Aug 05, 2020

The Tainted is a novel based on a 1920 Mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India. I decided to fictionalise the regiment so I could have artistic licence and my story was to be an account of how an Irish regiment serving in the British army in the Raj - I called them the Kildare Rangers.


When I started working on The Tainted I had planned to write a novel based on 1920 Mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India.  I decided to fictionalise the regiment so I could have artistic licence and my story was to be an account of how an Irish regiment serving in the British army in the Raj - I called them the Kildare Rangers - mutinied, and how their actions, in those few weeks, panned out. I was barely into writing the first three chapters when I realised that apart from the circumstances of the mutiny, there was a whole different, and indeed far more complex story waiting to be told, one that needed to be told - the aftermath of the mutiny and its ramifications on multiple generations of families in two countries on two separate continents. All three groups of characters in my novel are tainted by association and trauma that has come down through generations and it’s this baggage, and their search for identity and a final sense of belonging that has formed the basis of my book.

Researching this book took up many years of my life! I made a decision fairly early on in the project, to completely immerse myself in the period: so I confined all of my reading to books, magazines, periodicals in the years from about 1910 up to 1947. I watched scores of movies, Hollywood and Bollywood set in the Indian sub continent and Ireland too, that spanned those years. Two films come to mind straightaway: Bhowani Junction starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger, and the evocative and poignant Bow Barracks Forever. If you liked The Tainted, I think these two movies will resonate too.


I reconnected with books from my teenage and early twenties reading Somerset Maugham, John Masters and Ruskin Bond amongst many, many others. For an Irish perspective some of the writers I read were Sebastian Barry, JG Farrell, William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien. Happily, I also discovered Barbara Cleverly and her detective stories set in India during the Raj.

Sometimes while writing things would come to a complete full stop till I checked out a detail. When I began research for the chapter on the tiger hunt at Masinagudi, I ended up taking an unexpectedly long 6-month break from writing to read all of Jim Corbett's books, in order to get my head around the intricacies of hunting big game using elephants and beaters. For a visual guide I poured over many series of wonderful sketches and drawings in the Illustrated London News. They were big into hunting, fishing and shooting in the Tropics. A good few months later I felt I was an armchair expert and, may I add, one with a special interest in pigsticking!

To get an understanding of the contemporaneous attitude towards and the treatment of diseases like syphilis and malaria, as well as mental health issues and conditions in mental asylums, I turned to the work of medical historians and military archives. Additionally, I did field trips to eyeball some of the older mental hospitals in India - very many have still retained and use their old buildings.

I was forever hungry for visual references - I think many writers tend to be, for you need to have settings very clearly in your minds eye: people and places of that era that you can instantly conjure up as you write. I dug up many excellent documentaries about soldiering in the Raj and found art galleries and museums very useful, especially photographic exhibitions. Of course, the military are great at archiving every detail of their war and peacetime activities so there was a lot of material that was available between the three countries.


Luckily for historians and novelists a good many young army officers were bored stiff for most of their time in India, constricted as they were for months at a time by the relentless heat or the incessant rains - they wrote extensively, books, diaries and long letters chronicling their lives and travels in the sub continent. And of course there were scores of very articulate and descriptive accounts of daily life by the women of the Raj: wives, daughters and sisters, from Vicerines living in grand splendour to hardy missionaries heroically making do in remote 'up country' camps. Their writings were often published in popular women's magazines of the day and were a very good source for me. I managed to get sets of bound volumes from antiquarian dealers and even though I've moved on to writing my next novel, I still love reading them.

Post Independence, the Anglo Indians diaspora who had scattered all over the world contributed to their own nostalgic newsletters and journals, full of accounts of bygone life, recipes and photographs. Collectively they were an eye opener to life, attitudes and the cultural norms of that time.

What is amazing though is that all those themes I researched - money, migration, power and the shaming and blaming of women are still todays stories, still absolutely relevant. It's almost like time has stood still and nothing has changed. The similarities between India and Ireland are quite startling. Both countries have over many centuries obsessed with religion, allowed religious rites to overtake faith (this is an important distinction) and worse still, allowed men to have absolute control over those religious rites, the keys to the pearly gates. That female sexuality has been made a shameful thing is not surprising given the male dominated structure of religion in both countries. Fortunately for Ireland things seem to be changing for the better there is more tolerance, more understanding of differences. India is going through turbulent times - religious fundamentalism of any sort always bodes the worst for women.

I never consciously set out to write a book that would tie up issues from the pa st to problems of the present. But I've realised this: the one constant for writers of fiction is human nature - it just never changes. And so prejudices are still the same and the push back against class, caste and religious discrimination will go on valiantly.

Apart from the fact that 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the Mutiny, it is such a great time for The Tainted to be published - to come out when so many in Ireland, the New Irish are trying, many very successfully, to find a sense of belonging and forging identities that retain something from the land of their births and moulding it firmly around the best of their Irish selves.


Cauvery Madhaven         
Irish Republic 2020
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