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(ARCHIVE) Vol. XX No. 15, November 16-30, 2010
The Lilliputians in Madras
(By Geeta Doctor)

The story of a group of child performers from Australia whose Indian tour was a saga of travail.

India Dark* is an imaginative reconstruction of an ill-fated tour by an Australian theatrical venture that really did happen. It is an extraordinary saga of survival and near-tragedy about a troupe of very young children, known as the Lilliputian Opera Company, who were forced to tramp around the Indian sub-continent from Australia in the early years of the 20th Century. They were under the authority of an entrepreneur manager, who was catering to the demands of the ruling British elite who longed to be entertained with vaudeville in the manner of those living in London, Paris and New York. That they strutted their stuff, while masquerading as sexy nymphets, only made them more of a sensation.

Kirsty Murray, who is from Melbourne, describes herself as a person who loves “books, stories and people” from different parts of the world where she has lived. This is her tenth book. She describes how she took the bare bones of the story of a failed theatrical troupe with 29 children between the ages of seven and eighteen, all of whom had been promised a two-year world tour which started falling apart almost at once when they began to tour the sub-continent.

The crisis came to a head when they reached Madras by way of Calcutta, Allahabad, Lucknow, Bombay, Pune, Bangalore and even Kolar that had a sizeable group of English and Anglo-Indian people living there managing not just the gold mines, but the railway too. It was in Madras that one of the girls, Tilly, was able to finally get the authorities to file charges against the Manager (known here as Arthur Percival), a lecherous drunk, who clearly failed to keep his end of the bargain when the money ran out and the older members began to despair as they battled with disease, the death of an infant, who had to be buried in the ‘Gora Cemetery’ in Allahabad, and the harrowing conditions of travelling and billeting in a strange country.  As the author writes in an afterword, “In the months that followed, the children attempted to earn their fares back to Australia while complicated legal proceedings raged in the High Court of Madras.”

Murray tells the story through the eyes of two of the young girls, Tilly Sweetrick, who is 15 when we first meet her, and Poesy Swift, who starts off as a stage-struck 13-year-old. There are moments when you are reminded of Rumer Godden, that superb writer on children left to cope on their own against a harsh world dominated by uncaring adults, often set in the India of the late Raj era. Like Rumer Godden, Murray describes both the innocence and the cunning with which the children negotiate their way through their relationships with each other, both off-stage and in the boarding houses and hotels where they stay during the shows. The increasing horror of their situation as the money stops coming in and their acts becoming more and more desperate also reminds one of an old Paul Gallico story about a circus foundering in Spain, leading to some of the animals having to be killed by their desperate trainers to feed the others. Just as in Gallico’s Love, Let me not Hunger, there cannot be a happy ending to such a harrowing tale.

For all that, the children still manage to be enormously resilient. For readers in Madras there is an added interest. Murray has managed to re-create a vivid portrait of Madras society as it used to be in the early 20th Century. Some of it is of course vintage ‘exotic India’ of naked fakirs and magicians but, even here, she allows us to see a magician perform the famous Indian trick of growing a mango out of a dry mango seed that he has planted in a pot of fresh earth and the even trickier one of a little boy who climbs into a basket and is repeatedly stabbed with bloodied swords, only to emerge laughing at the end. We see these acts through the eyes of Poesy, who is a sensitive child filled with moral ambiguities just as Tilly is the more scheming one determined to thwart their minders and get back home to Australia.

Poesy even manages to stumble into a meeting at the Theosophical Society at Adyar where Annie Besant is holding forth. There she notices the young Jiddu Krishnamurti, with his “beautiful doe’s eyes” standing close to Mrs. Besant. As it happens, Poesy had once been taken by her grandmother to a lecture by Mrs. Besant in Australia. Poesy describes the extraordinary effect that Mrs. Besant’s words have on her when she speaks of the importance of Truth.

 Murray records one of Mrs. Besant’s famous utterances: “Truth may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her, she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay me, yet I will trust her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb, but ‘She tried to follow the truth’.” She also describes through Poesy’s ears the effect of Mrs. Besant’s personality on her audience. “Mrs. Besant spread her arms wide, as if to embrace the audience. When she spoke, her voice was like a song. It rang out across the hall.” This reminds us of one of the strange features that others have observed about Annie Besant. “When she began to speak,” they said, “she seemed to grow in size and fill the space around her.”

There are also some very poetic images of the Lilliputians performing at the Adyar Club (now, of course, the Madras Club) where the organisers had created a floating platform on the river, with lights hanging from the trees and the audience sitting in rows at the water’s edge. This reminded this reviewer of a theatrical performance that took place on the open terrace of the Club in the early 1960s with an all-Caucasian cast. It was Noel Coward’s South Sea Bubble and one feature of the show was that a special stage of bamboo and palm leaf had been built behind the audience, so half-way through we had to turn around and watch the action that took place in the bamboo bar, before turning round again.

There are also very interesting references to the old Victoria Hall (which is being renovated now, perhaps to its ancient glory) as a premier venue for entertainment, to the Moore Pavilion where boxing matches used to take place, and to the hotel with a roof-top restaurant where again the Lilliputians led by Tilly performed thanks to the efforts of the owner, a “Darling Corsican” named Mr. Giacomo d’Angelis.

It is worth reading the book just for these tantalising peeps into the past. And should you wonder where Kirsty Murray found her references, here is what she says: “His (S. Muthiah’s) extensive writings on the history of Madras/Chennai were pivotal in helping me imaginatively visit India in 1910.”

It might be India Dark but it’s Chennai de-light!


* India Dark by Kirsty Murray. (Allen and Unwin).


In this issue

The Three Woes of
the City's heritage
The Most Vulnerable Road-user
The accounts chief –
& the maths genius
The Lilliputians in Madras
At last, a unified transport authority
Other stories

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