The Siege of Krishnapur

Infobox Book
name = The Siege of Krishnapur
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = First edition cover
author = J. G. Farrell
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cover_artist =
country = England
language = English
series =
subject =
genre =
publisher = Weidenfeld & Nicolson
release_date = 1973
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardcover)
pages = 344 pp
isbn = ISBN 0297765809
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Siege of Krishnapur" is a novel by the author J.G. Farrell published in 1973.

Inspired by events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow the book details the siege of a fictional Indian town during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 from a single perspective: that of the British residents. The main characters find themselves subject to the increasing strictures and deprivation of the siege, which reverses the "normal" structure of life where Europeans governed Asian subjects. This reversal accounts for much of the success of the book, which is not just an early-1970s exercise in empire-bashing, nor an orthodox account of the decay of civilisation under pressure. The book portrays an India under the control of the Raj not under the East India Company as it was in 1857. The absurdity of the class system in a town no one can leave becomes a source of comic invention, though the text is serious in intent and tone. The book gained positive reviews from a variety of sources. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1576245,00.html Guardian Book Reviews] ] and won the Booker Prize in 1973 (list of winners). Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors for their business activities. [ [http://nyrb.typepad.com/classics/2008/05/the-best-of-the.html A Different Stripe: The Best of the Booker: The Siege of Krishnapur ] at nyrb.typepad.com] In [2008] the book was short-listed with six other former winners for The Best of the Booker.

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Farrell's story is set in the fictional town of Krishnapur, where the mysterious appearance of small piles of chapatis are the first sign that something is amiss in the Indian community. The Collector who heads the British presence in the town pessimistically believes that some sort of civil unrest is inevitable, and yet most of the members of the colonial community dismiss his concerns. As the Mutiny spreads across the Indian subcontinent, British officials take little notice, until the moment when the sepoys (native soldiers) rise up and turn against their former rulers in Krishnapur itself. The Siege of Krishnapur is often seen as a companion volume to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, in the last days of the British Empire. Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire. [ [http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=3662 New York Book Reviews] ]

The book tells of a besieged British garrison which held out for four months in the summer of 1857, the year of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, against an army of native Sepoys. The community comprises the Collector, an extremely Victorian believer in progress and father of small children who can often be found daydreaming of the Great Exhibition; the Magistrate, who has been a Chartist in his youth but who sees all his youthful political ideals destroyed by witnessing the siege; Dr Dunstable and Dr McNab, who row over the best way to treat the spreading cholera; Fleury, a poetical young man from England who learns to become a soldier; Lucy, a fallen woman rescued from a bungalow who eventually runs a tea salon in the despairing community; and other well-drawn characters. By the end of the novel cholera, starvation and the Sepoys have done for most of the inhabitants, who are reduced to eating dogs, horses and finally beetles, worrying all the time about their teeth, much loosened by scurvy. "The final retreat of the British, still doggedly stiff-upper-lipped, through the pantries, laundries, music rooms and ballroom of the residency, using chandeliers and violins as weapons, is a comic delight".

The book manages to suggest with great subtlety and restraint the problems for the British of ruling a community they do not understand: for example in Chapter 30, Fleury thinks: "what a lot of Indian life was unavailable to the Englishman who came equipped with his own religion and habits". However the book has on occasion been criticised for failing to treat the Indian experience of rule in any detail, preferring to focus on the experience of the ruling class. Suffice to say that the novel provides greater texture and critique of the ruling attitudes than can be found in many other novels, and that the Indian experience of the Mutiny, if sought, is best understood by looking elsewhere. The ending should serve as a reminder that, in JG Farrell's own words; "However badly they may begin a war and whatever casualties they suffer during it, the British almost invariably win it, and leave their enemy wondering why, with the taste of so many victories in their mouths, they have ended wearing the yoke of the defeated?"

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