Content
The book has date entries rather than chapters, and is split into two parts. It is explicitly not a travel journal: Ackerley provides no account of his journey to or from India, and he has comparatively little to say about the environment beyond a few descriptions of his immediate locale. As if to further emphasise this, Part One ends with Ackerley preparing for a trip to Varanasi (identified as Benares in the book), and Part Two begins with his return to Chhatarpur. (Ackerley renames it 'Chhokrapur', and in his introduction he confesses he "made up" the name, and "it would be idle to explore the map", [3] however in practice it could not realistically be mistaken for anywhere else.)
At the start of the book, Ackerley lists the "Principal Characters", aside from himself. [4] Tellingly, only Indians appear on the list; despite their presence throughout, he includes no Europeans or Anglo-Indians here. Apart from the Maharajah, there is the Dewan (the Maharajah's Prime Minister [5] ), Babaji Rao [6] (the Maharajah's private secretary), Abdul Haq (Ackerley's exasperating Hindi tutor), Narayan [7] (Clerk of the Maharajah's Guest House), Sharma [8] (the Maharajah's valet, and the apple of Ackerley's eye throughout the book), Hashim (waiter at the Guest House) and finally Habib, described as being "about twelve", Ackerley's miraculously over-zealous servant. Throughout the novel, and in common with the time, Ackerley refers to Muslims such as Abdul and Hashim as "Mohammedans".
Although a comic memoir, Hindoo Holiday is, certainly in terms of humour, comparatively free of what would be now termed racial profiling, even making allowances for the time of its writing. There is only one use of eye dialect (avay is used on a couple of occasions for "away"); instead, much of the comedy stems from Ackerley's struggles to come to terms with the complexities of Hinduism and the caste system, and most significantly from the comic timing of the dialogue. At no point are any Indians held up to ridicule; indeed Ackerley tends to reserve this for the pompous and often absurd Europeans who drift through the narrative - two cases in point being the preposterous Mrs Bristow, whose contrary, vacuous small-talk leaves Ackerley dumbfounded, [9] and the architect Mr Bramble, who is engaged to construct a 'Greek Temple' for the Europhile Maharajah. Most of the Europeans emerge as comparatively one-dimensional, in contrast to the complex depictions of the Maharajah, with his profligate life and his homosexual attractions, or of the persona of Abdul, whose relentless pursuit of Ackerley for his own personal gain is more than counterbalanced by the stark poverty of his existence. In a passage written with not a hint of pathos, Abdul's meagre home life is described in vivid detail, before the narrative returns to an extensive series of interactions where Abdul attempts to extract money or influence (or both) from the hapless Ackerley. [10]
Joe Randolph "J. R." Ackerley was a British writer and editor. Starting with the BBC the year after its founding in 1927, he was promoted to literary editor of The Listener, its weekly magazine, where he served for more than two decades. He published many emerging poets and writers who became influential in Great Britain. He was openly homosexual, a rarity in his time when homosexual activity was forbidden by law and socially ostracised.
Theodore Francis Powys – published as T. F. Powys – was a British novelist and short-story writer. He is best remembered for his allegorical novel Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1927), where Weston the wine merchant is evidently God. Powys was influenced by the Bible, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift and other writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as later writers such as Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former marriage name as A. S. Byatt, is an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been widely translated, into more than thirty languages.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Norman Alexander MacCaig DLitt was a Scottish poet and teacher. His poetry, in modern English, is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity.
Richard Thomas Mabey is a writer and broadcaster, chiefly on the relations between nature and culture.
Chhatarpur is a city and a municipality in Chhatarpur district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. It is the administrative headquarters of Chhatarpur District. Chhatarpur is a city and a municipality in Chhatarpur district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. It is the administrative headquarters of Chhatarpur District.
William Combe was a British miscellaneous writer. His early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench Prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax, a comic poem, illustrated by artist Thomas Rowlandson's colour plates, that satirised William Gilpin. Combe also wrote a series of imaginary letters, supposed to have been written by the second, or "wicked" Lord Lyttelton. Of a similar kind were his letters between Swift and "Stella". He also wrote the letterpress for various illustrated books, and was a general hack.
Herbert Richard Hoggart was an English academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
David Garnett was an English writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.
Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
Angelica Vanessa Garnett, was a British writer, painter and artist. She was the author of the memoir Deceived with Kindness (1984), an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death. It was published in the United States as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Written soon after Huxley left England and settled in California, the novel is Huxley's examination of American culture, particularly what he saw as its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth. This satire also raises philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in Huxley's final novel Island. The novel's title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a figure in Greek mythology to whom Aurora gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book was awarded the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Diana Athill was a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the greatest writers of the 20th century at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch Ltd.
Heat and Dust is a 1983 British historical romantic drama film, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based on her novel, Heat and Dust (1975). It was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant. It stars Greta Scacchi, Shashi Kapoor and Julie Christie.
The harpē (ἅρπη) was a type of sword or sickle; a sword with a sickle protrusion along one edge near the tip of the blade. The harpe is mentioned in Greek and Roman sources, and almost always in mythological contexts.
Horatio Clare is an English author known for travel, memoir, nature and children's books. He worked at the BBC as a producer on Front Row, Night Waves and The Verb.
Laura Cumming is the art critic of The Observer newspaper, a position she has held since 1999. Before that she worked for The Guardian, the New Statesman and the BBC. In addition to her career in journalism, Cumming has written well-received books on self-portraits in art and the discovery of a lost portrait by Diego Velázquez in 1845. The Vanishing Man was a New York Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017.
Maharaja Vishwanath Singh Bahadur KCSI was Maharaja of the salute state of Chhatarpur from 1867 to 1932.
