A recent post by Amardeep on the work of (with the related debates on) historians of, and more importantly for, the Empire, such as Niall Ferguson brought to my mind those odd statues of two Englishmen in topcoats and hats moored next to bare chested, dhoti clad, and in many case ascetic, Telugu luminaries such as Vemana, Potanna, Thygaraja, Krishnadeva Raya etc on the Tank Bund Road, which bounds that cesspool of a lake in the middle of Hyderabad, India. In a recent discussion on translating Telugu poetry, I was telling a friend how because of the vagaries of my education, the closest I have come to imbibing any of the literary output in Telugu, my mother tongue, is al most limited to reading the captions etched on the pedestals of those statues honoring those poets, writers, kings and statesmen.

As an aside, I also have a curious experience regarding the installation of these statues themselves. I remember very distinctly being stuck in a traffic jam on the Tank Bund, as I was riding in a convoy of trucks requisitioned from the Indian Army by the school for an excursion to the Hyderabad Zoo, precisely the day these statues were unveiled to the public by N.T. Rama Rao. Apart from the spillover from his highly successful movie career, another of the drivers in N.T.R's path to political power was his espousal of resurgence in Telugu pride.

Given this, the case of C.P. Brown’s induction into the “official” or state sponsored cannon (as my friend pointed out to me in that conversation) of Telugu luminaries is very curious indeed; curious because it highlights the ambiguities in the debates on empires, their evils, and most importantly their benefits. C.P. Brown, born of polyglot English missionary parents (one desirable side effect of wanting to save heathens by bringing them the Gospel, is that Christian missionaries have made important contributions to the preservation and propagation of languages; see this article detailing earliest Tamil types, circa 1578, used to print Doctrina Christam) is widely regarded as the modern day messiah who saved Telugu language from the sorry state it had fallen into by early 19th century, with the decline of Hindu kingdoms such as Vijayanagar in South India. This extensive article on Brown’s life details some sixty years of work that he put into collecting old manuscripts on palm leaves, compiling and codifying the language in the form of a Telugu-English dictionary (still considered to be a very high achievement by lexicographers and linguists), grammars, treasties on prosody such as this one, and finally translating works of poets such as this translation of epigrammatic and sonorous Vemana into English.

Then we have the case of Sir. Arthur Cotton, who can very easily be a poster boy to Ferguson’s Empire hosannas for the impact he had as he led the construction of irrigation works pretty much across every major South Indian river, starting with the Cauvery, and ending at the Godavari. Prof. Bret Wallach, whose monster geographical photo album The Great Mirror provided much enjoyment to me in the past, has written a very accessible article detailing Cotton’s work, and his Madras, or cheap, school of civil engineering. Wallach also details how mismanagement under the British causes a famine in the Godavari delta in 1842, and subsequently how Cotton hit out against the critics, notably the governor-general Lord Dalhousie, of his irrigation plans because of their seemingly large cost by writing, “"If it be asked how is this great sum of money to be obtained, the answer is simply, by converting the water of the Godavery into money instead of letting it run into the sea." You may also want to read Wallach's <a href=""ags.ou.edu">other article on British Irrigation in India as well.
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Now I could add my own hot air to the Empire debates, but since neither am I a historian nor have I read critically any of the source material driving these debates, I will desist other than adding the data points of these two Englishmen, celebrated as statues on Tank Bund, which get to breathe that noxious air and get shit upon by desi “kabootharaa” (pegions).

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.

There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it's a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.

I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me. the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.

First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black and I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crennelated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

He comes home at midnight. He thinks he is slightly drunk, so he doesn't attempt to write anything down in his notebook. He puts on the earphones, a cocoon of sound, a wave against which his bobbing head can rest. The click of keys. The rasp of a finger running under lines in a book of poetry he had bought earlier in the evening among many other books. How many people had he met in the course of the birthday party to which he was invited to earlier read in the course of their day? And how distant are most of their lives from these necessities that bind him to the page, to the shape of alphabet, to the bars of words detailing music of another kind?

This is where he drowns, the continuous whirlpool that enables him to breathe, to mark off day after day from the calendar that is pasted over his skin. People whose birthday it was today couldn't believe he was as old, or more exactly, as young as he claimed he was. That is because he has become green, and black, and perhaps even more something undefinable from diving repeatedly into the wreck.