Relevance to my work
My mother’s English family lived in India for five generations. Rawson Hart Boddam, the first salaried Governor of Mumbai (1884-88), was my great-great-great-great-great grandfather. My family lived and worked in cities all over India, including Delhi, Kolkata, and Lucknow, until the English were finally forced to leave when India gained independence in 1947.
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When I was fourteen, I transcribed my great-great-great aunt’s diary about being barricaded in a building in the city of Lucknow in 1857 during what came to be known as the “great mutiny” — the first key resistance by Indians against increasingly aggressive English rule in India. The events Ellen Huxham described in her diary stuck with me and I went on to study colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary India over several decades.
My first novel, Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons, is the result of ten years of research into the lives of Indian and African women who lived in Lucknow during 1857 — women who today remain virtually unknown. The book is a counterhistory about these women who actually financed and led the “mutiny,” what became a crucial and significant fight against English dominance. The Envy of Paradise, also an important counterhistory, is the sequel to Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons.
My great-grandfather, Clement George Parsons (1861-1912), who worked in the area of civil administration, wrote a long, satirical ballad which detailed contempt for the way the British operated in India. He sent the ballad to Rudyard Kipling, evidently looking for assistance in publishing it. As far as we know, that letter Parsons wrote to Kipling has not survived, but we do have the letter that Kipling sent back to him in reply.
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Kipling’s letter displays a strong warning to Parsons not to seek publication if he valued his professional career in British India. Parsons took Kipling’s advice and only published the ballad privately for his family.
At the time he wrote the ballad, Parsons was Assistant Commissioner to the Commissioner of the Punjab. He went on to become Commissioner of Lahore by 1912.