When history doesn’t spawn yawns

B.N. Goswamy

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Years ago, roaming the streets of a city in Canada — Calgary perhaps, but I do not clearly remember which, for in that trip I took several of them in — I happened to come upon a relatively small shop that dealt, as the sign-board said, with ‘Antique Books’ and ‘Other Nuggets”. Unable to resist — for the sheer aroma, apart from the sight, of old books I find so inviting — I entered, and began browsing the shelves. There is nothing that I had in mind, or was looking for: it was just the comfort of being able to feel the past around myself.

But, quite unexpectedly, I came upon a battered old volume the title of which read: The History of China and India: Pictorial and Descriptive, written by ‘Miss Corner’. I was unfamiliar with the author’s name, but the title gave me information on her. She was the author, the blurb said, of other books, namely ‘The Historical Library’, and ‘Questions on the History of Europe’. Intrigued, I began to leaf through the book — nobody hustles you in those shops — and got absorbed in it.

The China section, I am reluctant to admit, did not interest me much; so, I moved on fairly quickly to the India part. This is how the opening lines on India read: “Few countries in the world have experienced more revolutions than India, or been made the subject of so many able and interesting works. …it (the country) has always been a scene of constant warfare, as well as of commercial enterprise, and the well-known adage — “Might overcomes Right” — has never been more fully and more frequently exemplified than on the plains of Hindostan.” I found this refreshing for an opening.

There was a tone of understanding in these words and a degree of warmth: accompanied by an air of clarity. The book was at the same time profusely illustrated, page after page featuring little vignettes or relevant images in the form of black and white engravings or wood-cuts. Without much hesitation, I decided to pick the book up.

I am inclined to puzzle things out and there were, for me, some puzzles to solve with regard to the book. It was published, the title said, by Washbourne of New Bridge Street, London; was printed by Dean and Company; but it bore no date. Slowly, however, I was able to track the approximate date down, for when the narrative came up to British India, it mentioned the conquest of Sind by Napier, the ‘sale’ of Kashmir to Gulab Singh, but spoke till the very end of Governors General: all of which meant that the country had still not become part of the ‘Raj’. So, the date of its publication must have been somewhere between 1845 and 1858. Again, there were so many illustrations in the book but no clue as to who they were by. With some effort, I was able to get to the sources of some of them. One of them, showing the courtesans of Lucknow, was based on a ‘Company’ style painting of the same theme done by an Indian painter — with some minor changes introduced — that is now in the San Diego Museum of Art; one view of widow-burning — a theme that horrified and fascinated the British — was attributable to Flemish artist Franz Solvyns, who had made Calcutta his home in the very days the book was being written. And so on.

But why am I writing about that book long years after I acquired it? For the reason that I dip into it from time to time and each time I am impressed by the amount of information it conveys with simple, effortless ease. Consider the opening of her chapter on the Mughal emperor, Jahangir. “The emperor Akber”, it begins, “was succeeded by his son, Selim, who assumed the presumptuous title of Jehanghir, or Conqueror of the World; and although not equal to his illustrious father in ability, was a great sovereign under whose Dominion the empire lost none of its power and splendour.” From there it moves on to the lady whom Jehanghir married: Nur Jehan, ‘who came later to be known as Nur Mahal’, which means ‘the Light of the Harem’. This is followed by a long paragraph on Nur Jahan: her ancestry, her wit, the grace of her person. Clearly, ‘Miss Corner’, sitting in distant England and writing, must have been reading whatever was being published at that early date on India and her history, piecing together digestible bits of facts and stories, and then giving them easy form. The same ease went into all her accounts, whether of Ashoka or the ‘Patan kings of Delhi’ or Hyder Ali, or Ranjit Singh. The visuals she chose to interweave with her text were uniformly well picked so as to liven up the events she was reconstructing. 

A final puzzle about the book — who was the mysterious ‘Miss Corner’ who wrote it? – got solved the other day when I found that the lady, born Julia Corner in 1798 (died 1875), was a British children’s educational writer who created a whole Historical Library for the young and was always referred to by them as ‘Miss Corner’. She wrote on a remarkable range of subjects, from the histories of the Britons, the Saxons and the Normans, and the Histories of France and Italy, to The Play Grammar, Seeds of Knowledge, The First History of England that Should be Placed in the Hands of a Child, Little Plays for Little Actors, Little Mary’s Reading Book. Each book would include anecdotes, tables of historical events, maps, different aspects of history; and, always, questions were raised that related to the text in each book. Miss Corner was evidently a lady with a mission. Not surprisingly, 36 editions of the book that I have been writing about here have been published till date.

Reading about all these books and the easy but informative and highly accessible manner in which they were written made me ask myself this sad but relevant question: who in our land writes books for the young like this? Who?