White Elephant

"Jeyamohan is one of India's most resourceful makers of literary art" Pankaj Mishra

"Our understanding of contemporary India is incomplete without reading Jeyamohan" Vivek Shanbhag, author of Ghachar Ghochar

The year is 1878 and the south of India is in the grip of a devastating famine.

Aiden Byrne, an Irish police officer and loyal servant to the Crown, encounters two laborers being brutally whipped by the roadside. Their tormentor is an overseer from the Tudor Ice Company, where mammoth blocks of ice, harvested from frozen New England lakes, are broken down for British banquets by workers from the lowest rung of the caste system.

When those same laborers are found murdered, Aiden and Kathavarayan, a charismatic young activist, set out on a journey that brings them face-to-face with the bloody toll of the famine raging through the country. Once so fearless in this heat-blasted land, Aiden will now be forced to grapple with his own precarious role in the machinery of empire.

A vivid reimagining of the first labor uprising in modern Indian history, White Elephant is a soul-searing novel by one of India's greatest living writers, offering a stirring, indelible argument against the pitiless march and corrupting influence of empire.

Translated from the Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar