Hopkins also has another interest – progress. These statuettes do play a role in this book but not as an inspiration to the natives. He is independently wealthy and at his own expense has statuettes made of the literary great and good, including Shakespeare, Keats and Voltaire, and shipped out to India, to inspire the natives. Hopkins has the idea that other British people had, that of civilising the natives. He is a married but his wife is unwell, not least because she had a child who had died recently, and she has to leave shortly before the main action starts. We would consider him as a decent British Victorian man. Krishnapur, like other towns in British India, is run by a man known as a collector. Indeed, he is an effete poet and the heroine is certainly not initially attracted to him, though it does, more or less, conform to the other aspects. This genre had long since run its course but Farrell revives it for this novel though, as with the rest of the novel and the other two Empire novels, he subverts it. In India the historical situation is already ripe for mutiny, and the lovers are suddenly pitched into the upheaval. The hero, who is an officer, meets the young charming lady, just out from England, or who happens to be in India from before, and falls in love or both come to India in the same ship, and strike a liking on board the ship itself.
In his introduction to this novel, Pankaj Mishra points out that there is a minor genre of novel known as the mutiny novel. Most (though certainly not all) of the British were complacent about events in Meerut and elsewhere and this is certainly the case in this novel. The Indian Rebellion (often known as the Indian Mutiny) was taking place, having started at Meerut. Krishnapur is a fictitious place but this story is clearly based on The Siege of Lucknow of 1857. As the title indicates, this one is set in India. This is the second in Farrell’s Empire trilogy and he continues his post-colonial mockery of the British Empire, its exponents and its values, while not being adverse to mocking everyone else from colonisers to colonised.
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