Read The Maharani of Arakan yourself to decide whether it is (just) ‘A Romantic Comedy’, as George playfully subtitled it, or a ‘Symbolist Mystery Play’ (allegory)! Having re-read it over the weekend, I increasingly feel it’s the latter.
If it is a ‘Romantic Comedy’, I can well understand why one reviewer called it ‘a pleasant little excursion’ and another ‘trite’. But The Times was correct to say of it in 1916 that it ‘has many meanings’, and the TLS awarded it those high Edwardian accolades ‘charming and significant’. The Stage, too, called it ‘full of interest and charm from start to finish’. Everyone seemed to agree that it was magical in performance, with its Indian music and its songs written by Tagore specially.
There is, I have noticed now, a very interesting parallel with The Lamp. Amina, the exiled Mogul princess whose father was killed by the father of Dalia, current King of Arakan, is incited by her sister to kill Dalia with her father’s own dagger because Dalia ‘inherits his father’s guilt’. But Amina objects: ‘His son is innocent. […] Does not the Koran also teach us to forgive? […] Allah did not send me here to die, but to live, to breathe — to love.’ Sentiments very reminiscent of Myrrhina’s in The Lamp (see quotation in post of 3 April).
George was sceptical about the political empowerment of women, as were most British women in his lifetime. But always he believed in their self-fulfilment, in equal opportunities, in women’s need for economic and personal independence. Rather like Chekhov in his later works (Lady with Little Dog, Three Sisters, Betrothed), George focussed in The Fountain, The Maharani of Arakan, and The Lamp, on women’s own identity, vitality, and freedom from oppressive uncaring ideas.
Next entry: 15 April 1915
Related
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George Calderon c.1901
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
‘The Maharani’: A postscript
Read The Maharani of Arakan yourself to decide whether it is (just) ‘A Romantic Comedy’, as George playfully subtitled it, or a ‘Symbolist Mystery Play’ (allegory)! Having re-read it over the weekend, I increasingly feel it’s the latter.
If it is a ‘Romantic Comedy’, I can well understand why one reviewer called it ‘a pleasant little excursion’ and another ‘trite’. But The Times was correct to say of it in 1916 that it ‘has many meanings’, and the TLS awarded it those high Edwardian accolades ‘charming and significant’. The Stage, too, called it ‘full of interest and charm from start to finish’. Everyone seemed to agree that it was magical in performance, with its Indian music and its songs written by Tagore specially.
There is, I have noticed now, a very interesting parallel with The Lamp. Amina, the exiled Mogul princess whose father was killed by the father of Dalia, current King of Arakan, is incited by her sister to kill Dalia with her father’s own dagger because Dalia ‘inherits his father’s guilt’. But Amina objects: ‘His son is innocent. […] Does not the Koran also teach us to forgive? […] Allah did not send me here to die, but to live, to breathe — to love.’ Sentiments very reminiscent of Myrrhina’s in The Lamp (see quotation in post of 3 April).
George was sceptical about the political empowerment of women, as were most British women in his lifetime. But always he believed in their self-fulfilment, in equal opportunities, in women’s need for economic and personal independence. Rather like Chekhov in his later works (Lady with Little Dog, Three Sisters, Betrothed), George focussed in The Fountain, The Maharani of Arakan, and The Lamp, on women’s own identity, vitality, and freedom from oppressive uncaring ideas.
Next entry: 15 April 1915
Share this:
Related