TWO INDIAN TRAGEDIES.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1913, 22 November 1913, Page 9

TWO INDIAN TRAGEDIES.

, Kipling's famous saving, "For East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," will be recalled by- most readers of two recent novels, each .dealing .with:-that essentially-ugly .subject—sexual relationships ; . between Eglishwom'en and Indian mc/r. In "The Daughter-in-Law," by , E. W. Savi (Hurst and Black'ett; per Whitcorabe and Tombs), the heroine, an innocent and rather sjlly English girl,' tho daughter of still more foolish parents— the father is a-country clergyman— Uiarries a Hindu lawyer, Hurri Mohuu I)ey, being at the time blissfully unaware that the oily, persuasive scamp has a leper wife living in India.- The horrors of her. existence as the wife of a babu, behind the purdah, are. depicted with unrelenting realism. In the end she is fortunate enough to be freed from a life which bad become- unspeakably loathsome, but many Englishwomen are, it is. notorious, less fortunate. Some slight relief of humour is provided by tho unhappy girl's Hindu . mother-in-law, and the manner in which the most intimfte details of life behind ' tho purdah have ' been ropvodxicod by tho author, is singularly convincing. Tho. story, as a whole, makes rather painful reading. "The Lure of the Little Drum," by Margaret I'ate.rson ■ (Andrew Mclroso; .per Geprgo Robertson' and Co.), was seiecied by Messrs. ..W. J. Locke, and Joseph Conrad, and Miss Cholmondeley, as the'prize-winner (prize £250),' in a "best novel" competition initiated by tho-publisher. If "The ~Daiighter-in-Law" makes painful reading, still more so does; Miss Patorson's story. Again we have an English girl beguiled by an Indian, but in this instance the girl is the newlv-hiarricd wife of a young English officer, whom she deliberately leaves to become an inmate of the . harem. of a young Indian prince, Johaq Khan, the ruler ol a small native tributary. State.. \ Isafj Khan has been educated at Oxford, but- "behind his European polish lay. the subtle native mind." He had all 'the vices of a, long line of vicious ailccstors, and ovon. ahiougst his own subjects had ' an evil reputation. In ■ the girl there is a strain of inherited moral weakness, for the mother, though of decent birth, had drifted into the ranks of the demimonde. The prince exercises over, the lovely, though weakwilled Esther, a powerfully mesmeric influence, and in a moment of: weakness, recognised, by the victim herself to be such; she iistcni wee again to his sensuous love-making, and succumbs. . The rest is almost too painful to tell, for* the lover all too speedily becomes a fiendishly brutal tyrant, and although in the end the. poor woman is lucky enough to escape being poisoned, .the fate of a previous white inmate of Ishaq's harem, her ■freedom- is rapidly followed by her death, and that of her newly-born babe, the son' of her soldier husband, who, so the author ingeniously contrives, has been under the impression that his wife had died in a fow hours front cholera A secondary interest in tho story is afforded- by Ishaq's participation in a plot to overthrow the British rule, and the' novel possesses some well-drawn native characters. The leading motif of tile slnry, tho passionate attachment of a white woman for a coloured man — and such a man I —is decidedly unpleasant. But poor Esther AVilliams was. it may be feared, fated to moral and social ruin, even bad she nover met her over-fascinating but unscrupulous and wantonlv cruel prince. The nativo characters, tiotahly I!a Chandra, a fanatic, but an honest fanatic, are strongly drawn, and the- British Resident at the Court of Bhopul is a figure worthy of a place in tho portrait gallery of Flora

Annie Steel, or even the great Kipling himself.