why only a fly on the wheel?

T.H. Lewin recently got extended bytes on a web forum and what was intriguing about the discussion was the currency he commands more than a century after he left the Chittagong Hill Tracts in 1873. Rather than focus on the questions raised in that discussion, this posting briefly looks at what seems to be among the more accessible of his writings, A Fly on the Wheel, or How to Helped Govern India (1884). Written and published after Lewin's return to England, like Wild Races, this book was drawn from diary notes and personal letters from his time in the Chittagong Hill tracts.

FoW opens with Lewin as an eighteen year-old cadet in the service of the British East India Company’s expeditionary force sent to quell the Mutiny of 1857 and closes with his departure from those Chittagong Hill tracts about sixteen years later. Within this short period he moved from a Company officer to the Queen’s 104th regiment. Climbing the bureaucratic ladder rather effortlessly, he was appointed Superintendent of Hill tribes of the Chittagong Hill tracts in 1866, and this appointment was augmented within a few months to that of a Deputy Commissioner and Political Agent of the Hill Tracts of Chittagong and was moved from the 104th to the Bengal Staff Corps (191). The narrative details this progression and more importantly, how Lewin's maverick service to the British government went abegging. Most Mizo readers will identify with the terrain, landmarks, and events that embellish the narrative—more importantly how Lewin negotiated the release of Mary Winchester from the Howlong chiefs through his trusted friend Rutton Puia (var. Rothangpuia).

Why “Fly on the Wheel”? The book's title draws on the opening sections of Francis Bacon’s essay “Of vain-glory,” “It was prettily devised of Aesop; ‘the fly sat upon the axle tree of the chariot wheel, and said, What dust do I raise!’” A preliminary reading would suggest Lewin’s self-effacing insertion into a larger narrative of how Britain came to rule India and its “frontier” regions in particular. However, by the end of the book one gets the feeling that FoW is an attempt to air out some dirty laundry for having been denied the recognition that, in Lewin’s estimation, he deserved. “What is wanted here is not measures but a man. Place over them an officer gifted with the power of rule; not a mere cog in the great wheel of Government, but one tolerant of the failings of his fellow-creatures…Under a guidance like this, let the people by slow degrees civilize themselves. (Wild Races, 351)” Lewin seems to entitle himself as having fulfilled this standard without receiving the acknowledgement it deserved.

What is the value of “Fly on the Wheel”? On Feb 12, 1885, John Ruskin responded to the publication of the book by writing to Lewin, “I am beyond everything I can say interested in your book and in you, but I have a feeling that you have lowered the tone of it by making it…a hunting story book.” In a second response dated 10 March 1885, Ruskin writes, “Again, those cursed publishers are the pestilence of literature. They have made you destroy the dignity and simplicity of your book and robbed it of half its historical value.” Implicitly, one can read in these letters that the publishers had touched up the details for a wider audience. Does this compromise the integrity of FoW? What do we make of his first diplomatic venture to gain the trust of Rutton Puia, which he did by means “not quite regular” (FoW, 203, 204)? We have no way to prove which parts were spiced up and must leave that investigative project to any textual critic/analyst with the time and investment to decipher. Until such a time, we might as well let FoWstand on its own merit.

If one were interested in the issues broached above, Whitehead's Thangliena would be strongly recommended. Some interesting titbits I gleaned from it were:
- Lewin apparently had a child with Dari (var. Darthuami, Darthluangi). This child died soon after birth. In 1915, H. Lorrain even wrote to Lewin-now married and almost on his last breath- about Dari living in Lungsen village. Had Lewin become a White Mizo as the other inculturated "white Mughals"(Dalrymple) had?
- Lewin met up with Mary Winchester (Zoluti) much later in England. She was now Mary Innes Howie (nee Winchester)but Lewin didn't think much of her because she was "a stuck-up conceited little half-caste woman..." One wonders what Mary did to instigate her one-time liberator to such libelous estimates?

Some references:
T. H. Lewin, Wild Races of Southeastern India. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1870.
John Whitehead, Far Frontiers: People and Events in North-Eastern India 1857—1947. Putney, London: BASCA, 1989.
John Whitehead, Thangliena: A Life of T.H. Lewin. Gartmore, Sterlingshire: Kiscadale Publications, 1992.