Guest post by SUMANA ROY

A few years ago, I took my students to the cemetery in Darjeeling. I lived in an apartment just above the Happy Valley Tea Estate, from where I saw the prettiest of sunsets, had a colleague point out the ranges of Sandakphu to me quite often, and from whose long narrow balcony I imagined shadows of, as the lingo among Bengalis in Darjeeling went, “Sahib Ghosts”. Apart from the weather, perfect and monstrous in turns, what kept Darjeeling alive to “professors from the plains”, as we were called, was the mythology of “biliti” (“foreign”) ghosts waiting for the appropriate moment to reclaim what they had created – tea-gardens, the schools and colleges, the architecture, the cookies and cakes, the “style”, a word in which we tried to condense the British legacy. We spoke about planchettes, about ghosts we wanted to invite for tea, while history professors debated with political science researchers whether that meeting would be a post-postcolonial one or an anti-postcolonial moment.

I taught Robinson Crusoe to first year students, and while discussing the emergence of the English novel, I inevitably found myself thinking about the many Robinson Crusoes that the Empire must have sent into lonely pockets like Darjeeling and Sikkim two centuries ago. Teaching that novel by Defoe has its own rewards in an old colonial town like Darjeeling: students come up with the most unexpected of questions. Two I love: “Ma’am, how did Crusoe survive so long without a girlfriend or wife?” asked Bishal, he having just found the love of his life. The second was a little less personal: “Ma’am, what if Crusoe had come to the mountains instead of the sea? How different would the novel have been?” There was an element of imaginative truth in Pema’s question – Darjeeling must have been a terribly isolated, and near uninhabited, “island” three hundred and fifty years ago.

It was a question Pema asked me in that cemetery. It had rained the previous night and the soil was loose and muddy. None of us had got any candles. As substitute, one of them began reciting a poem I’d recently taught them: Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.

Would there have been a gravestone for Robinson Crusoe had he died on that island? We had a tiny roll-call of names from the tombstones, but I wanted to look again. “Looking for Robinson Crusoe?” Pema joked. I’d keep the name of my search a secret from them for the time being.

Later, sharing the day over evening tea with my maid, I told her about Louis Mandelli and the cemetery. Arati began cursing her dead father with a refrain in Nepali-English, “ohmygood”. “Mandelli? Are you sure, didi?,” she asked. “Not Mandela, are you sure?” I discovered that many decades ago, her father had been offered a “dollar-wala” salary by a “foreigner” for the simple task of lighting a candle on the gravestone of “Mandelli”. When he told his relatives about the high-paying easy job, they laughed at him: how could he, a fair-skinned Nepali Brahmin light a candle on the gravestone of some black man? “Black man?” I asked. “Yes, black man, that’s what all my uncles told my poor father. Mandela was a black man. African. Famous. This Mandelli who died in Darjeeling must have been that Mandela’s grandfather.” And so Mandelli’s tombstone remained without candles.

But where was this tombstone? I turned to history.

For two years, I’d crossed the cemetery on way from home to work, and in spite of the remnants of fear of spirits that had survived beyond my ghost-fed Bengali adolescence, it had played no immediate role in my imaginative life – only I’d often hear a telephone ring, as if from the depths of the earth, in my early morning sleep. This tintinnabulation was always the sound of birdcall, then my favourite ringtone. Young, lonely, and yet not soothed by human company, I began to watch out for birds in Darjeeling. Only greedy crows came for food on my balcony. I missed the homeliness of sparrows. When I found the time to watch sunsets, I sometimes noticed unfamiliar birds take flight into golden clouded skies. A multicoloured neck, an unusually shaped beak, a dancing tail – my lack of vocabulary made me feel more inadequate in this town than my tentativeness with the local language did. I walked to the Mall one day and ordered a copy of Salim Ali’s The Book of Indian Birds. That book never arrived; in the meantime, other birds made nests in my mind.

Frustrated, a feeling all bibliophiles in provincial towns know, I went to the Deshbandhu District Library nearby. The staff was overwhelmingly polite, this perhaps to compensate for the tiny collection they kept guard over. I asked for books about birds, and they wanted to know what kind of birds I was interested in. An arriviste on the bird-watching scene, I fumbled for an answer: “Darjeeling birds,” I ventured. The attendant, an old man in foggy glasses, whose gestures seemed illiterate to me, gave me a thin yellow book. I only saw these words: “Darjeeling Tea Planter and Ornithologist”. That slim book I read in bed would change the way I would look at birds in Darjeeling forever.

History tells us that Louis, born to Jerome, the son of Count Castel Nuovo, descendent of a Maltese aristocratic family, for reasons unknown beyond rumours of falling out with the Nuovos, took up the name of his mother’s family, “Mandelli”. Born in 1833, he was a boy of fifteen when his father, a Garibaldi enthusiast, returned to Italy in 1848. Disillusioned, the family might have left for England a year later, though this is again in the realm of speculation. “Thacker’s Bengal Directory”, a variant of the yellow pages in nineteenth century colonial India, however, lists the name of a Louis Mandelli in its “Register of Inhabitants” in 1864. How he got to Darjeeling will perhaps never be known except this: “he had landed a contract with the Lebong & Minchu Tea Company as manager of the garden (350 acres) of the same name,” says Fred Pinn, the author ofDarjeeling Tea Planter and Ornithologist. The R. C. Church records show him getting married promptly soon after to an Ann Jones, in all likelihood a Calcutta “girl” (since there is no entry on “Jones” in the Darjeeling resident directory at the time), this on 21st January, 1865. All this follows the familiar a-passage-to-India pattern.

But there is the tea story. In 1868, the Lebong &Minchu garden is taken over by the Land Mortgage Bank of India; a second garden is added to Mandelli’s responsibility. There must have been a downturn in his finances that forces him to move out of Darjeeling to near-deserted Lebong. In 1872, the Chongtong Tea Estate is also put under his management. While the supervision of 1350 acres of tea gardens must have caused a happy swell in his accounts, one that allows his family to move back to Darjeeling (“Mandelli” reappears in the residents’ register once again), it could not have been easy on him, as this letter to his close friend, Anderson, in June 1876 suggests: “I can assure you, the life of a Tea Planter is by far from being a pleasant one, especially this year: drought at first, incessant rain afterwards, & to crown all, cholera among coolies, beside the commission from home to inspect the gardens, all these combined are enough to drive any one mad”. But responsibilities continue to grow. By 1871, he had become part-owner of a tea-garden – “Bycemaree (Silligoree), Proprs. L. Mandelli & W. R. Martin, 70 acres” – and in 1873, of another, with the same partner. This was the Munjha, near Punkabari, which a few years ago produced the world’s most expensive tea. Mandelli sold this one soon after, and bought the picturesque Kyel Tea Estate, which is now known as Marybong Tea Estate, a fact that its present owners highlight on their tea-tourism web link.

While it was tea that brought young Mandelli to Darjeeling, it was neither the gardens nor the beauty of the Himalayas that made him stay back. It was the birds. It was perhaps the zeitgeist, with Darwin’s Origin of Species and Mendel’s experiments with the sweet pea that made botanists and zoologists of European men in the colonies. So as William Edwin Brooks, one of colonial India’s most famous ornithologists, made the North West Provinces of India his home and laboratory, so Mandelli began to think of Darjeeling as his Galapagos Islands. William Lloyd had, a few years ago, donated land for the setting up of the Botanical Gardens in the tiny town. That tract, evidence of the white man’s scientific curiosities that survives in nearly all colonial towns, now bears his name.

That desire to leave behind a name, an inheritance worth a future historian and scientist’s interest, loneliness, the absence of human company besides his immediate family, the lack of a common language, both literal and idiomatic, an affectionate curiosity and a scare quoted anger must have turned his gaze to the skies, to the birds. It was also someone else: Anderson; not John Anderson, the then Director of the National Museum in Calcutta, as had been presumed for a long time, but Andrew Anderson, the recipient of forty eight letters from Darjeeling. For Mandelli sent his boxes of birds to an Anderson in “Futtegarh”, a long distance friendship that continued until the latter’s death in 1878.

With no training or even no love for the science until his posting at Darjeeling, ornithology was anything but a gay science for him. He writes to Anderson: “… ornithological pleasures – then I should say Darjeeling is not your place. The rains are frightful, the dampness horrible & the fog so dense that you cannot see few yards before you … the leeches will eat you alive, besides all other discomforts to go through”. And yet he was generous: his work in the field helped map the Darjeeling belt ornithologically, especially his gifts to museums in Darjeeling, Calcutta, the British Museum in London and the Milan Museum, all on his own expenses.

What endeared Mandelli to me was not his love of birds, not Darjeeling which bound him and me in an ineffable way, but something that is difficult to put in a discourse: a provincial’s anger, the same I found in my students, and later, latent inside so many I met during my travels in the North East. Having grown up on stories about an uncle who had had his PhD dissertation “stolen” by a supervisor and friend in Calcutta, I understood Mandelli’s anger. How difficult it must have been, how utterly frustrating, to see “his” specimens acknowledged in the name of Allan Octavian Hume? How easy is it today, even after the retrospective advantage of history, to call the founder of the Indian National Congress a “thief”? Here is Mandelli to Anderson: “Hume took away one (rare bird) before when I was rather kutcha in ornithology, but he won’t take me in now” (30^th July, 1873). There’s also the man-on-the-field’s anger against the man-in-the-lab, and quite amusingly, in spite of calling the “natives” “rascals” and “humbugs”, he identifies with the “Indian”: “Indian ornithologists see for themselves and all their statements are based on facts, whereas Home Ornithologists base their statements on ‘hypothesis’ only” (19^th August, 1873). The substitutability between Home and Hume exists between the lines. Complaining about the barter economy between Hume and himself, he tells Anderson that in “exchange” for the 5000 birds that he gave Hume, the latter gave him, “in return about 800, the commonest birds in India, 400 of which went down the khud, as they were not worth the carriage …”.

Lord Hume gave an astounding 82,000 specimens to the British Museum, “one of the most splendid donations ever made to the Nation”, says the citation, this by the man who founded the Indian National Congress “to organise an association for the mental, moral, social and political regeneration of the people of India”. Science and its mechanisms of exploitation did not seem to have figured in that pious transaction. Is Mandelli right to make these allegations then? “Yes, Hume is a brute. In fact, I call him a swindler, as far as birds are concerned … he has found out that I am no more his slave subservient to his sneaking and bland manners & hypocritical ways?” Hume, however, did make acknowledgements from time to time, as in his journal, Stray Feathers (1874): “This beautiful species is another that we owe to that indefatigable ornithologist Mr. L. Mandelli”. What else did Mandelli seek besides this then? Was it the Victorian-in-the-colony’s desire for fame, a version of the provincial’s love for the spotlight, that he wanted but never got, not even after his death in 1880, when Hume bought Mandelli’s entire collection?

I decided to tell my students, a few weeks later, that I’d actually gone looking for Louis Mandelli’s tombstone. We hadn’t found it, as I’d expected, near the “celebrities”, the famous Hungarian Indologist Alexander Csoma De Koorosi and George Almer Lloyd among them. There is a reason behind this: there was gossip at around that time that Mandelli, unable to survive the losses to his estate and the bank mortgages, committed suicide, and hence the “Cause of Death Unknown” in the Bishop’s Death Register. While that might have been true, it is also possible that he might have died of slow arsenic poisoning, the arsenic being necessary for curing bird skins.

More than a hundred and twenty five years after his death, when a student brought a Nissim Ezekiel poem, “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher”, on that gradually greying afternoon –

The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing –

birds had begun their journeys back home. It was past four, and days are short in north-eastern hill towns. Mandelli’s grave overlooks the Happy Valley Tea Estate; he died a sad man, always “awfully behind in sending away tea to the market”, dealing with troubled finances, gasping in one letter that “I have now satisfied all my creditors”, complaining of ill health and old age at forty two (“I am getting old very fast”), and perhaps more than anything else, sad like a child in need of attention. He wanted the world to watch him as he “watched the rarer birds”. “Mandelligunge”, the tea garden-residential quarters he set up, might be lost from Google map. But, in the strange way that ornithologists leave behind not just human progeny but surname-bearing birds, Pellorneum Mandelli, a warbler, Arborophila Mandelli Hume, the redbreasted hill partridge, Phylloscopus Inornatus Mandelli Brooks, a willow-warbler, Certhia Mandelli, the tree creeper,Minla Mandelli, the tit-babbler, still fly over Darjeeling.

(Sumana Roy teaches at the Department of Humanities, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College, Her first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008.)