Sculpting the Elephant is part located in Oxford where I live, especially in the former industrial and working class areas of Jericho and St Thomas’s but is set when Jericho was gentrifying and the Oxford Rock scene had started to transform the district. I devised a Sculpting the Elephant walk of interesting landmarks .Sculpting the Elephant Walk leaflet
The other half is in India. I can write about it with authenticity because of my Indian born husband. Atam was born near Lahore in what is now Pakistan, so was a refugee thanks to the world’s biggest ethnic cleansing engineered by the imperial power that was the UK.
It is possible to read Sculpting the Elephant as a moving love story and ignore the historical subplot but I hope the latter grips readers. I invented a Victorian polymath, Bartholmew Carew. Bartholomew leaves for India believing in the colonial myths but, as an open minded and curious man, he is soon disillusioned with the Raj. But his saving grace is that he works for the Great Trigonometrical Survey – the nineteenth century equivalent of the endeavour to get into space in the C20th! The inspirational thing about this 70 year long project to map the whole of India including the Himalayas is that the Indians and Brits who worked together respected each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-C5CQz-PKg&feature=youtu.be
The reason our country looks the way it does is because of Empire and it is not taught enough in schools or universities. We can’t properly understand this country without knowing about the British Empire. In my memoir,
I explain immigration from the Commonwealth – we are here because you were there.
I don’t believe in sweeping away the horrors of empire, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Opium Wars, the massacres and the hasty departure from India using the army to protect the leaving British but not to police partition. Neither do I believe in stereotyped narratives. Life isn’t like that – its messy.
Even after recounting the terrible consequences of our former imperial rule, the predominant tone in India is of sadness. They talk of the English language, the cities of Mumbai (Bombay), Chennai (Madras) and Kolkata (Calcutta) founded by the Raj, the railways, the law and cricket as positive legacies but criticise our hypocrisy that we ignore the massacres, the racism, famines and economic exploitation.
Rarely talked about either in the UK or in India is the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Dr Jim Bennett of the Museum of the History of Science pointed me in that direction for my Victorian polymath character. Put simply the mapping of India was one of the greatest scientific achievements of the C19. Measuring the Himalayas with heavy C19 equipment meant it was an achievement of human endurance too.
I want my books to reflect how each human being is unique. In my opinion, we need to connect and judge each other on our individual behaviour and not on stereotypes! I don’t want to be labelled by association with the British government. I’ve done everything I can think of to say NOT IN MY NAME, disagreeing with my government’s support arming and giving intelligence to Israel but the media and politicians often want to stereotype the inhabitants of a country by the acts of their governments. Our politicians need to distinguish between PATRIOTISM and NATIONALISM The former is love of one’s country but the latter is my country right or wrong and is dangerous.
In the story of the British in India this survey is a great and often forgotten achievement of Indians and Brits working together -it also defined the country we know as India.
The Hollywood actor, Kundan Khan, made a fabulous audiobook of Sculpting the Elephant. Unfortunately Essential Audiobooks went out of business before it could be put on audible. I’m hoping to remedy that in 2026.
He was present at the launch of my memoir at the Nehru Centre in Mayfair.
