White Elephant

A dazzling postcolonial inversion of Heart of Darkness set during the Great Indian Famine of 1878 that recounts its devastating cost to both life and human dignity.

It is 1878, and Aiden Byrne, an Irish police officer in Madrasapatnam, loyal servant to the crown and Queen Victoria, knows that there is no danger that he ought to fear in this heatblasted and famine-devastated land.

But when he discovers two laborers from Tudor Ice Company being brutally whipped in the countryside, he is dragged into a world whose surface he has only skimmed before. He sees the horrific conditions under which the local workers, members of the lowest rung of the caste system, process the mammoth blocks of ice that are carved out of frozen New England lakes and transported to India for use in the drinks and iceboxes of the colonial forces.

When the two workers disappear—presumably killed—Byrne is approached by Kathavarayan, a charismatic young activist belonging to a lower caste, who is looking to put things right. He sets Byrne off on a journey that brings him face-to-face with the bloody toll of the famine raging through the country—one that would kill more than eight million people before it was done—and forces him to grapple with his own precarious and complicated role in the machinery of the British empire.

In White Elephant, Jeyamohan uses surreal prose and vivid imagery to deliver a searing account of a crucial moment in the history of a nation, a city, and a people.