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Writing, Rewriting the Beach: An Essay

1998; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13642529809409073

1470-1154

Greg Dening,

South Asian Studies and Diaspora

Abstract Calcutta 1811. The rich travelled on the shoulders of the poor in Calcutta in 1811. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, in his palanquin, bobbed along above the heads of the coolies and beggars in Tank Square. He did not see the short man with a sailor's gait and a scarred, near-toothless face. But Edward Robarts saw him. Seeing Raffles gave Robarts hope. For ten months on this, the harshest of his beaches, Robarts had been on the slide. Calcutta was a Company town, an East India Company town. A white man without Company connections, or without a trade that the Company valued, had nothing to sell but his poverty. In an empire city, there was no space between the empowered rich and the disciplined native population who did their work for them. The relentless pressure on the poor white man was downward. A man never went up in the rounds of begging a few rupees from vestrymen's wives and daughters. There was only the trading of one disrespectful gaze for another degrading judgement. Just a year before, Robarts had reached the highest rung on his social ladder. But this had been in Penang. He had been butler and cook to Sir Thomas Raffles's sister. There had been soirees and parties aplenty, enough anyway to delude his sense of social status. Death, however, rode the shoulders of rich and poor alike in the East. Raffles and his family fled Penang. Robarts had to find another beach in Calcutta. Robarts came to Calcutta with what he thought of as his two greatest capitals in life - his 'royal bride' and his story of 'a long and singular career of an enterprizeing and unfortuneate life'. His wife was Enaoata, daughter of 'King' Keatonui of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas. She came to Calcutta with their three children and pregnant with the fourth. Hers was the unfortunate life, we have to think. She had left her native islands with Robarts, first for Tahiti. There she tried to hang herself as she faced Robarts's violence. He brewed rum for the convict colony at Botany Bay and succumbed to it as well. Whenever we meet her on all the beaches of her life, she is in tears. It is hard not to think that with a language none could speak, except her husband, and he haltingly, she was wrapped in a terrible silence. In Calcutta, she could endure only a couple of years in the makeshift compounds behind the godowns of Taretta Bazaar where they lived. Her children survived not much longer. Robarts always saw himself as 'enterprizeing' in the face of harsh circumstances. 'Bumptious' would probably be the word others would have used. If only half the stories of how he rescued people and ships were true, he would have been a hard man to live with. But anyone who has a story that he believes others will want to read probably is to be seen as bumptious. Robarts had already begun to write his story when he went looking for Raffles. He had no trouble discovering him. 'A Great man everyone knows,' he wrote later, 'but a poor man sits in his corner unnoticed'. When he knocked on Raffles's door, it was opened by a Malay servant who recognized Robarts from Penang. He was taken immediately to Sir Thomas. 'Why, Robarts,' Raffles said. 'We've been looking for you.' At Raffles's side was a bespectacled man with an air of great learning. It was 'that morning star of Literature, the Immortal' Dr John Caspar Leyden - linguist, theologian, poet, medical practictioner, Freemason, professor of Hindustani, Judge of the Twenty-Four Pergunnahs and Commissioner of the Court of Request. Leyden was a collector of stories and languages. He had acquired thirty-four of the latter and thought that through Robarts he might acquire another. He asked Robarts what he had been doing in Calcutta. 'Looking for employment and writing my Narrative of what I had gone through since I left London.' 'What? You have turned author!' 'Yes, Sir! Anything to raise the wind for an honest morsel.' 'What? Raise the wind!' Leyden laughed at the sailor's metaphor. 'Yes, Sir! I have been lying becalmed these ten months, and if a breeze does not spring up, my unfortunate Bark will founder on the rocks of adversity'. 'Is your wife from the islands with you? Bring her with you and let me see your narrative, and then I shall be better judge of your abilities.' So Robarts returned in a few days, with a few pages of his 'Vocabalry of the Marqueasas Language'. Enoata came with him to pronounce the words. The rooms of Leyden's house were filled with Persian scholars transcribing texts. Leyden offered Robarts a desk and forty rupees a month to tell his story. Robarts received only January's first stipend. Leyden had gone with Lord Minto and Raffles on an expedition to annex Java. Searching for manuscripts in Batavia, he caught a fever and died, learned and young. Robarts's story, written in a neat, small hand, breathlessly without stop, comma or paragraph for 171 pages, is not signed as completed until 24 July 1824. By then he has many, many more vicissitudes to tell of. But in January 1811, sharing a desk with a Persian scholar, he had begun: In November 1797 I saild from Blackwall on board the Ship Eupirates, bound round Cape Heru in search of sperm whales….