ROYAL RUMBLE
Even 38 years after it was first published, this excellent boxing novel by Timeri N. Murari packs a punch
In an author’s note at the end of Gunboat Jack, Aleph’s reissue of a novel originally published under another title in 1981, author Timeri N. Murari recalls his childhood fascination with the black-American boxer who knocked around Bangalore in the 1950s—an exotic figure who wore cowboy boots and a Stetson. Knowing little of the fighter’s history and apprehensive about his ability to inhabit the soul of a black American of that era, he explains, he really only borrowed two aspects from the real man’s life for his character—his name and his curious exile in India, where his displacement allows him to float between the worlds of the British, the Anglo-Indians and the erstwhile royals, all newly unmoored by independence. His Gunboat Jack is a white man, trapped in Bangalore after his lover died and her travelling circus went belly up.
That makes an unusual backdrop for this excellent boxing novel, a subgenre with fairly rigid conventions. The main action centres around Gunboat’s efforts to train the young yuvaraj of Tandhapur to box so he can defeat the son of the raja’s scheming British housekeeper and paramour. A schoolboy boxer himself, Murari manages the stock elements of that story arc skilfully, evoking the old-time tough guy sentimentality of W.C. Heinz (The Professional), A.J. Liebling (The Sweet Science) and Leonard Gardner (Fat City—perhaps the greatest of all time). He also cleverly makes them his own. The fix is in, naturally, but it turns on an evil charm bought from a tantric. Sparring is complicated by the niceties of caste. And so on.
Murari also tweaks the racial and socio-economic dynamics of the sport. Nataraj or ‘Nicky’ is a prince who is losing his status, rather than a poor underdog. And though his brown countrymen have recently upended the colonial power structure, neither his British opponent nor the larger community of colonial holdovers have much invested in the racial symbolism of the match. Rather, it is Gunboat Jack— recast as a white man in the novel—who sees the fight as his last chance to rise from poverty and thereby return home to the Bronx, and the villainous figure of the British housekeeper-cum-governess who has crammed her son into the mould of the ‘Great White Hope’.
She holds sway in Tandhapur by dint of her supposed social superiority, which is fading faster, even, than that of the royals in the wake of independence. If Nicky is able to prove in the ring that an Indian is as brave and skilled as her English son, she thinks, she will no longer be able to tolerate living with his family. The resolution is not so much predictable as inevitable—as is true of the detective novel, the romance, and all the enduring genres—but that does not reduce its charm. ■
—Jason Overdorf