Historical fiction writers live simultaneously in three time zones: The past is what they aim to imaginatively interrogate, the present is what they seek to interpret through that reconstructed past, and the future is what they hope to influence through a newly interpreted present.
Often, they are driven to accept this challenging mode of existence because of the specific gaps, shortcomings, and conflicts in history that trouble or fascinate them — and the only way they can solve them. addressing these aspects is through fictitious intervention and invention.
With East India, Brinda Chary aims to do just that by restoring, reclaiming, and rearranging the little-known, barely annotated history of the earliest recorded Indian immigrant to the United States of America today. The first permanent British colony in America was established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. And this is where Tony, the East Indian of the same name, found himself in 1635, working as a hired servant. contract at tobacco plantations.
Born of unclear paternity to a Tamil prostitute, Tony’s comfortable life on India’s Coromandel Coast ended shortly after he lost his mother. Her British patron sends the boy to London to start a new life. Despite the kindness of some of the other Indian immigrants there, things didn’t go as planned. He is kidnapped and put on a ship bound for the New World. As the only East Indian among many different groups of whites and blacks, he was more of a lone stranger than anyone else.
This distinction gives him a unique perspective on all social and political happenings but often puts him in the most precarious position with whites, blacks, and Native Americans. So his journey to adulthood is filled with adventures and tragedy, gains and losses, love and longing. He eventually found his way into his dream doctor’s apprentice. However, as he soon learns, this creates even more complications at a time when people are against or lash out at the unknowns of science and medicine.
The horrifying art of healing is also the beating heart of this story as it fuels Tony’s deep desire to “reincarnate himself, again. Tony East India – laborer, adventurer, and now a doctor’s apprentice. I was both a parent and a baby, and I was determined to make it a success.” He confessed to a servant and indentured friend that such reincarnation was “hard labor”. However, this inner struggle drives Tony’s every action, decision, and emotion.
Although he never found a foothold, he was determined: “I will thrive wherever the wind puts me.” When he knew he would never be able to return to India, which was still his homeland, he declared: “…I will be my own refuge, my destination. Like a snail, I will carry it home on my back. , find it where I happen to be, make it from what I carry.”
Tony’s tenacious attitude of hope and growing attachment to America – which, like him, is constantly reborn – is something all immigrants will readily recognize. But that was just a low result for Chary. She aims to do more with her storytelling. As she shows us, the 17th century was also a time when colonization and globalization began to spread around the world. The Indian subcontinent, Africa, Europe and the Americas are all dealing with mass displacement in addition to the important discovery.
Through the ups and downs of the novel’s characters, Chary shows how all of those forces are still shaping our present. For example, there are mentions of the Great Wall of China being built to enclose 300,000 acres and keep the British colony “safe”. There are scenes where no one knows where India is or places a brown person, so they remove Tony and go for “Moor” instead. As for the legacy our present is creating for our future, we need only be mindful of these past recurring patterns.
If the above makes the novel sound like some sort of dry historical text, let me dispel that notion from you. Chary’s most notable achievement with this novel is that she disregards her enormous process of learning and research throughout. Her cinematic world-building ensures spectacle and content as it sweeps us along the Coromandel coast, the streets of London and the Virginian countryside. The characters are treated with care and attention to detail so that we find humanity even in the worst of them. Tony’s voice is, from a first person point of view, very serious and endearing, especially as he is filled with wonder at human biology, the beauty and healing qualities of many plants and flowers, as well as the powerful mystery of love.
In the author’s note, Chary reveals the personal encounters that led up to this novel. A scholar of English Renaissance literature, alluding to an “Indian boy” in Shakespeare’s works A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the omission of what happened to him at the end of the play always haunted her. “Tony” is the earliest known brief mention of an East Indian worker in the US archives. After him, many others have been recorded, including a young East Indian who apprenticed at a London apothecary before coming to America. The Tony of Charlie novel is all three of them.
In the last four decades alone, there have been numerous books about South Asian or East Indian immigrants—both fiction and non-fiction. Some have won awards. Almost all of them focus on contemporary stories. Chary’s “Tony East Indies” planted his own flag in this literary setting. As he says at the end: “Others of my kind will come here, and others, too, and they will tell their stories, stories full of loss, doubt, wonder, and hope But mine, for example, is the first story.”
Through this first fictional East Indian immigrant, Brinda Chary has also wonderfully pioneered the much-needed path toward rich, new literary territory.
Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book critic and the founder of Desi Books. She tweets at @jennybhatt.
