Ghosts of Irish Famine in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur

Abstract

This essay argues that Anglo-Irish author J. G. Farrell’s 1973 Booker Prize-winning novel, in emphasizing the starvation of besieged Britishers during the so-called Mutiny of 1857, implicitly recalls the starvation of the Irish during the Great Famine of the 1840s. The potency of this tropological trace enables Farrell to satirize imperialism and, in the 1970s, imperial nostalgia, more effectively. By outlining the historical link between tropes of Irish figures and Indian rebels, and by highlighting Farrell’s echo of these tropes, the essay shows that the novel’s descriptions of food and hunger, for example, establish an unstated correspondence between these near-contemporaneous events that exposes the vacuity of imperialism and imperial nostalgia.