The Kidnapping of Mark Twain

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Publishing Private Limited

Pages: 344

he Kidnapping of Mark Twain is a delightful, nicely flowing mystery by the versatile Anuradha Kumar. As the title suggests, the plot, if not all, revolves around the kidnapping of the famous American writer, Mark Twain, well-known for his trip to British India in the 1890s, partly to find material for his future prose projects. Just as Kurosawa uses the kidnapping of the child of a tycoon’s servant to explore the underbelly of Tokyo, the author of the mystery under review employs a similar device to expose layers of an emerging new cosmopolitan centre under British colonial rule. Applying a quick scanner, the story appears simple and rather straightforward. Our lovable, mild-mannered protagonist, Henry, the American consul, is smitten by a mixed-race Indian woman, Maya Barton, a multi-talented person who’s into art and magic and has a a detective’s eye.

Things thicken up right off the bat. Prior to the kidnapping of Mark Twain, there occurs the murder of a woman, Cassi, the second wife of a labour activist. Manuel, real name Manu, belonging to the lowest castes of Hinduism, is introduced and then murdered towards the end. There’s the theft of jewellery, too, complicating the plot. The disappearance of Mark Twain is followed by the entry of the enigmatic missionary Arthur Peace, who entices Mark Twain into ingesting opium to experience its ill effects on man and society. The author hints at the connectedness of things in a big city where evil and good are sometimes two sides of the same coin. Arthur Peace grows opium in his backyard along with vegetables while Mark Twain flips flops between whether he was kidnapped or he went along voluntarily. Opium is also used by factory workers, if I remember the plot correctly, and is given to children as well so they can doze off longer to let their mothers work prolonged hours. Although the author, while introducing an interesting cast of characters, from a German filmmaker to a Serbian musician to Parsis businessmen and Muslims and Hindus serving Americans and, of course, British, refrains from mentioning Iraqi Jews who monopolised the opium business, displacing the Parsis, in British India under the protection of the Empire. Nonetheless, she highlights its negative effects on the Indian society.

What Anuradha Kumar has done in this book goes beyond a standard mystery. There are elements of thriller and suspense along with romance and, above all, social critique, most obvious in the words of Manuel. Those who have followed Anuradha Kumar’s evolution as a writer know that her interest in history, especially Indian history, is deep. That interest is the reason why she has recreated a section of Bombay at the end of the 19th Century. But for this reviewer, the real joy was the language itself, not too literary, not too pedestrian. She also avoids ‘deceptively simple’ prose. She carefully captures the English of the time, spoken by people of varied backgrounds. Nowhere does it sound awkward or stilted when exchanges occur between white folks and natives or when the natives speak among themselves. There is no incident, as per my memory, that would beckon a charge of neo-orientalism too. She paints the Bombay of a particular time with a concise focus and consciously refrains from explaining complexities and/ or subtleties of a native culture, a practice quite in vogue today among many South Asian writers writing in English.

As the title suggests, the plot, if not all, revolves around the kidnapping of the famous American writer, Mark Twain, well-known for his trip to British India in the 1890s, partly to find material for his future projects. 

The structure of the book is balanced between the ‘abduction’ of Mark Twain and the two murders, even if the title tilts the scale towards the thrill that comes from the anticipated rescue mission for Mark Twain. The reader unconsciously knows that the celebrated author cannot be killed (a minor weakness in the plot) because that would catapult the novel in a totally different direction/ genre and the first few pages assure the reader of the direction the author has taken. By the end of the novel, what lingers in the reader’s mind are the two murders and the mystery elements surrounding the narrative. Although the reader learns who the murderers are, the way the author manipulates the ending, ‘who the murderers are’ turns into ‘who the murderers might be.’ Anuradha Kumar very cleverly steps back from the actual delivering of justice. Instead, she posits the note of hope that justice might bring the culprits to its rightful end. By doing so, she wants the reader to reconsider the popularised notion of British justice.

The characters and situations we create in a novel often acquire symbolic contours. In late 1890s, not many could’ve foreseen the end of the British Empire. Yet All India Congress had been established in 1885 with its inaugural session taking place in India. It might’ve been a good addition to have created a couple of Indian characters belonging to higher echelons of power engaged in challenging the British politically. Finally, I cannot shake off the fact that both the murdered and the murderers were native Indians, not British. That runs the risk of resetting the notion of barbaric natives or noble savages. A similar oversight occurs in Sonora Jha’s otherwise fine novel The Laughter, which has the distinction of creating a credible, dynamic Muslim law professor and campus activist the students look up to, only to have her shot by a stupid old white man, for whom her creation simply serves to ignite long dormant passions. Minor irritant aside, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain is a pleasure to read, written with measured strokes of intelligence and imagination.

The writer is a librarian and lecturer in San Francisco. His last book was A Footbridge to Hell Called Love. His novella Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams is due in December 2023