Book Review: White Elephant- A Novel by Jeyamohan

Team Kitaab reviews Jeyamohan’s The White Elephant (Harper Perennial, 2026) translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar.

Jeyamohan’s White Elephant tells the story of a terrible period in colonial India, when famine claimed millions of lives and caste determined how much suffering a person was expected to endure. Set in 1878, the novel brings to life the people who lived through this period, especially those whose pain and struggles have rarely found a place in history. Amid the devastating famine that ravaged southern India, the novel enters a world in which hunger is an instrument of power, and human dignity is determined by the accident of birth. It is a haunting work of historical fiction, one that makes the past frighteningly immediate without allowing the reader the comfort of imagining that its cruelties belong exclusively to another time.

At the centre of the novel is Aiden Byrne, an Irish police officer stationed in colonial India, a servant of the Crown who initially believes himself secure within the hierarchies of the British Raj. The third-person narrative, shaped around his perspective, offers a compelling point of entry into a society he has scarcely begun to understand. When Aiden encounters two labourers from the Tudor Ice Company being brutally whipped, his encounter with colonial India acquires a different moral dimension. The violence he witnesses is an expression of a larger order, sustained by imperial authority, economic exploitation and the deeply entrenched structures of caste. When the labourers are subsequently found murdered, his investigation with Kathavarayan, a young and charismatic activist, draws him into the human devastation unfolding beyond the limited world of his official duties.