Correspondent Priyanka Tanwar interacted with Prof Anindyo Roy on nonsense poetry, his first fiction work The Viceroy’s Artist on poet and artist Edward Lear.
Edited excerpts:
Indian Printer & Publisher – What drew you towards the world of nonsense poetry?
Prof Anindyo Roy – As a child, I read and recited nonsense poetry from Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol. 2023 was the centenary year of its publication. Sukumar Ray was inspired by Edward Lear. Much later, as a teacher, I included Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry, particularly his The Cummerband in the courses on the nineteenth century that I taught.
In 2013, while working at the British Library in London, I came across Lear’s Indian Journals. Initially, I worked on a scholarly article on Lear’s India. Later I decided to turn to fictional retelling. The journal entries were often fragmented, filled with untold stories that seemed to lurk behind what he could not elaborate in those journals. I decided that I would narrate those untold stories in my novel.
Also, in his nonsense poems, Lear mocked the norms of his own society, often revealing its underside. A great number of his limericks set the eccentric in conflict with “they,” the faceless, officious members of society at large. The primary theme remains the problems anyone with the slightest idiosyncrasy has in feeling uncomfortable in that world. This also shaped my interest in Lear and in retelling the story of his journey in India.
IPP – How did you decide to explore the inner journey of Edward Lear?
Roy – Some of those untold stories seemed to me were about Edward Lear’s encounter with the unfamiliar world that he encountered in India. Fiction allowed me to delve into that world of the unknown by exploring his relationship to his past, his inner life, his trials and tribulations and narrating them as a story about self-discovery. In short, I braided details of the external journey of travel with the story of his life.
IPP – What kind of sources did you refer to while writing The Viceroy’s Artist?
Roy – The sources are mostly secondary critical works on Edward Lear, including his published biographies, and his published letters. In addition, I did research on 19th-century colonial India and on the material culture and history of 19th-century Britain.
IPP – The Viceroy’s Artist is part travelogue, part documentation of Edward Lear’s inner journey, part about his experiences with the British empire, and part about his nonsense poetry and paintings. Was it difficult to incorporate these myriad aspects into one work? How did you piece together these aspects?
Roy – Edward Lear’s journey to India was enabled by a commission he received from the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook for painting the Kanchenjunga. As he sits on a stool waiting for the mists to clear so that he can begin sketching, he is struck by the mountain’s elusiveness. He agonizes over the fact that there is no “middle distance” in the space he sees in front, and even the peaks in the background dissolve as soon as he attempts to sketch. All he can see is an expansive nothingness in the space where the middle distance should be. Without it, he cannot draw (western art depends on ‘perspective’ that requires the presence of the ‘middle ground’). This is where I begin, and that elusiveness becomes the main theme in my fictional retelling. All the different narrative strands came together around it, including his reflections on the British Empire, about Indian art, about people he encounters and their manners, the sounds of Indian languages he hears around him, and his thoughts about the limits of his own conceptions about art — color, line, form, as well as about his past, elements of which he had not acknowledged or even fully comprehended before.
IPP – The structure of The Viceroy’s Artist is unique. You move from different phases of his life in a few pages. Why did you select this particular style of storytelling?
Roy – My style draws from Virginia Woolf’s “stream of consciousness.” Having taught and written about Woolf, I was so attuned to it that it came to me naturally! In this narrative world, time is never linear, but always moves backward and forward, the present can be embodied both as an immediate sense of the world and as an unexpected eruption of the past. When I began thinking about the form of my novel, it seemed to me that my attempt to braid the story of external travel with an inner journey could be very effectively implemented through this style.
IPP – How did you bring the artistic aspects of Lear’s work to life? Apart from the Malabar dyes what new aspects of artistic medium did Lear discover on his journey to India?
Roy – As an illustrator and landscape painter, Lear made Italy his home. He attended a short course on art at the Royal Academy but did not linger there for long. Although he never achieved fame and glory for his art during his lifetime, he had many friends in the established artistic world — Holman Hunt, Turner, Rossetti. Some of his personal correspondence attests to his interest in debating and discussing art.
During his travels through India, he sketched extensively and did some watercolors and in his journals, he reflected on what he drew. Lear’s ‘discovery’ of the Malabar dyes is my invention and is based on his preoccupation, in his journals, with the world of light that he encounters during his trip to Malabar. As an admirer of the artist Turner, Lear began to see the relationship between light and color very differently — which is why I included that section, including his encounter with Mr Nair who first suggests that he try natural colors.
IPP – How is your book different from other literary works on Edward Lear?
Roy – Except for Joe Robert’s Bengal, the cold weather 1873: A Dream of Edward Lear in India, I have not come across any novel or literary work that features Edward Lear in India or elsewhere. There are some excellent biographies; however, my novel does not claim to be one. The title of my work is The Viceroy’s Artist: A Novel. I wish someone would write fictional accounts of his travels through Albania, Italy, Greece, Corfu, Egypt and the Holy Land. He has left behind a wealth of material on his travels to these places.
Prof. Anindyo Roy’s exploration of Edward Lear through fiction sounds like a fascinating way to bridge travel writing and literary history. It’s interesting how Lear’s ‘nonsense’ poetry might actually illuminate deeper truths when viewed through the lens of colonial movement and identity—I’d love to hear more about how Roy balances fact and imagination in the narrative.