Lady Murasaki, whose name we don’t know

Murasaki Shikibu writing at Ishiyama-dera. Suzuki Harunobu, 1767. Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Murasaki Shikibu writing at Ishiyama-dera.
Suzuki Harunobu, 1767
Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Lady Murasaki, or Murasaki Shikibu, is one of the great writers of the world. Her Tale of Genji, written more than a thousand years ago, jumpstarted Japanese literature. (It also contains a Garlic Princess.) At the time, most writers in Japan were men or else court women. The men received elaborate training in classical Chinese and then wrote Japanese with Chinese characters. Japanese grammar is more different from Chinese than English grammar is, so this was neither easy nor conducive to graceful writing. The women, though, weren’t educated much and had to scribble their Japanese using the syllabary. The freedom this created led to Tale of Genji and Sei Shonagon‘s Pillow Book, among others. Apparently the two women, who were ladies-in-waiting at the royal court at the same time, disliked each other. Murasaki writes, “Sei Shonagon… was dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters; but if you examined them closely, they left a great deal to be desired.”

Lady Murasaki looking at the moon at Ishiyama-dera. By Yoshitoshi (1889)

Lady Murasaki looking at the moon at Ishiyama-dera. By Yoshitoshi (1889)

But Murasaki goes on, “Thus do I criticize others from various angles–but here is one who has survived this far without having achieved anything of note….Whenever my loneliness threatens to overwhelm me, I take out one or two of them [her Chinese books] to look at; but my women gather together behind my back….What kind of lady is it who reads Chinese books?’ they whisper….So I hesitate to do even those things I should be able to do quite freely, only too aware of my own servants’ prying eyes. How much more so at court….So all they see of me is a façade.”

But even though we know a lot about Lady Murasaki’s inner feelings from her diary and Genji, we don’t know her name! Her family name was Fujiwara but herimg-131 real name was not recorded. Sei Shonagon is also just a court name. A woman of an earlier generation who also left a diary is known only as Michitsuna’s mother.

The Japanese were not the only people to suppress the names of women.In ancient Rome, women were often known only by the name of their family and then their order in the family. In China, many famous women in history are known only as Mencius’ mother, Consort Ban [her surname], or the Zhangsun Empress [a posthumous title]. Even today, girls’ names are not entered into the family books kept by Chinese families for generations. And even today in the Arab world, women are commonly called only “Umm Ali” or “Umm Salim”– mother of Ali or Salim, the name of their oldest son. Even if he’s the youngest of six children.

The story behind the story: Kipling’s Kim, part II

Since I am writing a book about a boy spy in Asia (although in ancient China, not British colonial India), I was rereading KimThe book is full of the life of India in the 1800s, in all its diversity and vigor. I love learning how Kipling was inspired by real people, places and events in his story.

Simla

One of the most intriguing characters in the book is the mysterious Lurgan Sahib, who runs a jewelry store in Simla, in the Himalaya. Today, Simla is a sleepy little town, but when the British ran India, the colonial administration would move there for the hot months, and for more than half the year, Simla was effectively the capital of India.

Lurgan Sahib teaches Kim how to observe. He was based on the real, fascinating “Alexander Jacob,” whom Kipling seems to have met. Peter Hopkirk, in Quest for Kim, writes: “Claiming to be a Turk, he was believed by some to be of Armenian or Polish Jewish parentage, though born in Turkey. ‘He was of the humblest origin,’ the obituarist continues, ‘and when ten years old was sold as a slave to a rich pasha, who, discovering the boy’s uncommon abilities, made a student of him.'” He became free on the death of his master, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise, worked his way from the Arabian peninsula to Bombay, and ended up as a gem-dealer in Simla. Many people who knew him apparently believed he had supernatural powers, and this is hinted at in Kim. Peter Hopkirk, too, writes that odd things happened to him while he was trying to find out more about Jacobs. Among other misfortunes, he lost all of his notes for his book. “Although I cannot say I seriously believe in messages or warnings from beyond the grave, this was not the only thing that happened while I was searching for Jacob’s will…Perhaps it was now time to lay off Jacob before something far worse befell me!”

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At about age sixteen, Kim is reunited with the old Tibetan lama who has paid for his expensive boarding school.

Kim and the lama. These illustrations were by Kipling's father, who knew the original model for the lama

Kim and the lama. These illustrations were by Kipling’s father, who knew the real man who was the model for Teshoo Lama. The swastika symbolizes the endless cycle of birth and death that Buddhists and Hindus hope to escape. Unlike the Nazi swastika, which is set on the diagonal, the Hindu one sits squarely on its base.

 Kim and his lama make their way to the Himalayan foothills; the lama “drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred… sweated and panted astonished. ‘This is my country,’ said the lama.” One day in the hills, they meet Hurree Babu, one of Creighton Sahib’s top spies, who is pretending to be a “courteous Dacca physician” but is actually in the hills looking for two men who have come from Russia.

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Hurree Babu, the “cowardly” Bengali master spy

During the 1800s, the Russians continually advanced their frontiers, and the British in India definitely felt the threat. This is “the Great Game” in Kim. In reality, the Russians came thousands of miles closer to India during that century; but in the book, they are warded off by the network of spies set up by Creighton Sahib. Hurree Babu and Kim and the unwitting lama cause the Russian and French officer to lose all their maps and other possessions and feel lucky they are still alive. The lama and Kim take refuge with “the woman of Shamlegh,” Lispeth, the polyandrous mistress of a remote community on the edge of a 2000-foot cliff. Kipling wrote an entire story about her; it’s sad.

The woman of Shamlegh

The woman of Shamlegh

At the end of the story, the lama and Kim, having thwarted the Russians’ plot, return to the Indian lowlands and the lama happens across a farm stream he is sure was the Buddha’s.

“Certain is our deliverance! Come!” He crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won Salvation for himself and his beloved.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment

 

The real Alice

The real Alice Liddell at age 7

The real Alice Liddell, age 7

This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland. I read it as a child and enjoyed it, but it is way more fun to read as an adult. It’s full of puns and in-jokes and references that go over the head of a child. We miss a lot of the jokes ourselves because we’re so removed from a time when children had to memorize poems like this:

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower…

In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

For me, the only illustrations are the original, Tenniel ones. Did you know the artist put himself in the book as the White Knight? And there are many other visual jokes. Tenniel worked with Lewis Carroll on the illustrations– Carroll had done some himself, which are interesting to compare with the ones we are used to.

Mary Hilton Badcock, possibly the model for Tenniel's idea of Alice.

Mary Hilton Badcock, probably the model for Tenniel’s idea of Alice.

Lewis Carroll, in real life, was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford, and the real Alice’s father was dean of Christ Church College, far above him on the university ladder. But the dean’s children loved him and one day he took three of them out for a row and little Alice, then seven, demanded a story “with nonsense in it.” This was the origin of Alice in Wonderland.

Although it is clear that Charles Dodgson liked little girls too much– yet we are in Victorian times here, no actual evidence shows bad behavior on his part toward Alice, and although Alice’s parents put a stop to his visiting their children for reasons Alice never found out (a BBC documentary seems to show that any parent would have), she herself had the friendliest memory of him till the end of her life, and later wrote that she was sad for years that he had stopped coming. As an adult, they corresponded once or twice and I recall his saying that Alice was the politest child he ever met. You can see an echo of this all throughout Alice in Wonderland, when Alice is polite to caterpillars, dormice, mad hatters, pigs, and even the Queen of Hearts, who wants to cut off her head.

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The story behind the story: Kipling’s Kim

Kim is one of my favorite books (and the name of my first boyfriend– he was named after it. For a long time that put me off reading the book). I’m aware that for a lot of people, independent of the story, the book is problematic because of its unapologetic colonialism. But it’s a really good read and, approached with an open mind, a fascinating glimpse of India under British rule in the late 1800s, with all the wild variety and color of its landscape and its many different ethnic groups, religions and languages.

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Recently I read a book by Peter Hopkirk (who also wrote The Great Game) on the sources and original people and places that inspired Kipling to write Kim.

Hopkirk, who died last year, didn’t have the advantage of the internet in writing Quest for Kim, which was published in 1996. But I do! Using Hopkirk’s book’s identifications, I went looking for pictures to illustrate the story behind the story of Kim, the boy spy.

The book begins in Lahore, which was once a great Indian city and is now in Pakistan and almost completely Muslim. A bunch of street urchins, including Kim, are playing on the great cannon, Zam-Zammah. It’s still there.

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10246675_10100765302339774_6272338693372118626_nInto the chaotic city walks a creature from another world– a lama, abbot of a Tibetan monastery, come down from the Himalaya to look for the Buddha’s stream of enlightenment. He’s been told to ask “the keeper of the wonder house” – the museum curator. Kipling’s father, Lockwood, in fact: a scholarly, gentle man.

I was delighted to learn from Hopkirk’s book that the lama, too– the second hero of Kim– was also based on a real person. Here is a distinguished red-hat lama of today, who looks like the lama in the story to me: “such a man as Kim, who thought he knew all castes, had never seen. He was nearly six feet high, dressed in fold upon fold… and not one fold of it could Kim refer to any known trade or profession. At his belt hung a long openwork iron pencase and a wooden rosary such as holy men wear. On his head was a gigantic sort of tam-o’-shanter… His eyes turned up at the corners.”

“I am no Khitai [Chinese],” says the old man, “but a Bhotiya (Tibetan), since you must know– a lama– or, say, a guru in your tongue.”

10959874_10100765306541354_4221154889893290041_nHopkirk identified the lama’s monastery as Tso-chen, which you can see on the map in the bottom left quadrangle. It is very remote, but today, tourists can visit the Mendong monastery in Tso-chen (now Coqên).

A third hero of the book is the Pathan horse merchant Mahbub Ali. Kim meets him at a caravansery, an inn with space for camels and wares. Here is a picture of one in Peshawar that probably looked much like the one Kim visits in Lahore.

1795603_10100765303951544_3455251642590718434_n And here is Kipling’s father’s illustration of Mahbub Ali himself:  a Pashtun (Pathan) from Afghanistan. It’s exactly how I imagine him. “The big burly Afghan, his beard dyed scarlet with lime (for he was elderly and did not wish his gray hairs to show) knew the boy’s value as a gossip.” He is a Muslim and likes to say “God’s curse on all unbelievers!” before doing something kind for the unbeliever in question. He is also a master spy.

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Kim and the lama set out on the Grand Trunk Road that runs east-west across India. Today, much of it is a major highway.

“See, Holy One–” says an old man to the lama, “the Great Road which is the backbone of all Hind. For the most part it is shaded, as here, with four lines of trees; the middle road– all hard– takes the quick traffic…. Left and right is the rougher road for the heavy carts– grain and cotton and timber, bhoosa, lime, and hides. A man goes in safety here– for at every few kos is a police station….All castes and kinds of men move here. Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnyas, pilgrims and potters– all the world going and coming.”

“And truly,” continues the narrator, “the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles– such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.”

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The lama and Kim on the right, the old lady in her cart on the left

Kim sneaks up into the bushes to Colonel Creighton’s villa in Umballa, just off the Great Trunk Road, to pass a secret message to the colonel from Mahbub Ali. Peter Hopkirk was able to find the only villa it could have been in the modern town of Ambala, and this picture in Quest for Kim was drawn from his photo. The message, as Kim guesses, has nothing to do with horses and is about rebellious hill rajahs.

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10922686_10100765308242944_6446155722805806567_n Thomas George Montgomerie of the Indian Survey was undoubtedly the original of Colonel Creighton, who manages Kim’s career as a spy.

“An officer of great ingenuity,” writes Hopkirk, “he trained these hand-picked individuals in clandestine surveying techniques devised by himself which would permit them to work undercover beyond the frontiers of British India, thus enabling the Survey to produce maps of the strategic approaches which an invader might use.

“Montgomerie first taught his men, through exhaustive practice, to take a pace of known length which would remain constant whether walking uphill, downhill or on the level. Next he devised furtive ways whereby they could keep a precise but discreet count of the number of such measured paces taken during a long day’s march. Some travelled as Buddhist pilgrims, with rosaries and prayer-wheels, which Montgomerie’s workshops at Dehra Dun, the Survey’s headquarters, cunningly doctored for clandestine use…. ”

More in the next post.