Some histories survive in official records. Others remain buried in the lives of people who suffered without leaving behind monuments, memoirs or a place in mainstream memory. Jeyamohan’s White Elephant turns its attention to this second kind of history.
Set in 1878, when a devastating famine had engulfed southern India, the novel enters colonial Madraspatnam through the eyes of Aiden Byrne, an Irish police officer serving the British Crown. Aiden begins as a man relatively secure in his place within the colonial machinery. That certainty begins to unravel when he witnesses two labourers from the Tudor Ice Company being brutally whipped.
What first appears to be an isolated act of violence opens a door into a much larger system of exploitation.
At the Tudor Ice Company, huge blocks of ice harvested from frozen lakes in New England are shipped thousands of kilometres to India and eventually broken down for British banquets. The luxury enjoyed by one section of colonial society, however, rests on the labour of workers placed at the lowest end of the caste hierarchy.
The contrast is one of the novel’s most striking ideas: ice transported across oceans for colonial comfort in a land where people are dying of hunger under a relentless sun.
When two labourers are later found murdered, Aiden joins Kathavarayan, a young activist, in trying to understand what happened. Their search gradually expands beyond the killings. It takes them into a landscape devastated by famine, caste oppression and colonial power, forcing Aiden to confront the system he serves and his own position within it.
This is where White Elephant moves beyond the structure of a historical mystery.
The murders provide the narrative momentum, but Jeyamohan’s larger concern is the anatomy of injustice — how exploitation becomes normal, how institutions sustain it and how individuals learn to look away. Colonialism is not presented merely as a distant political arrangement. It is experienced through hunger, physical violence, labour, privilege and the unequal value placed on human lives.
Caste is equally central to the novel.
Jeyamohan has said that the famine of the 1870s left relatively little imprint on classical Tamil literature, in part because many of those who suffered most belonged to Dalit and other oppressed communities. White Elephant attempts to recover that missing history through fiction.
In doing so, the novel resists the temptation to locate all cruelty in one place. British colonial exploitation forms the wider machinery of oppression, but social hierarchies, feudal structures and caste discrimination deepen the suffering. The result is a world in which different systems of power reinforce one another.
Aiden is an interesting choice through whom to examine this world. He is neither completely outside the machinery nor entirely comfortable within it. As an Irishman serving the British Empire, he occupies an uneasy position — an agent of imperial authority who also comes from a land with its own history of deprivation and domination.
His moral discomfort gives the novel much of its tension.
Through him, Jeyamohan raises a difficult question: what responsibility does an individual bear when he recognises that the institution he serves is unjust?
Priyamvada Ramkumar, who has translated the novel from Tamil into English, describes Aiden as “a conscionable person stuck in the garb of an oppressor”. That conflict becomes one of the book’s most compelling threads. Awareness alone does not free Aiden from complicity. Nor does personal sympathy automatically give him the power to dismantle the system around him.
Kathavarayan, meanwhile, brings another energy to the story. His activism and proximity to the lives of the oppressed challenge Aiden’s assumptions and prevent the narrative from becoming simply a colonial officer’s awakening.
The famine itself hangs over the novel like a constant presence. Hunger here is not background scenery. It shapes choices, morality and relationships. As people struggle simply to survive, abstract ideas of justice collide with the immediate realities of food, labour and power.
Jeyamohan’s historical world is also built through sharp contrasts — abundance beside starvation, privilege beside dispossession, physical strength beside helplessness and imported luxury beside local death.
The title White Elephant consequently acquires several possible meanings. It evokes something costly, excessive and sustained despite its burden, but within the novel it can also be read as an image of empire itself: enormous, imposing and maintained through structures whose human cost is hidden from those who benefit from them.
The novel is described as a reimagining of what might have been one of modern India’s earliest labour uprisings. But its relevance does not depend on the historical claim alone. Its deeper concerns — the invisibility of workers, caste hierarchy, institutional cruelty and the moral compromises demanded by systems of power — reach well beyond the nineteenth century.
That is perhaps the reason the novel feels contemporary despite its setting.
Rather than offering colonialism as a simple story of rulers and subjects, White Elephant asks readers to examine the layers beneath power: who profits, who performs the labour, who suffers and who decides that such suffering is acceptable.
Ramkumar’s translation has the difficult task of carrying Jeyamohan’s historical and moral landscape into English without flattening its cultural context. The result allows the novel’s stark imagery and ethical questions to remain at the forefront.
At 344 pages, White Elephant is not a light historical adventure. Its world is deliberately uncomfortable. Violence, hunger and degradation form an essential part of the story, and the novel repeatedly asks readers to remain with people and experiences that history itself may have preferred to forget.
That discomfort is also its strength.
White Elephant is ultimately less interested in asking whether one individual can be heroic than in examining what happens when people become part of an unjust system. Can personal morality survive institutional cruelty? Is witnessing injustice enough? And how much freedom does an individual truly possess when power determines the boundaries within which he can act?
Jeyamohan offers no easy escape from those questions.
Instead, he uses the famine-stricken landscape of colonial South India to illuminate a darker truth: systems of oppression endure not only because of those who actively enforce them, but also because of the many arrangements — political, economic and social — that make suffering appear ordinary.
In recovering a world of forgotten labourers and buried violence, White Elephant becomes more than a historical novel. It is also an unsettling meditation on power, complicity and the people history leaves behind.
Book: White Elephant
Author: Jeyamohan
Translator: Priyamvada Ramkumar
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Pages: 344
Price: ₹599
