#33,
Of Epigrammatology (4)
The Unreliable Informant
He is an English man
For he himself has said it
And it’s greatly to his credit…
for despite all temptations
to belong to other nations
he is an English man
Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Pirates of Penzance”
Now, anyone who knows anything about Gilbert and Sullivan knows that this is not the “Pirates of Penzance,” but is rather “H.M.S. Pinafore.” It is such an elementary mistake, that it is curious that I should have made it in my last book, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History. Needless to say, the mistake was deliberate. Here’s why I did it.
The essay in which this epigram was used was entitled “Beyond Silly Mid-off: C.L.R. James, Ranjitsinhji, and the Boundaries of Englishness.” This title itself may need explaining for those uninitiated in the splendors of English cricket (though I could probably count myself one since I haven't played the game in over 35 years and haven’t watched it in ten). The position of silly mid-off is one extremely close to the bat, and a fielder (the mid-off, akin to a shortstop) is positioned there only when the fielding team is pretty confident that the batter is going to give up a catch and is unlikely to be able to make a big hit off the bowling. This can be somewhat insulting to the batter, so often the response of that same batter is to move down the wicket and take an almighty swing at the ball, very much endangering the welfare state of the silly mid-off. C.L.R. James is the author, among a host of other things, of the most cited sports history text, Beyond a Boundary. One of the arguments he makes in this work is that cricket was not merely something the English imposed on those they colonized – an opiate or a mechanism for social control; it also became a medium through which, and the idiom in which the colonized turned the ideology of the colonizer on its head. While there is no denying the power and persuasiveness of his text, my article endeavored to suggest that even the most subtle of theorists could not step beyond the boundaries of empire, but rather continually found him or herself fielding at silly-mid-off again.
A key element
in this argument was the manner in which the cricketer Ranjitsinhji was deployed
in Beyond a Boundary and the way
in which South Asians in the Caribbean were written out of the story. The section on Ranjitsinhji, in particular,
endeavored to suggest that the very Englishness of cricket could be considered
in many respects a confection created by this Indian Prince. This was the section that used the words from
this particular Gilbert and Sullivan song as its epigraph. For, interestingly, there is something very
imperial about the words of this song; Englishness is up for grabs here.
There is choice. Though, of
course, Gilbert is suggesting that to be English is the right choice, one
that Indians and Africans might want to consider (rather than following the
nationalist example provided by the Americans), and also a better one than
opting for being German, French, Japanese, or another imperial identity.
Ranjitsinhji certainly made this choice, playing cricket for
But the words
of the song are also quintessentially English and, along with the rest of
the work (that old oily cart) written by these two men, they are often thought
of when people think of Victorian Britain.
To get them wrong, both in the wording (should it not be: “in spite
of all temptation”, which scans better?) and in the attribution, is nigh on
criminal – especially for an Englishman. But
as Salman Rushdie suggests in his essay on unreliable narration in Midnight’s Children, such things are important as ways of “deflating
that narrational pomposity,” and can serve as “a way of telling the reader
to maintain a healthy distrust.” For,
and we should end with Rushdie: