New Delhi: There is a particular kind of exile that writers carry with them, not the loss of a place so much as the loss of a way of seeing. For Rumer Godden, who spent her childhood in colonial Bengal and later built one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive literary careers from the material of that early life, India was never simply a setting. It was the landscape that shaped her imagination, her sense of home and her understanding of what writing could do.
Every Least Thing, published by Speaking Tiger Books, brings together selections from Godden’s autobiographical writing to trace that formation, following her from an unconventional childhood in Narayanganj through marriage, motherhood, the difficult beginnings of a literary career, and the long years in which India remained central to her inner life.
Godden was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, in 1907, but she was nine months old when her family moved to India, where her father ran a shipping company on the inland waterways of Bengal. She grew up with her three sisters in Narayanganj, a small river town that is now part of Bangladesh, in a vast house staffed by servants and surrounded by gardens heavy with strange scents.
The childhood she describes is one of extraordinary sensory richness, of orchards and river picnics and the smells of flowers and sewage, and it is a world she returned to repeatedly in her fiction.
What Every Least Thing reveals is how deliberately Godden constructed her identity as a writer against the expectations of her class and gender. She was the second of four daughters, and by her own account felt ignored, overshadowed by a beautiful elder sister and a beloved younger one.
“To be ignored is the best possible thing for a writer,” she said later, describing her writing as “an effort to outdo” her sister Jon, who also became a writer. That competitive restlessness, combined with a physical fragility that followed a childhood spinal injury, produced a young woman determined to make a life on her own terms.
The book follows her through the institutions and rituals of colonial English childhood, convent schools, dance classes, the long separations from parents that were simply expected, and then into the choices that set her apart. She trained as a dancer in London, returned to Calcutta in the late 1920s, and shocked local society by opening a dance school for English and Indian children.
Running that school for two decades, she found herself in a kind of social limbo, neither fully of the colonial establishment nor outside it, and it was during this period that she wrote Black Narcissus, the novel that would make her name.
The selections gathered here do not shy away from the difficulties that followed. Godden’s marriage to Laurence Sinclair Foster was unhappy from the start, and when it ended, she was left nearly penniless with two young daughters to raise. She moved to Kashmir, lived on a houseboat and then in a rented house where she started a farm, and wrote.
The memoir records the precariousness of those years alongside the vividness of the world she inhabited, the colours of a Kashmiri spring, the orchards of wild white iris, the thieving carpenters and the houseboat life on the Jhelum.
What makes Every Least Thing more than a simple compilation is the way it allows Godden’s relationship with India to emerge as something complicated rather than sentimental.
She was, by her own admission, shaped by the blindness of the colonial world she was born into, she read A Passage to India at nineteen and felt ashamed of her ignorance, of having been raised like the Turtons, kept apart from Indians, and the memoir records her determination to see more clearly, to insist on lessons in Hinduism, to visit and speak with Indians, to refuse the separations she had been taught. That reckoning is part of what gives her Indian novels their texture, and it is part of what gives this book its interest.
For readers who know Godden through Black Narcissus or The River or The Greengage Summer, these pages offer the experiences behind the fiction: the convent that became the setting of her most famous novel, the houseboat and the farm that fed Kingfishers Catch Fire, the childhood that never quite left her.
For readers coming to her for the first time, it is a portrait of a woman learning to make a life on her own terms, and of a writer whose connection to India endured long after she had left it.
Speaking Tiger has done a service in gathering these pieces together. Godden’s India was never theirs, as the title of her memoir with Jon suggests, but it was hers, and this book makes clear why it mattered.
