sister Clodagh, at the book's heart, is plagued my memories of her Romantic past in Ireland. These come upon her unbidden, triggered by people and things in her present in a manner which is almost Proustian but is far less fussily conveyed.

Of course, to describe them as isolated is somewhat ridiculous. They are surrounded by people, by the natives, who are for the most part an undifferentiated mass, even in some cases where they are named. We are allowed into the thoughts of only two of the Indian characters, and then only briefly, one of whom is desperately trying to be more 'European'. Our point of few is firmly with the British, who mostly fail to understand the people by whom they are surrounded. And yet the presence of the 'natives' and of the mountain and the air is constantly hovering over the narrative. The Generals English advisor, the unkempt Mr. Dean, is supposed to have gone native, we're told so at several points, and yet he repeatedly refers to the local people there as savages and children. He's like a cuddlier Mr. Kurtz.

If the climax of the novel represents a tragedy, which in many ways it clearly does, its partly a failure of communication. The failure of these people to coexist with a place where they don't belong. In her introduction to another of her books, Rumer Godden describes India in an idealised manner, "Indians do not change; their clothes and customs are timeless". Now, as it happens, I shall be going to India next week, to visit my wife's family, and I highly doubt that the country I shall experience a small part of will be exactly unchanged or 'timeless'. In the three and a half years since my wife last visited, some things will have changed for her. Part of what changed India was the presence of the British, a presence which produced a writer such as Rumer Godden. Was she saw as timeless had already changed, because everywhere does. Yet, alongside this somewhat patronising attitude, there's also a respect for the people as they are. As Sister Clodagh starts to realise, these are people just like oneself, but it occurs to me that that is a recognition which only makes others more mysterious. If you regard someone as part of a mass, however you manage that, then they are simple to understand, because you're fitting them to a prearranged pattern. To see somebody as an individual, as a person, is to admit that you don't understand them. They have an interiority which you don't have access to, and part of the violence of colonialism is that that it denies that fact. Even in as apparently mild a novel as this, which never directly addresses the subject, just as it never really directly addresses anything, which is one of its strengths as a novel. All of its characters are the products of colonialism, whether its Mr. Dean who 'goes native' but still stands apart and in some way looks down upon the native people who surround him, the Young General who wishes to become 'European', or Sister Clodagh, whose memories of Ireland eventually reveal her as Anglo-Irish, playing with the 'Irish children' but set apart in another colonised landscape.

I think can I understand why this book might have appealed to Michael Powell, a High Tory, who nevertheless filmed an Indian set story entirely in England, principally on Alfred Junge designed sets in order to better keep control of the colour. As the Wikipedia entry for the film shows, the final scene, which magically depicts the beginning of the monsoon as the nuns abandon the Himalayas, has been interpreted by critic Dave Kehr as 'a last farewell to their fading empire', resonating with the fact that the film was released only a few months before India achieved Independence. But the novel already represented a respectful retreat, the General is sorry to see the Nuns leave, because that's the only solution Rumer Godden can envisage to the difficulties raised in her fiction. Its doubly sad, obviously because of the tragedy with which the novel climaxes, but also with the sadness of people failing to understand each other.