Prior to 2012, Jane Austen had never traveled to India. One couldn’t blame her, considering the life-threatening hazards of a months-long overseas journey to a country swarming with malaria, dysentery, and other things we still have today but they have antibiotics and immunizations for. India in Jane Austen’s time was not yet a British colony. The British East India company controlled major ports and was making headways inland, but was not yet controlled by the British military and still competed with the Dutch East India Company and other European concerns. (An excellent book on line in this time period, by the way, is White Mughals by William Dalrymple)

All of that changed last month when I traveled to the former British fort town of Mcleod-Ganj in the hills of Dharamsala and took Jane Austen with me. It was named after its founder, Sir Donald McLeod, a British officer in the Punjab who would vacation in the cooler mountainside. It was not annexed by the British until 1849. Lord Elgin, famous to British historians, is buried there, in a still-functioning Anglican church and graveyard known as St. John in the Wilderness. The town would be all-but abandoned now if it hadn’t been granted as a resident to the Dalai Lama by Prime Minister Nehru in 1960, and a town has sprung up around him, comprimsed of Tibetan refugees, spiritual tourists, activists, local Himachali Indians, and merchants from Nepal and the Punjab. The Tibetan Government-in-Exile is a mile down the hill and most of the major Tibetan monasteries in the North of India are either in McLeod-Ganj itself or Lower Dharamsala, 40 km south. I arrived to join the “activist” contingent, recording and compiling oral histories of Tibetan refugees as part of a Kickstart project. After a month in India, I spent 6 days in Nepal before returning to America, exhausted, to work on book 5 of my series, which is unrelated and out next month. I didn’t do much touring in India itself, but when I did, Jane Austen tagged along (when it was appropriate). She was also present for the Dalai Lama’s spring teaching, but I wasn’t allowed to have a camera for it. Continue reading →

Marsha Altman

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Is this not a great movie poster?

As you can clearly see, I am someone who is very on top of things in life, and not someone who got “February 13th” and February 16th” screwed up. Well, it’s not like they’re not very close in numbers.

My fifth book, The Knights of Derbyshire, is at the copyeditor, at I’ve been getting ready for a 5-week trip to India and Nepal, two countries which Jane Austen was never in, so there’s not a whole lot to connect those things. Did someone do a post about Jane Austen and Bollywood? Somewhere, definitely.

Jane Austen’s works have showed up in India’s move industry, as Bride and Prejudice and the more recent Aisha (Emma). I haven’t see these because I cannot stand Bollywood films. Seriously, the jarring dancing gets to me, but I do know that Jane Austen logically does well in Bollywood because of the nature of her romances, which end well. I was once watching Monsoon Wedding with a friend of mine who is Indian. It’s one of those rare Bollywood movies where nobody breaks out dancing until the end, so it actually does really well in America. Anyway, I was discussing whether the peasant romance was going to work out, and Nihal said, “Of course it is. If it didn’t people would throw things at the screen and destroy the movie theater.” And in Austen, things work out for her protagonists, at least in the six main books.

I’m actually going to be working with the Tibetan refugee community in India, so we’ll see if I can link THAT to Jane Austen in next month’s post (hint – probably not). Follow it all on my travel blog.

Marsha Altman

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This post is largely a response to an issue raised at Austenprose about an author apologizing to Jane Austen for using her characters in his book.

I’ve thanked Jane Austen lots of times – across five books, one eBooks, and I will continue to thank her because she deserves to be thanked.  In coming up with new ways to say it I’ll probably say that I “stole” from her if I haven’t already. But this, like I think the author of the book in question, is in jest. I don’t have to do it. I’m not thanking Jane; I’m making a public acknowledgment of the origin of some of my characters. It’s for my reading audience, not anyone else.

The truth is that Jane Austen is dead. She is completely and utterly dead. And she’s gone. I don’t know about the afterlife, because Judaism has changed its mind a couple times over the past 3000 years (apparently we believe in reincarnation now? And have since the 16th century? Whatever. We face G-d, we’re judged, things happen) but I do believe that people who I’ve never even known are not floating above my head, judging me for what I do, because that sounds like the worst possible kind of afterlife. Wherever Jane is, if she’s anywhere, it’s not the Barnes and Noble at Union Square, browsing through the mid-A section of “Fiction and Literature.” If there’s a heaven it definitely has better stores.

So Jane isn’t judging me, and I’m not stealing from her. Her literary works have entered the public domain. They are owner-less. They are public ideas to be used by anyone for anything, and cannot be claimed by anyone as “their own.” According to American copyright law, even if Jane were to rise from the dead, she couldn’t claim royalties on the endless reprints of her work because once something is in the public domain, it can never go back into the private one. Continue reading →

Marsha Altman

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