On the Face of the Waters and Below:

The Significance of India’s Rivers in the Fiction of Flora Annie Steel

Abstract

Rivers have always been of immense practical and cultural importance to human civilisation. Control of rivers is therefore of considerable strategic value to invading or colonising forces. This was especially true in British India, which was home to many rivers, including the Ganges, which has been central to Indian culture for millennia (Sen). In “The Bridge Builders,” Rudyard Kipling celebrates the way British technology not only bridges the Ganges, but forces Mother Gunga and the rest of the Hindu pantheon to submit to British mastery of the land and its people. For Flora Annie Steel, however, British technology does not tame India’s waterways nor force Mother Gunga to accept British sovereignty. Instead, managing the rivers is a continual effort, and one that is not always successful. More importantly, in Steel’s fiction rivers are meeting places, where West and East come together with vastly different understandings. In the short story “Lal,” Steel’s first published work of fiction, the unnamed river seems to mock British endeavours to chart its banks and levels, while giving the eponymous, enigmatic, and potentially non-existent Lal everything he needs. On the banks of the river, the anonymous narrator of “Lal” meets the people of India and recognises the divide in understanding between himself and them. In Steel’s novels rivers often become sites of contest where the struggle between Anglo-Indian officials and Hindu priests to control the flow of the water reflects broader discourses around rational, materialist progress, and the misuses and abuses of organised religion. Ultimately, as in “Lal,” the rivers in Steel’s novels determine their own courses despite the efforts of humans. Analogously, for Steel, India’s people and their beliefs flow around those who attempt to lead them and remain an enigmatic force to be governed but never understood.