The game is afoot: Assollant’s Captain Corcoran finally reaches Indian bookstores

At home, Assollant’s descent into obscurity owed to principled tactical imprudence — he chose the wrong side. Fiercely Republican, he wrote against the regime of Napoleon III, which made it impossible for him to work for the government. He tried to make a living from books, and churned out one every year for ever, but only Captain Corcoran was a success. He died in penury and obscurity, though he was buried in Pere Lachaise, perhaps the world’s most visited cemetery, where he shares hallowed turf with Moliere, Chopin, Rossini, Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde, Bellini and, most famously, Jim Morrison.

Assollant never visited India, like his much-admired cultural heir HRF Keating, who churned out nine novels featuring Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay Police without even setting eyes on the Gateway. That spectacular run, starting with The Perfect Murder (1964, made into a Mechant-Ivory film), ended when he did come to India. Thereafter, apparently, he found it harder to write Inspector Ghote books — a fine instance of travel constricting the mind.

Keating got away with it because by his time, there was ample material for armchair travellers, and writers who wanted to conjure up locations they had never set eyes on. Assollant didn’t enjoy that good fortune, and may have relied on contemporary European yarns and classical authors like Pliny. And so he has anomalies like an encounter with a rhinoceros in central India. He places his hero in the company of a Prince Holkar, which would have been a reasonable choice for a slightly earlier time, when the Maratha confederacy had deployed troops across the subcontinent and threatened Calcutta. They were natural partners of the French, who were trying to emerge as a countervailing force in Asia. One of modern Kolkata’s busiest roads was once known as the Maratha Ditch, a fortification intended to break the momentum of enemy cavalry and impede the movement of gun carriages. But Miller writes that by the time of the Rising, the Holkars supported the British. And therefore, they should have earned Assollant’s displeasure.

Apart from the British, Assollant was presciently suspicious of the Germans. But he was quite even-handed in his dealings with all nationalities, even his own. The book opens with a withering account of a boring afternoon in the Academy of Sciences in Lyon, where a savant had put the entire faculty to sleep by reading from “the shorter version of his Collected Works, telling them about his research on the subject of the footprints left in the dust by the left legs of a hungry spider.”

Into this haven of arcane somnolence, one day in 1857, steps a 25-year-old Captain Corcoran, bearing a revolver and a dirk, and amazes the savants by speaking effortlessly in English, Hindustani and Sanskrit, and calling for a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in case anyone needs an exegetical rendering. And at his call appears a royal Bengal tigress, aged five, who will travel with him in search of an Indian guru.

This is only the first volume of the adventures of Captain Corcoran, published by Louis Hachette in 1885. Another volume remains out of bounds to the English reader, and one hopes that Sam Miller will treat this as a matter of urgency.