"Anila's Journey" by Mary Finn (published 2008)

The idea to write this novel came from a famous painting - titled "An Indian Lady" - by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey. The painting (which can be found in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin) sparked Mary Finn's interest in writing a fictional story about an Irishman wed to an Indian woman. In her novel "Anila's Journey", readers will meet a compelling girl named Anila, who is half Irish and half Bengali. She is born during the eighteenth century. Finn portrays the hardships within the world of colonial India: a world where cultures intertwine amid political unrest, creating social tensions within the family group and beyond. "Anila's Journey" fills this dark backdrop with vivid prose and mesmerizing poetry.

In colonial India during the late 18th century, racism ran rampant, and so there is a thread which runs within these pages that holds the issue of race relations. Yet, Mary Finn does not exploit this cultural phenomenon in her writing. Rather, she masters the art of implication with her words. For a young adult - this book is considered a “YA” novel (though I’d recommend it to anyone) - this style of writing may spark a curiosity in history, colonialism, post-colonialism, sociology, and/or critical theory. It also may give readers an idea of different types of artists: the artist related to preserving the human record – such as Thomas Hickey, who is renowned for his paintings of Indian women contextualized in Indian cultural symbols and artifacts of that time period. Also, the main character, Anila Tandy, portrays the artist related to scientific inquiry; she is taken on a special journey because of her innate talent for drawing animals, but especially birds.

Mary Finn’s novel, “Anila’s Journey” (published in 2008) traces the fine yet strong line that connects England to India. It is fascinating to see how different kinds of relationships grew between the English and the people of India within this story: there is that of the teacher and student, the translator and foreigner, the colonizer and manservant, the artist and sitter, the storyteller and listener, and so many more. Supposedly harsh relationships are illuminated by an unexpected gentleness. Relationships between people of the same country, mistaken sometimes for being good ones, are shown in all their brutality. Readers will learn about bibis – an Indian word translated into English as mistress. But something about bibi, in this novel, means a bit more than just a woman who sleeps with a man.

The man the young Anila is hired by, Mr. Walker, a Scottish man (there were other people in India besides the British during this time, such as the Scottish and the Irish), requires Anila to draw the birds she sees as their boat travels down the Ganges. Finn does not take this journey down the Ganges lightly – each page is full of description and there is no doubt that readers minds will blossom with images, smells, sounds, and the touch of India with each turn of the page. Readers will learn about the price of salt during that time; how there were two ways of getting this important commodity – with or without paying taxes.

That is just a tiny, tiny bit of the story. “Anila’s Journey” goes back and forth between past and present, blending the two together like a painter would, so seamlessly and delicately. Anila’s life is a turbulent one, perhaps representative of a weighty portion of Indian girls of that time. Her white father falls in love with her young dark-skinned mother, and for a better life, her young mother leaves her only home. Anila is born into a place of sadness and beauty, where her fellow Indian women are jealous one day and kind the next, where her father works hard and makes her mother laugh, where the birds sing and people dance, as well as steal and sell. But her childhood is for the most part a happy one, and even when her father must go back to Ireland to tend to an important private matter, Anila never lets go of that memory of happiness on her journey into adulthood, and into understanding her past.

“Anila’s Journey” is an immersion into Calcutta and Madras, the Ganges and other wonderful places in India. It will provide a good point of entry into a landscape of wonder and artistry set in that important time of worldview expansion, which Mary Finn seems to capture as if it were a mere few centuries ago.