Forgotten Revolutions: A debut novelist turns her family history into political drama

Having met a few Muslims, Madhusudan Chandra Joshi has formed an idea of who they are. Amir Farooqui, a fellow traveller on his ship, is modern and English in speech and dress—Madhusudan takes him for a man easy about his faith. Then comes the morning of Eid. Madhusudan wakes before dawn, restless, and walks to the front deck to find it filled with men in white, rising and bowing as one— including Amir. He has been at sea a week and is already wrong about the one man he thought he had worked out.

The Imitation Englishman, Devki Pande’s debut novel, is about people who are not what they first seem. It’s also about Indians who were in Europe during World War I for reasons other than soldiering and who found the war arrived in their lives anyway. More than a million Indians served overseas; the trenches, the hospitals and the memorials feature their historians. The men who inspire Pande’s story have had fewer chroniclers.

It is 1916. Madhusudan is a young clerk at the District Courts headed to Heidelberg to study law. Amir is a revolutionary who keeps his business to himself and code-switches depending on who he is speaking to. Madhusudan is drawn into the Hindu-German Conspiracy, a gun-running plot for Indian freedom organised by Indians living in exile. It plays out on several stages across the world, and the novel follows it through India, Germany, Britain and the US.

The conspiracy is history. In the first years of the war, Indian nationalists in Berlin and on the American West Coast, many of them linked to the Ghadar Movement in San Francisco, looked to Germany for money and weapons to arm an uprising against the British. You don’t need a history degree to follow the plot. Madhusudan is learning the politics as he goes.

As the war closes in, Indian troops under British command begin fighting Germans and Heidelberg is no longer open to either man. Amir goes to San Francisco to find fellow revolutionaries. Madhusudan heads to London for studies where he enounters the racism and inequality of the colonial order at close range. The title begins to make sense.

The Imitation Englishman is rooted in its author’s family history. Pande’s great-grandfather, Padmadutt Pande, left Almora in 1916 to study law at the University of Heidelberg, and found the revolution he thought he had left behind in India. In 2019, a grant took Devki Pande to Heidelberg where she sat at the Red Ox, a pub her great-grandfather would have known, and ate what he would have eaten: cured fish, potatoes and beer. A photograph of him as a young man, drinking tea with a cousin in Oxford, is lost now.

Madhusudan is ambitious and his political awareness grows with each city he passes through. Social mannerisms do not come easily to him and knives and forks prove harder to master than law. The pressure is on him to become someone acceptable in a world that does not regard him as an equal.

It’s an odd position. Madhusudan is a subject of the British Empire, studying in Germany while Indian soldiers fight Germans in Europe and Africa. The novel rests on that contradiction, and on the choices Indians were forced to make in a period of global upheaval. Pande’s novel takes up a corner of the freedom struggle that fiction seldom visits. What becomes of a clerk who sets out for a law degree and ends up in the middle of a war he was not meant to fight is the question it is built on.