Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and author of The Far Pavilions, best known for her epic Raj-era fiction.
On the island
Eight records
Well, the first one is Volce Bleu, and that I don't ever remember hearing before on a record, and I'm enchanted to find that you've dug it up for me. But my mother used to play it. All Victorians learnt to play the piano. And this was one of her piano pieces, and I remember it from ... years of the First World War.
My second record is one called Russell of Spring, and this is again a childhood memory. We had to make our own entertainments in India.
And this to me is coming back from school. I was always terrified that after school we wouldn't go back to Indor again, that daddy would decide to retire before we could go back. Fortunately didn't. And we went back to Indar, and when we arrived back in Delhi, we'd always been in Old Delhi before, but now there was a place called New Delhi, which was completely new to us. and it had a large and opulent club.
It came out at the beginning of the thirties, I suppose. And we went to Japan. on one of those very small little boats that used to do the trip across the China Sea to Japan. And the captain had got hold of this record, and they had a sort of tannoy system, a very primitive one in those days, but he used to play this record, and you heard it all over the ship.
My fifth record is Nola. Again, this dates from Delhi days, and reminds me so much of Delhi. But I don't think anybody could be depressed on a desert island with a tune like this. Very cheerful, jumpy.
Record number six it's merely a remembrance of the fact, again, we used to make our own entertainment. And this was a charity, I think, cabaret, I'm not quite sure. In Kashmir, said Onaga. And I sang the song with a man who was a a gay young subaltern with rather a nice voice.
I'm again a tremendous Chance Aublanc fan and I'm delighted to hear that he's still going strong and still singing. But this was a great favorite of the old days.
Anjuli's ThemeFavourite
My last record is called Julia's Theme, and it was written by somebody who read the Far Pavilions and liked them very much. called Jerry Lanning, and it's how he sees the heroine of the Palf Villain. It's how I see her too.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:49Could you endure solitude on a tropical island?
Oh, very much, yes.
Presenter asks
3:09Were you born in India?
Yes, I was born there. I was born in Simla, and I don't think you can get much more raj than that.
Presenter asks
5:44Did you find it very strange coming to England for the first time?
I chated England. It was the first time I'd realized that India wasn't my country. ... But this was my country, and my friends, and my place, and it was only when I was yanked out of it and sent home that it really dawned on me that it was going to be very lucky if I ever came back.
Presenter asks
6:09What was your art training for? What had you in mind?
I wanted to be an illustrator of children's books. I was going to be the new Dulac or Arthur Rackham or something like that. I was absolutely determined on it. and I did quite a bit of illustration. But I never made any money out of it, and I turned to writing merely because I simply had to make some money. And I thought I'd have a bash and I had a bash. And if my book had been thrown back at me I never, never, never would have written another word.
The keepsakes
The book
Rudyard Kipling
you can read Kim again and again and again and again and you're back in India.
The luxury
the only thing I would like was the tools of my trade, so that I could sketch or write
Presenter asks
26:07What do they think of [The Far Pavilions] in India?
They absolutely ate it, and that is the biggest compliment I ever received in my life, because I went out to do a sort of um promotional thing on shadow and pavilions, sitting rather on the edge of my chair. ... Because even my dearest friends, you never quite know how they're going to take something that somebody else writes about them, and they went straight overboard about it.
“I chated England. It was the first time I'd realized that India wasn't my country.”
“I turned to writing merely because I simply had to make some money. And I thought I'd have a bash and I had a bash. And if my book had been thrown back at me I never, never, never would have written another word.”
“There's nothing in that book there's nothing in Shadow of the Moon which is invented. And there's jolly little in Far Pavilions that is invented too. It's nearly all true.”