Rani Selvarajah’s novel Savage Beasts takes the story of Medea and reimagines it set in 18th-century India. She tells Historia how she wanted to explore the treatment of women and of foreigners under colonialism; universal themes, both in myth and in history.
I first studied the play Medea at school and was instantly mesmerised by the story of a fascinating and fearless woman who, in the face of injustice, refused to stand down no matter the personal cost.
As imagined by the Ancient Greek playwright Euripides, Medea is an indelible, divisive character that has become one of the most infamous women of Greek myth for her crimes.
To the Greeks, Medea, Princess of Colchis, was a ‘barbarian’ or foreigner. The difference between Greeks and non-Greeks was strongly defined in the eyes of the Athenian audience that would have seen Euripides’ play performed in fifth-century BCE. Twenty years prior to this performance, the Athenian leader Pericles had even passed a law meaning that citizenship was restricted to those of Greek parentage on both sides.
The impetus of the play – Jason’s unceremonious abandonment of Medea to marry the Corinthian princess – would have therefore likely struck a familiar, if possibly uneasy, chord. The unrelenting xenophobia and denigration of Medea, from Jason and others, as well as her position as an exile, underscore the precarity of her position in the play.
It is this intersection of her identity as both a woman and a foreigner that I wanted to explore in Savage Beasts.
The opening of the novel is set in 1757, the year which arguably marked the beginning of Britain’s colonisation of India with the Battle of Plassey.
This saw the defeat of the last independent Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, and conquest of the richest kingdom in India at the hands of a rapacious and unregulated trading company: the East India Company.
Before the years of the British Raj (when Britain ruled India), India was ruled not by a nation but by a private enterprise based in Leadenhall Street in London. The EIC was beholden only to its shareholders, and while they ruled over India their corruption and greed grew to such proportions that a parliamentary inquiry was called in response to public outcry.
Estimates have placed the cost of colonialism to India at £45 trillion. Alongside the financial cost of what was taken, the human costs were incalculable: millions died population died during the 1770 Bengal famine, which is generally seen as caused by the East India Company’s exorbitant taxation policies and agricultural reforms, alongside a poor harvest.
Although the distance between fifth-century Athens and 18th-century British colonialism may seem vast at first, there are more connections than one might at first presume.
As has already been explored by Susan Stokes-Chapman, the Regency period, beginning in the 18th century, saw a great deal of classical influence in fashion, architecture and literature, as well as an explosion in classical archaeology thanks to the Grand Tour.
This, however, also influenced how the British saw themselves in relation to the world. Classical imagery was very popular with the EIC and one can see this as an expression of their imperialist ambitions, as if they were the heirs of the Roman Empire.
These nods to classical Greece and Rome can be seen in the names of EIC ships, such as the Caesar, Ariadne and Argo. They can also be seen in the statues commissioned by the EIC in 1760 to celebrate men who had led military campaigns in India.
In one we can see Robert Clive in Roman military dress, clearly echoing Emperor Augustus in his pose. In the 18th century this statue stood in East India House’s General Courtroom, above merchants and shareholders. Anyone who entered that room would be left in no doubt as to how those depicted saw themselves in relation to those whose lands they plundered for profit.
However, this is not to say that there were no relationships between members of the EIC and people whose land they colonised.
Noor Begum (also known as Halima) married General Benoît de Boigne, a French mercenary who worked for the EIC. They married in Lucknow and had two children before moving to England.
Noor and the children were baptised as de Boigne tried to network within London society. Unfortunately, de Boigne soon felt that Indian wife did not match his ambitions and he left his wife of several years for a 17-year-old French aristocrat, having declared that he and Noor were not legally married under British law. Noor was separated from her children and spent the rest of her life alone until she died in a cottage in Horsham in 56 years later.
In Noor’s story, and so many others, we find the experience of foreign women being unceremoniously abandoned far from home when they proved inconvenient. It was clear to me that such a colonial context made for the perfect setting to retell Medea.
In Medea, translated through my character of Meena, I saw a young woman, in love with a man who came to her shores in search of gold. She is manipulated (by divine forces or otherwise), cannot return home and is later abandoned in a foreign land that is hostile to her once she is no longer of use to the man who once depended so much on her help.
Hers is a story of the colonised, from whom much is taken, only to be discarded and despised. As I thought more about the myth I considered Jason, a young adventurer hoping to improve his status through the acquisition of foreign gold, and it was not hard to read colonial theft into this story.
I wanted to use myth and history to explore one another through this lens of colonialism, to find the complexity and humanity of this most infamous mythical woman, and to examine the brutality of societal structures that other and demonise foreign women.
The charge of savagery is regularly laid at Medea’s feet in the play, yet she is victim of a cruel system intent on dehumanising her. A system that sadly continues to treat migrant women with hostility, leaving them without protection and support
I hope therefore that my book offers greater examination of this and, perhaps, some reflection on how these dehumanising structures in our modern society were formed and continue to exist.
Savage Beasts by Rani Selvarajah is published on 25 May, 2023.
For a fresh take on the stories surrounding Jason, have a look at Jason, the Argonauts – and a Woman? by Emily Hauser
To read more about India under British rule, you may enjoy:
Finding empathy – the complexities of writing Robert Clive by Diana Preston
It’s time to remember Ganga Singh: maharaja, reformer, statesman by Alec Marsh
Unforgettable legacies of the East India Company by Vayu Naidu
Re-examining the history of Empire in fact and fiction by Tom Williams
Partition, politics, and a prime minister’s passion by Vaseem Khan
And for more on classicism in the late 18th century, read Unboxing Pandora’s myth – in Georgian London by Susan Stokes-Chapman, another reimagining of a myth.
Images:
- Medea by Frederick Sandys, 1866–68: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Lord Clive meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey by Francis Hayman, c1760: Wikimedia (public domain)
- India House: The Sale Room by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808 (showing statues very similar to the one of Clive): Wikimedia (public domain)
- Major William Palmer with his second wife, the Mughal princess Bibi Faiz Bakhsh by Johann Zoffany, 1785, showing Noor standing far right: British Library, F597 via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Medea in Corinth, about to kill her son, painted on an Apulian red figured volute krater by The Underworld Painter, c330–310BC: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
