Summary: an elegant exploration of Hiberno-Indian relations over the decades

While anti-colonialism is now deeply culturally embedded in contemporary Ireland, our history on the matter, as Cauvery Madhavan gently reminds us with this book, is rather more complicated. 

The Tainted takes as its starting point a fictionalized story of a 1920 mutiny by Irish troops in India. (In the book the “Kildare” rather than the Connaught Rangers are the mutineers).

Because, superficially, the British and Irish are white, the British expect the Irish to collaborate with them in treating the Indians in the way that the British treat the Irish at home.

By and large the Irish are happy to comply. But when news of the depredations of the Black and Tans percolates through to the Irish barracks the centre cannot hold, and the colonial authorities are murderously provoked when Irish soldiers down arms in protest.

The second two-thirds of the book explore the repercussions from this incident down the years, not least for Rose, a young “Anglo-Indian” woman – daughter of an Irish father and an Indian mother. 

Cleverly Madhavan does not allow her narrative to rest with any single character for too long.  Instead she shifts the psychological perspective of the novel across a range of characters into the first decades of Indian independence. By doing this she gives insight into the attitudes and prejudices of different communities, and shows how these pose needless challenges to the appreciation of each other’s common humanity. 

Madhavan’s novel is an engaging and illuminating exploration of identity, cultures and history, elegantly written and ultimately hopeful. After all, whatever our skin, our blood is the same colour.