Like the red mouth of a rectum shrinking shut after ejecting waste,” the doors close noiselessly behind Captain Aiden Byrne as he leaves the chambers of the Duke of Buckingham. His plea to halt grain exports from Madras, Vizag, and Nagore for a few months to salvage the famine has all but fallen on deaf ears.
Byrne could hardly have expected otherwise. He rides past Fort St. George onto Beach Road, through a city on the cusp of a great upgrade: new roads and railways, the Senate House rising, and a canal to join the Adyar and the Cooum. All of it richly enabled by the famine itself, which delivered labour more desperate than it had ever been – their wages disappearing upward into the nexus of contractors and bureaucrats.
In White Elephant (2026), B Jeyamohan drills into the heart of this precarity. Originally published in Tamil as Vellai Yaanai (2013) and translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar, the novel is set during the Great Famine of 1876–78 – a catastrophe with over ten million dead – and follows Byrne as he investigates the mystery of missing Dalit workers at the Tudor Ice House factory.
Ridiculous as it may seem, the factory deals in ice frozen from the pure, otherworldly waters of New England and shipped across the seas to cool colonial Madras. Cast out of bonded labour in a famished countryside, the Dalits sign up for the punishing work its preservation demands.
This backdrop let’s Jeyamohan tip his hat to a barely documented event: the 1878 strike by the factory’s workers, among the earliest labour protests in the subcontinent. Indeed, it was on the very roads they built that the exploited could die in heaps and make their presence felt to the white powers – a presence their high-caste brethren seldom granted.
Priyamvada, who previously translated Jeyamohan’s collection of short stories, returns here with a remarkably consistent tone and texture. Only the tempo has changed. The stories were quick, emotive bursts; the novel moves languidly through monologues. Yet both are hard-hitting in the truest sense.
Because Jeyamohan’s is a world where gods are wretched scoundrels, goddesses are accursed prostitutes, deities who conspire a famine into being and reduce their own devotee to a dark old crone “with breasts that hang like two black leather pouches and a body as dry as a cigar.” Maybe the putrid stench of colonialism curdling with untouchability behoves the author to reach for this forceful articulation of disgust. But spiritualism is never dismissed. For it is the same woman, guided by her dharmam (moral responsibility), who rushes to offer her last toddy palm fruit to Byrne, her guest, for punniyam, for merit.
Bleeding upon the thorns of life
At times, though, the excess jars the reader. Characters become ciphers for the author’s arguments and the historical currents they inhabit. They speak in much the same Tamil emotional register, regardless of nationality. A Scottish teenager en route to Chengalpattu, repulsed by the scenes outside his carriage, declares that eating even a crumb of his bread would bring a curse upon his ten generations. One wonders: would a Victorian ever burn at this temperature?
To be sure, the excess here is not only Tamil; it is also partly Romantic, a Western maximalism that predates Victorian restraint. The two traditions meet in Byrne’s feverish raptures, where verses of P.B. Shelley, visions of him drowning alone off the Italian coast, punctuate the narrative. In these fevers, it is perhaps Jeyamohan, not Byrne, dreaming of Shelley. He would not be the first Tamil writer to do so.
A quarter century after the novel’s events, mahakavi (great poet) Subramania Bharati in his early work would take the pen name Shelley Daasan, Shelley’s servant, and write radical Tamil poetry in a Shelleyan register that fit no convention of his day. Out of many such experiments came modern Tamil poetry.
Calcutta had run the experiment even earlier. In India’s First Radicals (2025), Rosinka Chaudhuri shows how the Young Bengal intellectuals of the 1830s drew their radicalism less from philosophers like Locke or Bentham than from Shelley’s unsparing verses. In the bilingual newspapers they wrote and ran, modern Bengali prose took shape, and with it an early iteration of Indian modernity.
Priyamvada’s translation thus completes a circuit. For two centuries, Indian writers absorbed Western forms, renewing their own voices in the process. In White Elephant, a Tamil moral imagination – Jeyamohan’s rooted voice recontextualising Shelleyan fire – arrives back in English through Byrne’s raptures.
We have long read Indian characters written for the Western eye; here we read Western characters written for the Tamil eye, in an English that renews as much as it challenges.
Ye are many—they are few
Byrne’s raptures also chart the inner turmoil of a man who took the empire at its word, only to feel that trust strain against its limits. Those limits are familiar enough.
In Dinyar Patel’s biography of Dadabhai Naoroji (2020), we watch a man carry the same trust to its zenith: he sails to London to plead the Indian case, wins an election by a whisker, enters the House of Commons in 1892, and yet makes no material dent at all. But the record scarcely holds, beyond a few letters to friends, the toll such failure took on him. It is this subjective interior that fiction steps in to imagine.
And Jeyamohan grades this interior finely. He has a sharp eye for hierarchy. In his short story Vanangaan, spit weaves through the ranks of an estate: the overseer who spits on the wage slave holds up a spittoon, in turn, for the royals. The novel puts these gradations to work on conscience itself, as the famine tests each rung.
The conscience of Nick Parmer, the American manager of the Tudor Ice House, is pitted against that of Murahari Iyengar, a high-caste contractor. Parmer eventually yields to the protesters, fearing the shame of the news reaching his homeland. Iyengar does not budge an inch.
Worse, he vows that no protester will ever find work again. The author hints that the Christian conscience may prove more reachable here than the Vedic one, soured as it is by generations of myopic custodians.
The oppressed have their hierarchies too. Karuppan, a young worker, braves all odds to galvanise the men into an unshakeable black boulder. Kathavarayan, the brain behind the protest, tempers him and hunts for compromise, carrying a guilt that is part opportunism. By the end, the strategist lives to fight on. The foot soldier, in all likelihood, is dead.
Enmeshed in this matrix, we are made to confront the oppressors of our own time, and, unnervingly, the oppressor within ourselves.
The white elephant, then, is might in its whitest skin, rolling its full weight over a strip of starving children by the sea. It is the beast that never forgets, dredging up its scriptures of purity to trample those beneath it. But it can be, even if briefly, the black boulder that sits resolutely in protest under a harsh sun, white shimmer playing opulently on its surface.
21.12°C Kathmandu
