Sneha Pathak reviews The Viceroy’s Artist by Anindyo Roy (published by Hachette India, 2023).
Edward Lear, poet and artist, visited India in 1873 at the invitation of Lord Northbrook, who was then the Viceroy of India. His purpose was to paint the Kanchenjunga in its glory. The Viceroy’s Artist is based on the journal he kept during his Indian travel, published almost seventy years later. Anindyo Roy uses research and his imagination to fill the gaps in the journal and creates a picture of the man and his efforts to bring his dream to fruition.
Lear’s Experiences in Colonial India
The book opens in January 1874 when Lear has reached Kuresong, from where he hopes to bring the glorious mountain on canvas. But The Viceroy’s Artist by Anindyo Roy is not just the story of how Lear achieved this feat, it is the story of Lear’s entire journey through the subcontinent, his experiences with colonial India as well as a picture of life as it was during the late nineteenth century.
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Through prose rich in imagery, snippets of verse, and quotations, Roy paints the picture of the artist as well as the man that Lear was. The narrative moves at a languid, slow speed and the book lapses into digression often as a mode of insight into the wanderings of this painter-poet in his sixties who also re-lives his past as he struggles with life in a new place to fulfil the viceroy’s commission.
Evoking the Raj Era
The biggest feat of the novel is how it evokes the bygone Raj era so well within its pages. The reader is lost in the world of slow journeys undertaken on foot, trains that move at a languid pace, a world of dak-bungalows, pony-driven carts and gruelling weather that holds supreme over human beings. The book also gives an insight into the mindset of the people during the British Raj while portraying the strange place that Lear occupies between the Britishers and the Indians.
The Viceroy’s Artist is also full of long, meandering conversations that take place between Lear and his man-servant Giorgi and well-known personalities of the time. Real-life characters like Alfred Tennyson, Maharaja Duleep Singh, Lockwood Kipling etc. also make an appearance within the pages of the book.
The Narrative Style of The Viceroy’s Artist
In his Afterword, Roy states that the book’s writing style was inspired by the narrative technique of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. He says that this style helped him because he could “excavate Lear’s buried memories, untie the knots, loops and tangles, opening up the gaps and allowing the silences to speak.” This narrative style works for this novel which is research-heavy and not as concerned with the plot as with delineating a picture of the man and the artist that Lear was while giving its readers a portrait of his times.
Favourite Quote from The Viceroy’s Artist by Anindyo Roy
The tide is returning. The heat has been replaced by a mild coolness. Hastily pulling out the last sketch he had made of the Kanchenjunga from his satchel, he gazes at it intently, running his forefinger very gently over its fierce outlines. In the remembered dream, the Kanchenjunga flashes, emitting an unknown light. Could it be the lighthouse sending its first signals to a ship, perhaps waiting in the darkening ocean?
Conclusion
Because of its meandering, ponderous narrative and a tendency to focus more on bringing the man alive before his readers than following a particular plot per se, The Viceroy’s Artist by Anindyo Roy will not fit into every reader’s idea of historical fiction. Readers who are interested in knowing more about the man or the history and aren’t deterred by fiction where research at times trumps the story will find The Viceroy’s Artist a useful addition to their lists.
