About this Item
Huddleston, George. The White Fakir: A Tale of the Mystical East. London: Ocean Publishing Company, [1932]. First edition. Octavo, pp. [i-vi] vii-xi [xii] 1-243 [244]. Original blue cloth, front and spine panels stamped in black. Illustrations by Lionel Curtiss on two inserted plates. Some foxing to edges of text block, otherwise a fine copy in a fine pictorial dust jacket (also illustrated by Curtiss) with just a bit or darkening to spine panel. An imaginative and notably scarce book, especially in jacket. #769. $350. Reginald 07528. Day, Supplemental Checklist of Fantastic Literature, p. 44. Gupta, India in English Fiction 1025. A romance with mystical overtones set mostly in Colonial India, culminating with a utopian vision of a future in which the warring religions of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity have been united under the protective and progressive guidance of Britain. The innermost circle of the story concerns the English newlyweds Miles Pleston and his bride Tantalla. He is the eldest son of a retired Colonial widower who made his fortune in India (after some tragic mishaps) and retired to a quiet English life. There he hired a local girl, Tantalla, to act as his private secretary. She and Miles fall in love quickly and after he finishes his education as an engineer, they marry and move out to India, where fate lands them in the same obscure village (Fakirganj) and the same bungalow build by Pleston senior. Two local Indians, a canny but largely benevolent fakir named Pitumber, and a nasty old liar named Luxminia, a classic evil stepmother (of a young lad who secures work in the newlyweds' household), serve to help expand the story's focus outwards as well as backwards into the past and forward into the future. The novel makes the point that individuals suffer for the sins for their ancestors just as surely as if they were suffering for the sins of their own previous incarnations. The parallel is inevitable given the novel's setting, but the untangling of confused or hidden genealogy not only chugs along throughout Western literature as a venerable plot engine, but also provides a thematic destination. Untangling such threads is sometimes the only way of answering those stubborn questions: who am I? where did I come from? where am I going? The woman destined to save India may be Tantalla, the novel implies, because of her sincere love for the ways of the country. In any event, the story ends on a happy note for the couple. More ambitiously, it points forward prophetically to a civilizational reconciliation. Miles, who had always scoffed at religion (though his father showed a curious reverence towards Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god), tells his wife that he saw a vision in which Ganesh spoke to him of himself and his wife: "You are the only ones able to fathom the mind and outlook of both the Occident and Orient. One of you, who has in him the triple blood of European, a Moslem, and a Hindu, will accomplish a miracle." This miracle will be the dissolution of all the forces driving conflict in India, to be accomplished only by "a superman of mixed blood." (p. 239). Seller Inventory # 769
Contact seller
Report this item
