Set in 1878 in colonial India, White Elephant follows Aiden Byrne, a young Irish police officer in the service of the British Raj.
Aiden is given an administrative role in Madras, where, during a great famine, he witnesses the beating of two ice house workers by an Indian overseer. The overseer claims they have failed to report for work. He says they are criminals and that he has the right to punish them.
Aiden, at this point a man loyal to the crown, halts the man’s whip and orders him to help the labourers from the ground. The overseer refuses. They are of the untouchable caste. It is simply not possible for him to touch them. Disgusted by this but unsure what to do, Aiden orders that the labourers be escorted back to the ice house.
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When he later discovers that the labourers never returned to work, nor to their homes in the poorest part of the city, Aiden launches an investigation which draws him into the lives of labourers, missionaries and Indian reformers.
He witnesses the devastation caused by the famine, the brutality of caste discrimination and the indifference of the colonial administration. He gradually realises that the ice house incident is not an isolated atrocity but part of a wider system in which imperial wealth depends on invisible suffering.
There is a scene early in the novel where his father, a quiet man, asks him if he knows the history of his name. He says, “We are descendants of Leinster’s King Bran Mac Máelmórda. This, right here, is our country. The nation of Ireland. You, on the other hand, are going to war on behalf of Britain.” Though this tension of being Irish and “fighting” for the British is mostly left unresolved, it does permeate the way Aiden begins to recognise his own complicity in the machinery of colonialism.
Readers looking for a tightly plotted historical thriller may find the narrative deliberately patient. Jeyamohan is more interested in accumulation than suspense, allowing the world to emerge gradually.
A big novel, with big questions, White Elephant is humanist at its core and concerned deeply with the lives of those lost and destroyed by the empire.
Dean Fee is a writer and editor
