Jocelyn Cullity's Amah and the Silk-Winged PigeonsReviewed by Amy Mitchell
This is a beautiful and horrifying book. Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons is meticulously researched and focuses on the events that led to the 1857 bloodbath in Lucknow. While this tragedy contributed to the end of the East India Company’s repressive reign in India (replaced by the direct colonial control of the British Government with its own myriad of sins), and thus has significant historical importance, it is an event with which I suspect most readers will not be familiar, myself included. This book is far more than a necessary history lesson, however; it is also a journey into the lost scents, tastes and textures of a cosmopolitan and richly cultured society, and an elegy for that loss.
Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons does an impressive job of resurrecting Lucknow just before the East India Company bulldozed through portions of northern India. The ethnic, cultural and religious diversity all contributed to an artistic and educated city that was an important site for travellers, businesspeople, artists and writers from Asia, Europe and North Africa, alongside members of the subcontinent’s own diverse communities. In this novel, we see characters who read both Persian and Arabic poetry, and who also enjoy Shakespearean plays. There is rich culinary diversity, and a joyful embrace of each religion’s festivals—Lucknow’s citizens are happy to celebrate both Hinduism’s Diwali and Islam’s Eids, for example. When it becomes apparent that Lucknow is in the devouring crosshairs of the East India Company, community representatives hold an unofficial summit to address the situation; attendees include Hindu, Sunni, Sufi, Parsee [Zoroastrian], and Jewish adherents. The first three-quarters of the novel luxuriate in the details of this profoundly cosmopolitan location. Consider the following description of making and serving tea: |
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From an urn, the vendor pours well-water that sparkles like diamonds. He boils the clear water in a silver pot over a ruby fire and cuts emerald-green limes with sugar and lets the mixture steep. Then he offers these diamonds, rubies, and emeralds to Amah, and she brings them to her lips, slips them into her mouth, and holds them in her cheeks to protect them before letting them slide down her throat. The steam that rises from the cup dampens her nose and cheeks, and the steam from the chai-wallah’s silver pot twirls like flutes in the air, like the twirling flutes that once carried Persian and Arabic melodies all the way here, steam rising high as the heads of Ethiopian women who would travel high seas.
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Amah herself is a palace guard from Ethiopian descent, a black woman who wields rifles and intelligence just like her male peers. She is young, and she loves Lucknow fiercely. The city’s details are “diamonds, rubies and emeralds” for the reader, as well.
The novel takes its time to build to the climactic tragedy, which mirrors the tense-yet-slow rate of news and communication in the nineteenth century. As the characters wait to find out how bad it will be and whether their resistance will work, the reader continues to be immersed in the literal and metaphorical wealth of Lucknow, to the point that I found myself irrationally hoping that Lucknow would somehow escape its eventual baptism by fire, despite the fact that this devastation is history and thus will inevitably happen. The ultimate effect is that, while the novel certainly drives home the brutality of what occurred, it goes beyond this level (which few historical novels really do) and drives viscerally home the incalculable loss that the world experienced when Lucknow as it was then ceased to exist. It never did succeed in rebuilding its richness. The novel also wrestles head-on with the difficult question of what to do in the face of profound, crushing injustice. India is the land of Gandhi, after all, and the apocalyptic events towards the end of the book clearly point towards his way of non-violent resistance as the only tenable option. If ever there was an argument for the legitimacy of violent resistance, India certainly had one in the face of the East India Company, which destroyed lives, communities, wealth, and infrastructure (one of the first things the Company does in Lucknow is stop paying sanitation workers and other maintenance personnel, with filthy and predictable results; they also wreck the drainage systems). The English committed atrocities, and surely violence is warranted under these circumstances. However, the novel very carefully depicts the cycle of violence that erupts as a result, an ever-increasing feedback loop of blood, outrage and horror. Disenfranchised and traumatized Indians commit their own atrocities in revenge, which then further amplify the violence of the English, and so on until there is no longer any possibility of resolution beyond that imposed by whoever is ultimately most powerful, and the human cost in the meantime is unendurable. Amah herself, in a typical young person’s fashion, is initially impatient to strike back against the English, and is frustrated by her superior’s insistence on watching, waiting, being courteous, and documenting injustices. By the end of the novel, however, Amah has been a firsthand witness to the bloody devastation, has seen her friends tortured to death and brutally executed, and has herself killed. Violence becomes repugnant to her: |
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Amah goes straight to the Gomti [River] and takes off her black clothing. In her trousers and red jacket, she kneels in the water, turns her back for good on death-dealing violence, and prays alone in the dawn. Her heavy head falls down in the water like it is made of stone.
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In the end, she and a few of her friends simply leave.
The silk-winged pigeons of the title are rare and expensive birds that were originally purchased by the Awadh royal family and later auctioned off by the English. When the violence is at least temporarily over, Amah enters the building in which East India Company members and their families have been recently under siege, and finds the silk-winged pigeons almost dead from starvation and neglect. She enlists the help of passing boys who find some of Lucknow’s pigeon trainers, and they all carefully tend to the birds: |
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Together they fill the bowls with water, tear the chapati into tiny bits and offer it to the birds. Together they kneel. They do what the learned men tell them, and they coax the birds with soft words as they dip their fingers in the water and rub it on the pigeons’ beaks; when the birds open their mouths just a little, they pop in crumbled chapati the size of tiny diamonds. A low thrumming starts in the breasts of the birds, in the breasts of everyone kneeling there. The boys and the men and Amah pray that the pretty pigeons will grow strong, fly high over Lucknow, their silk wings glinting in the sun, their coloured breasts bursting with calm, the good birds free to find and return to old, cherished homes.
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The pigeons become a symbol of fragile resilience—they embody the richness of old Lucknow, and they themselves are almost lost. They aren’t quite lost entirely, however, and while the reader senses that they will never return to their former prominence, they are still there, and there is some beauty in simply remaining.
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Amy Mitchell is a founding editor here at The Temz Review and a professor at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide variety of fiction, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.
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