The Siege of Krishnapur (New York Review Books Classics)

Students of history will recognize 1857 as the year of the Sepoy rebellion in India--an uprising of native soldiers against the British, brought on by Hindu and Muslim recruits' belief that the rifle cartridges they were provided had been greased with pig or cow fat. This seminal event in Anglo-Indian relations provides the backdrop for J.G. Farrell's Booker Prize-winning exploration of race, culture, and class, The Siege of Krishnapur.

Like the mysteriously appearing chapatis, life in British India seems, on the surface, innocuous enough. Farrell introduces us gradually to a large cast of characters as he paints a vivid portrait of the Victorians' daily routines that are accompanied by heat, boredom, class consciousness, and the pursuit of genteel pastimes intended for cooler climates. Even the siege begins slowly, with disquieting news of massacres in cities far away. When Krishnapur itself is finally attacked, the Europeans withdraw inside the grounds of the Residency where very soon conditions begin to deteriorate: food and water run out, disease is rampant, people begin to go a little mad. Soon the very proper British are reduced to eating insects and consorting across class lines. Farrell's descriptions of life inside the Residency are simultaneously horrifying and blackly humorous. The siege, for example, is conducted under the avid eyes of the local populace, who clearly anticipate an enjoyable massacre and thus arrive every morning laden with picnic lunches (plainly visible to the starving Europeans). By turns witty and compassionate, The Siege of Krishnapur comprises the best of all fictional worlds: unforgettable characters, an epic adventure, and at its heart a cultural clash for the ages. Quite simply, this is a splendid novel. --Alix Wilber

Product Description
Winner of the booker prize.

India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.

Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion—at once brutal, blundering, and wistful—is soon revealed. The Siege of Krishnapur is a companion to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.

The novel narrates the story of the British community at Krishnapur during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the entire community holed up in the Residency (like a governor's palace) for months under siege. Farrell's style is highly cinematic, reminiscent of great movie epics about that era, such as "The Man Who Would Be King," - lots of scope, majesty, explosions, and bright-red uniforms, added to the day-to-day domestic squabbles of the community. Farrell's take is not a shallow war novel though; he is witty, ironic, inspired, and sad in turn.

The book features remarkable turns of fortune and engaging details on every page, all of which were dramatically motivated and apt. (Examples: When the besieged run out of ammunition, they create canister shot by stuffing ladies' stockings with silverware. There's a sudden infestation of flying bugs that will make you jump right out of your chair. Two doctors have an argument about the cause of cholera with dramatic consequences. A lucky shot by a Lieutenant....well I won't spoil it for you.)

The main character, the Collector, seems to stand in for all of Britain as he is transformed by his Indian experience: first arrogance and a passion for bringing British `civilization' to the uncivilized, then bravado as he stands up to the initial assaults, then despair as he watches the failure of mere ingenuity to overcome the natives. In a wonderful little coda at the end of the book you can see how he has been utterly transformed by the experience.

A wonderful find, a 'must read'! I'm off to read the rest of Farrell's novels!


"What a lot of Indian life was unavailable to Englishmen."   February 20, 2003
Mary Whipple (New England)
38 out of 39 found this review helpful

The bloody Siege of Krishnapur in 1857 is the pivot around which the action revolves in this Booker Award-winning novel by J. G. Farrell, but Farrell's focus is less on Krishnapur and the siege than it is on the attitudes and beliefs of the English colonizers who made that siege an inevitability. He puts these empire-builders under the microscope, then skewers their arrogant and superior attitudes with the rapier of his wit, subjecting them to satire and juxtaposing them and their narrowly focused lives against the realities of the world around them. Remarkably, he does this with enough subtlety that we can recognize his characters as individuals, rather than total stereotypes, at the same time that we see their absurdity and recognize the damage they have done in their zeal to spread their "superior" culture.

From the opening pages, Farrell builds suspense as the English colony ignores reports of unrest in Barrackpur, Berhampur, and Meerut. The flirtations of the single women, the amorous attentions of the young men, the boorish and insensitive behavior of the officials, the gossipy whispering of their wives, and the unrelenting efforts to maintain the same society they enjoyed at home--with tea parties, poetry readings, and dances--all attest to their degree of isolation from the world around them. When violence breaks out in Krishnapur and all the inhabitants take refuge in the colonial Residence, Farrell turns it into a microcosm which illuminates their misplaced values and goals as they interact with each other and face dangers from without--and from within. The siege continues for more than three months, with bloodshed, disease, starvation, lack of water and medicine, and the summer weather taking their toll.

Farrell's dark humor is unparalleled. Using irony, understatement, and a sense of the absurd, he conveys his disapproval of colonialism without resorting to the harshness of polemics. By concentrating exclusively on the English in the Residence and not on India's local population (ironically reflecting the approach of the colonizers themselves), he makes their behavior appear ridiculous in its own right, rather than ridiculous in comparison to other cultures. Mr. Rayne, the Opium Agent, calls the sale of opium, "progress." The Padre cannot understand why the Bible was originally written in an obscure language like Hebrew, rather than English, which is "spoken in every corner of every continent." A dying man offering up his last, heartfelt prayer is told by the Magistrate, "Yes, yes, to be sure, don't worry about it." The heads from a collection of small sculptures of the "great minds of Europe" are used as deadly explosives when shot becomes scarce.

Through his precise imagery, his acute eye for memorable and revealing details, his unerring ear for dialogue, his ability to maintain pace and suspense, and his humor, Farrell creates a historical novel with the enduring qualities which make it as relevant today as it was when published thirty years ago. Mary Whipple


DEATH, WHERE IS THY POINT?   May 9, 2006
DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful

Chapatis. It is always difficult to start a novel convincingly, but it's a long time since I saw it done better than it is here. The harbinger of the brutal and bloody Indian uprising of 1857 was, in this narrative at least, the secret distribution of chapatis to the intended victims. I have long forgotten what little I may ever have known about these events, and I would actually be delighted to discover that this detail was not an invention of the novelist's but what actually happened.

If paraphrased, the amount of gore and squalor that is detailed here on page after page would seem grotesque and even intolerable. As told by Farrell, it manages to be neither. This was the Victorian era, and the story is a scenario of British Victorians subjected to pressure and strain of near-incredible ferocity. The author does not spare us the specifics, and it will be a long time before I forget the spongy piles of corpses, the sense of near-unbearable heat in which I for one would have had difficulty in even wearing the stuffy formal clothes let alone dancing let alone battling for my very life, the pervasive stench, the outbreak of cholera and the indelible vignette of the lapdog chewing the face off a fallen defender. Even more extraordinary, to me, than the way they keep going is what they don't do and in particular what they think and don't think. There is no real instance of irrational panic whatsoever, and although the Padre for one has clearly gone slightly round the bend, the way this manifests itself is in an obsessional fixation with denouncing Sin and Heresy, and largely with his frantic concern to prove that great Victorian preoccupation The Existence of God from something like Aquinas's Argument from Design.

At the height of the horror, the Collector is still thinking in Victorian vocabulary and expressing himself in subordinate clauses. Staring death in the eye, the young intellectual Fleury is still concerned with his theories, whether in respect of the operation of guns or of the progress of rationalism. The ladies themselves, who might have been expected to be in a state of blind terror, are still weighing up the niceties of how the matrons and widows on the one hand, and the Fallen Woman on the other, are expected to comport themselves. Most amazingly of all, when the cholera first breaks out the two doctors conduct a lengthy and articulate debate on its causes and remedies, keeping the attention not just of each other but of an attentive audience.

The book abounds in unforgettable incidents - the smothering cloud of cockchafer beetles, the snowstorm, the slaughter of one rebel contingent with silver forks from the dining-room and marble busts of Socrates and Keats - but what is distinctive and extraordinary about this book is its tone. Its tone is quiet, detached and wry without being aggressively ironic. No heavy lessons are preached (although it's not hard to see which side the author is on when it comes to religion). No particular political standpoint is adopted either, the nearest we get to that being the shoulder-shrugging last paragraph. The whole saga ought to have been a filthy nightmare, but instead the reader feels rather like the onlookers who have come along with picnic lunches to watch the events as if they were watching a game of cricket. It has all been Virgil's `plurima mortis imago' - the omnipresent face of death, and yet it has been a bit of a spectator-sport too. I'm actually rather glad I'm no historian in this instance. I don't know what set off the uprising, and once the relief forces turn up so far as I know things went back to much as they were before. The author offers us no theories or explanations: he just leaves us having witnessed wholesale and insensate slaughter and wondering what it can all have been in aid of.


My Favorite 20th Century Novel   June 18, 2000
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

For those seeking greater insights into Britain's imperial ethos, I urge you to read THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR, by the late(and great)Anglo-Irish writer J.G. Farrell. It's about the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, when thousands of native Indian Army troops (know as Sepoys) rose up against their English masters. The bloody mutiny began in Meerut barracks in May of '57 and quickly spread along a 500-mile string of cities and villages in northern India. It was finally put down five months later. Marked by appalling atrocities on both sides, thousands of Indians and hundreds of Europeans were slaughtered. The proximal cause of the uprising was the introduction of rifle cartridges greased with animal fat, which was unacceptable on religious grounds to both Hindus and Muslims. The underlying (if at the time unarticulated) cause of course rested in dissatisfaction on the part of Indians, the inhabitants of an ancient and sophisticated civilization, over their subjugation by foreigners.

In the 18th century, the presence of the British in India, most of whom were men, was generally benign and not much noticed. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the behavior of the British toward Indians had become increasingly oppressive and arrogant, in large part due to the presence of English wives, who ghettoized the English communities and regarded all native Indians with fear and contempt. After the rebellion, such attitudes hardened and became pervasive; this in turn fed the resolve of Indians to expel the British from their country - which they did 92 years later. Although there is no record of it, at the time, a few thoughtful Englishmen must have recognized that the rebellion was an indelible sign of what would inevitably follow.

The centerpiece, if you will, of the Sepoy Rebellion was the four-month siege by the rebels of the Residency at Lucknow. The "residency" was in fact a large, walled compound which served as the British administrative center of an area consisting of thousand of square miles and millions of inhabitants. It was also the social center of the British community and the home of the "Collector", the region's chief administrative officer. THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR, first published in 1973 and winner of the Booker Prize that year, is a fictionalized account of the Lucknow siege - although most of the incidents related in the book actually occurred and most of the characters are based on real people.

THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR is, bar none, my favorite 20th century novel. It is a sublime book that has everything - elegant, crystalline writing, vividness, tight novelistic structure, tremendous scope and depth, action, excitement, moving, convincing sentiment, comedy and tragedy, uproarious savage satire and searing irony. Supporting these virtues is a serious philosophical discourse about the nature of human progress as it is reflected in the efforts of Westerners to "civilize" the rest of the world. For all of that, although KRISHNAPUR demands close attention, for the literate, it is a highly accessible, highly satisfying "read". I know that you'll enjoy it, and in reading it will, I believe, learn a bit more about the human condition.

Should you be inspired to learn more about the Sepoy Rebellion, I recommend Christopher Hibbert's THE GREAT MUTINY, Viking, l978. And for a trenchant, entertaining examination of day-to-day life during the Raj (from the British perspective), see PLAIN TALES FROM THE RAJ, edited by Charles Allen (Holt, Rinehart, l985)

Absurdly, J.G. Farrell died in a fishing accident in 1979. Among his other works are: TROUBLES (1970), set in Dublin in l919, THE SINGAPORE GRIP (1978), set in Singapore in the weeks immediately before the Japanese invasion of the city in 1940, and the unfinished THE HILL STATION, set in Simla in pre-independence days.


Outstanding book - who is civilized   October 10, 2005
Thomas Keneally (Portland, OR)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

J.G. Farrell's book came out in 1972 was about the Sepoy Mutiny and a part of Indian History that is not well traced. Though there are versions of it, one wonders which is accurate. Thus it is an apt topic for a novel. He looks at it from various perspectives - the British, the Indians and the Princes. In bitter irony, he spares none and tears each of them. The book starts with mirth and gradually descends into darkness as the fight between the Indian soldiers and British intensifies. As is often traced in history, such darkness leads to reduction of ones senses and it is seen in the book. Though it only a novel, it captures all aspects of the story beautifully.

It shows the collector as a ramrod person who sticks to his rules as a typical Britisher of the past. He has his positives and negatives and foresees the problem but is unable to cope with it. He thinks that he is bringing civilization to an uncivilized place and as the story unfolds, one wonders who is civilized. On a more concrete note, one understands the pros and cons of imperialism and how difficult it gets to justify it at times. Though the British were under the East India Company during this time, after this they moved under Royal Flag. That shows the extent of the impact this war created. This is one of most beautiful novels of that decade. Farrell travelled to India during the research for the novel and commented that he was more confused after seeing India than before. He was an eclectic author who wrote books like Singapore Grip, but this was his masterpiece. It is worth owning.