White Eclipse tells the fictionalized history of the forced and fateful interactions between the British of the East India Company and the people of India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The sun didn't set on the British Empire, but it didn't rise for millions of people around the world.
It's a novel of conflicted and complex individuals, both men and women, Indian and British. The British Commissioner Shaw's corrupt politics was complicated by his wife's love for India and the Indians, and her sense of justice and equality. Conspiring with the Company officials, the powerful and the rich Indians oppressed and exploited the poor and betrayed their own country.
Teenage girls were regularly kidnapped and committed to the British army brothels where a ghastly, crude, and humiliating medical examination of girls held naked in suspended wire cages was done every month. Even in this dreadful place, intense love blossomed between a British army Captain and a teenage widow, although he finally betrays her.
This may be the first novel to recreate the story of the first Wahhabi movement against the British India. The British considered the Wahhabis terrorists, perhaps the first group so characterized in world history. A Muslim teenager who had supported the Wahabis fighting the British in the present-day Afghanistan was captured and sentenced to death for sedition but commuted to life in an Andaman prison. Another love story blossoms in this unlikely place.
The novel is also a story of heart-warming kindness from an English girl, an 8-year-old Emily who smuggled food from her kitchen to her beloved Indian friends who were imprisoned in their own home for nonpayment of a debt. The little girl confronted the Commissioner and got her Indian friends released from their home imprisonment. Eventually, Emily marries the Indian couple's son.
Deadly famines, occurring with dreadful frequency, were a feature of the East India Company rule of India. Indian and Irish famines of the 19th century echo each other in the novel. Even during famines, the British had exported large quantities of food grains from India to England.
In an earlier famine, Helen had organized a relief program to feed the hungry. But in a subsequent famine, both her husband and the Governor-General stopped her in her tracks. She then became a horrified witness to the harrowing effects of her husband's Malthusian approach to managing the famines. Millions of Indians died on the streets. Helen left her husband and returned to England. His wife's departure forced the Commissioner to face not only his own ruthlessness but also his vulnerabilities that he never thought he had. The Governor declared that Shaw had gone insane and confined him to a small bungalow in Darjeeling.
The British slave trade on the Indian subcontinent echoes the African slave trade by the Europeans and the Americans. As under several colonial empires, Indian farmers were captured and sent to Caribbean islands where they worked as slaves on British sugarcane plantations.
Hearing the heartbreaking news that her husband had been confined as an insane, Helen returned to India and took her husband home.
In 1857, the Indian soldiers of the British Army rebelled against the Company rule. The soldiers killed many British men, women, and children. The company took brutal revenge against the Indian people, especially against the Indian soldiers of its own army. They tied solders into the mouths of cannons and blew them away in public places.
