Arjun Motwani (PGII, Roll 34)
‘A Gentleman of Oxford’, writing in 1756 about the apparently superfluous and irrelevant details in many of Milton’s epic similes, complained that Milton is “guilty” of “running away from his Similes, whose Beauty consists in its Brevity as much as in any particular Part of its Construction, to make a Parade of his Knowledge of foreign Countries” (emphasis mine). [1] The question of Milton’s “luxurious Comparisons that deviate from the Subject” was, as Christopher Ricks points out, debated fairly often during the eighteenth century; [2] but what is striking about the ‘Gentleman of Oxford’ is his suggestion that Milton’s allusions to foreign cultures were only meant to impress the readers with their erudition and hence, were dispensable insofar as their removal would have made no conceivable difference to the overall project of justifying the ways of God to man. It is true that Milton (or, more precisely, the epic narrator in Paradise Lost) refers to and also imaginatively evokes a wide range of faraway ‘exotic’ places while narrating events which had taken place even before the beginning of historical time. Also, Milton, as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State, would have been deeply aware of England’s diplomatic relations with the Oriental nations from where merchant-adventurers brought back valuable goods, and, possibly, of the accounts these travellers were penning down after returning home [3]. However, this does not mean that the wide geographical knowledge Milton had amassed (and which, in Of Education, he wished all English children would amass through “the use of the Globes, and all the Maps; first with the old names, and then with the new”) [4] simply filtered into the discourse of the epic-narrator in an unmediated manner, resulting in unnecessary and avoidable “excursions into the exotic, part of an encyclopedic epic’s obligation to be encyclopedic even in its naming of places” (Balachandra Rajan). [5]
That Milton’s epic similes serve definite aesthetic functions, rather than merely parading the poet’s impeccable command over geography, was recognised by critics as early as Addison, who praised Milton for not “quit[ting] his Simile till it rises to some very great Idea, which is often foreign to the Occasion that gave Birth to it.” [6] Richardson also defended the extended similes despite acknowledging that they are not always strictly “to the Purpose”, on the grounds that readers feel delight when, “The Main Business being done, the Poet gives the rein a little to Fancy.” [7] The poet’s “Fancy”, we might add, often leads him to faraway enchanting places which most contemporary readers would have perceived as hovering nebulously somewhere near the outer reaches of the known world. Not only are such flights of Fancy “foreign to the [main] Occasion”, but they also lead to the conjuring up of places with tantalisingly unfamiliar names (like ‘Sericana’, ‘Bengala’, ‘Imaus’) that serve as signifiers of radical difference: the places are, in a very literal sense, foreign. Milton, of course, does not invent the numerous Oriental place names scattered throughout the text. He culls them from the works of Classical geographers and contemporary travellers to the east, and also from the increasingly detailed atlases and maps of Biblical lands (often appended to early modern King James and Geneva Bibles) which were being produced in Europe in the wake of the cartographic revolution. [8] But it is still significant that he chooses to interrupt his narrative at key moments in order to launch into digressive similes where the vehicle is drawn from the matter of the East, because, by stimulating a sense of wonder through his depiction of places dimly glimpsed and shrouded in mystery, he possibly tries to a convey a sense of the far more marvellous nature of the original thing being compared. (The technique, in other words, is that of comparing “Great things with small” (2.922). Thus, when the fallen angels in the outer chamber of Pandemonium undergo a sudden transformation from giants to “less than smallest dwarves” (1.781), they are compared to “that Pigmean Race/ Beyond the Indian Mount” (1.780); and this is followed by the evocation of a haunting moonlit landscape reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with “Faery Elves” gallivanting all around and creating “Jocond Music” that charms the solitary peasant returning home (1.781-788). Similarly, while describing how Satan is greeted with delightful fragrance when he reaches the borders of Eden, the garrulous epic narrator proceeds to draw a parallel with the experience of merchants sailing “Beyond the Cape of Hope” who smell the “Sabean odours” wafting towards them from the “spicie shoare” of “Arabie the blest” (4.159-165). The first simile is possibly based on a cartographic practice of inscribing images of pygmy-like inhabitants on some maps of eastern Asia, [9] whereas the second one derives from and participates in a proto-Orientalist discourse about the wondrous aroma of the perfumes of Arabia.
However, in the context of the epic similes involving allusions to the Orient, it is useful to keep in mind C. A. Martindale’s observation that the two things being compared might have no more than a single point of correspondence, and hence, it is possible for them to be actually quite dissimilar. [10] The principle on which the simile operates is, as Martindale points out, that of “idem in alio: the poet discerns the like in the unlike”; and, in fact, “without some degree of unlikeliness, there would be no simile at all.” [11] It is only the degree to which the two things are dissimilar that varies. Also, if and when the elements of the comparison are fairly heterogeneous, “the simile may highlight the likeness in the apparent dissimilarity or it may to some extent stress the dissimilarity” (emphasis mine). [12] When read with this caveat in mind, it becomes evident that Milton’s comparison of Hell’s fallen angels with Himalayan pygmies on the basis of their diminutive stature alone does not, ipso facto, imply a “Satanisation of the Orient” (to use Balachandra Rajan’s phrase) [13]: it is only in one respect that the inhabitants of the Indian mount resemble the infernal creatures jostling for space in Pandemonium; and, one might argue, the effectiveness of the simile depends on a tacit acknowledgement of how dissimilar the two ultimately are. That Milton does not intend to show a total and perfect correspondence between the two things being compared must be kept in mind while reading the other similes involving the Orient or the New World as well. It is especially crucial to our understanding of the fig-tree passage (9.1101-1114), which is arguably the most complex and ambiguous among the references to India in the poem and also imbued with great theological import.
Milton’s ekphrasis of the phenomenal Indian fig tree occurs right after the climax of the poem. Adam and Eve, having partaken of the forbidden fruit and slaked the “Lust” with which they were “burn[ing]” (9.1015), fall asleep; but their sleep is disturbed by “unkindly fumes” and guilty, tormenting dreams (9.1050). On waking up and realising that they have lost their innocence and that their faces are marked indelibly by “foul concupiscence” (9.1078), they feel overwhelming anguish. They also become painfully aware of their nakedness and Adam, having excoriated Eve for her role in enabling Satan to lead them to disobedience, suggests that they search for a tree whose leaves are broad enough to hide well those “middle parts” which “seem most/ To shame obnoxious” (9.1094). Luckily, they soon chance upon the Indian fig tree (the ficus benghalensis, more commonly known as the banyan tree, even though Milton never uses this name), whose broad leaves would adequately serve their purpose. [14] It is at this critical juncture, when the narrative tension is at its peak, that the epic narrator embarks on a lengthy enumeration of the notable features of this tree, which would surely have been a botanical curiosity for most seventeenth century English readers:
… both together went
Into the thickest Wood, there soon they chose
The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d,
But such as at this day to Indians known
In Malabar or Decan spreds her Armes
Braunching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow
About the Mother Tree, a Pillard shade as pillars
High overarch’t, and echoing Walks between;
There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heate
Shelters in coole, and tends his pasturing Herds
At Loopholes cut through thickest shade: Those Leaves
They gatherd, broad as Amazonian Targe
And with what skill they had, together sowd,
To gird thir waste, vain Covering if to hide
Thir guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike
To that first naked Glorie. (9.1101-1114)
In terms of its function in the narrative, the passage (especially the part dealing with the Indian herdsman) creates a mood of pastoral calm and serenity immediately after the harrowing depiction of Adam’s and Eve’s transgressions and their torrid postlapsarian lovemaking. It fully satisfies Boileau’s requirement that the epic simile disengage us “from too painful an Attention to the principal Subject… by leading [us] into other agreeable Images.” [15] What is surprising, however, is that this locus amoenus is not to be found in the countryside of Italy or Greece but in the (apparently) verdant plains of “Deccan or Malabar” – places which Milton’s contemporary Peter Heylyn, in his influential account of the “chorographie and historie of the whole vvorld” called Cosmographie (1652), described as being inhabited by idolatrous people who worship demons. [16] Moreover, the idol-worshippers of Malabar, according to Heylyn, participated in devotional forms very similar to the worship of the infernal Moloch; but here, this is not even hinted at by Milton (and this despite the fact that in A Second Defence, written fourteen years earlier, Milton himself had railed against the hopeless paganism of the Indians and their innate susceptibility to despotism, calling them “the most stupid of mortals”). [17] Milton’s aim then, in describing the herdsman’s contented slumber, is simply to present a foil to the anguish and moral turmoil of Adam and Eve. This foil is superbly effective in throwing into relief Adam’s and Eve’s crippling awareness of their nakedness because the herdsman is said to belong to a land whose inhabitants, according to contemporaries like Heylyn, are “content with no more covering than to hide their shame”. [18] Naturally, in this context, Milton leaves out those details about the Malabar herdsmen which would show that they have their own share of moral depravity. The portrayal is, thus, a product of Milton’s exercise of his “fertile literary imagination” [19], rather than of any desire to present an accurate and full account of the customs of foreign lands; Milton is, after all, a poet and not an Orientalist ethnographer.
As for the elaborate description of the banyan tree, Milton would have found the details not only in Pliny’s Natural History and John Gerard’s Herball (largely derived from Pliny), but also in the travelogue written by a Jesuit merchant called Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, which was anthologized by Samuel Purchas in Purchas His Pilgrimes. [20] From these sources, however, Milton could have gleaned information only about the striking appearance of the banyan tree (a tree “very wonderful to behold”, as his immediate source, Linschoten, averred) [21]; the allegorical significance of the hanging roots, which reject light and air and prefer instead to remain mired in the earth, had been pointed out by other writers like Thomas Becon and Walter Raleigh. Both of them, following earlier authorities, discerned in the constitution of the banyan tree an allegory of Adam’s initial uprightness in the eyes of God and his subsequent tragic descent into the world of corruption and imperfection. Becon, for instance, explained: “As this tree (saith he) so did Man grow straight and upright towards God, untill such time as he had transgressed and broken the Commandment of his Creatour; and then like unto the boughs of this tree, he beganne to bend downwarde, and stouped toward the earth, which all the rest of Adam’s posteritie have done, rooting themselves theirein and fastening themselves to this corrupt world.” [22] Raleigh too, in his History of the World, went on to explain how the ponderous, earth-bound roots of the banyan mirror the first parents’ fall from prelapsarian glory, and also how its “lack of fruit is analogous to the rarity of virtue”. [23] (Milton indeed takes pains to highlight that the fig tree he is concerned with is not the “kind for Fruit renown’d”, but this can have another implication too, which will be discussed soon). Raleigh’s analysis of the sinister implications of the banyan tree’s fruitlessness is possibly somewhat indebted to biblical passages like Habakkuk 3:17, where God punishes humankind’s wickedness by decreeing that “the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines”; and, Milton might also, according to Alice M. Mathews, have been influenced by this link between barenness and evil reiterated throughout Bible. [24] Keeping in mind the dark moral associations acquired by the Indian fig tree by the time Milton was writing his epic, Alastair Fowler concludes, in his annotations to the fig-tree passage, that the “proliferating tree is a tree of error: it is an objective correlative of the proliferating sin that will ramify through Adam’s and Eve’s descendants.” [25]
There is, however, also a plausible alternative to this grim interpretation. While it is true that there was a tradition of reading the Indian fig tree as an allegory of mankind’s fallenness, it must also be kept in mind that in the popular imagination, it had none of the connotations of corporeality or “foul concupiscence” which had attached themselves to the more conventional and well-known ficus carica. The fruits of the (conventional) fig tree, as Karen Edwards reminds us, were often thought to induce sexual passion [26]; and, following the Genesis account of Adam and Eve covering themselves with fig leaves, Michelangelo even went to the extent of depicting the forbidden fruit not as an apple but as a fig, thereby popularising this identification. But Milton’s Indian fig, devoid of such baleful fruits and belonging to a noticeably different species, offers only “thickest shade” to the weary herdsman. This absence of fruits, in other words, actually serves to underscore its difference from the tree symbolising torrid postlapsarian lust; it is indeed telling that those seeking shelter beneath it enjoy only cool shade, peaceful repose, and protection from the sun’s scorching “heate”.
The significance of Milton’s banyan tree, thus, is difficult to ascertain through a survey of such extratextual discourses alone, since one can reach two very contradictory conclusions. There is, however, nothing within the epic simile itself which proves that Milton intends to present the tree as an “objective correlative” of mankind’s “proliferating sin”, especially since the ekphrasis of the tree segues into an account of how blameless shepherds, exhausted by honest labour, are sheltered by it. The simile is based on a correspondence between the fig tree in Eden and the fig tree which “at this day” flourishes in Deccan and Malabar [27] (this might appear tautological insofar as one fig tree is bound to be like another fig tree); but, as a whole, it appears to foreground the contrast between the spiritual anguish wracking Milton’s protagonists and the carefree calmness enjoyed by the Rousseauistic noble savages of India.
The analogy between Adam and Eve and ‘primitive’ peoples is further emphasised in the simile immediately following the fig-tree passage; but here, the question of whether the two are ultimately similar or dissimilar becomes more difficult to resolve: “… Such of late/ Columbus found th’ American so girt/ With featherd Cincture, naked else and wilde belt/ Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores” (9.1115-1119). It is tempting to read this simile as an instance of Milton’s portrayal of the New World inhabitants as especially tainted by sin and corruption, but a careful reading reveals that here, too, there is only one concrete point of similarity between Adam and Eve and the native Americans: their garments. There is no explicit reference to their spiritual condition, and it is not necessary to assume that the New World ‘savages’ resemble the tormented Adam and Eve in every respect. In fact, Adam’s earlier fervently expressed wish to hide himself from God and live the untroubled life of a ‘savage’ (“O might I here/ In solitude live savage, in some glade/ Obscur’d,…” (9.1083-1086) only hints that he finds such a life enviable, since it does not entail an excruciating awareness of one’s own fallenness. There is, of course, the anachronism of Adam mentioning ‘savages’ who would inhabit the New World only much later, but still, the overall tendency to romanticise ‘primitive’/non-civilised life emerges quite clearly.
It is important to note that in terms of antiquity, India and the New World did not enjoy the same venerable position in seventeenth century historical imagination: while America was the uninscribed ‘virgin’ territory which could be the bearer of virtually any meaning imposed on it by its ‘discoverers’, Indian civilisation was avowedly much older, and had been discussed and interpreted by the ancients. Not only was it supposed to be a part of the primordial core of human civilisation, but, as Balachandra Rajan points out, it was also the site where the earliest phase of Biblical history was sometimes thought to have unfolded, since many of the ancient church fathers “followed Josephus in making the Ganges one of the rivers of Paradise.” [28] Luis de Camoes too, while chronicling the establishment of Portugal’s divinely sanctioned Indian empire in The Lusiads, followed this tradition and described the Ganges as originating from Eden (Milton had, possibly, read the poem either in the original or in Richard Fanshawe’s 1655 translation). [29] Now, it is true that Milton does not explicitly situate his Eden in India. Also, by the seventeenth century, the general exegetical consensus about the location of Eden had tilted towards the Mesopotamian region, with such influential theologians as Calvin “marshaling all [their] philological resources and consulting the latest developments in Ptolemaic cartography to reconstruct Eden’s Mesopotamian surroundings with unprecedented exactitude” (Morgan Ng). [30] But this hardly detracts from the fabled antiquity of India, not least because ‘India’, in the early modern period, signified a somewhat amorphous landmass whose precise geographical borders were difficult to determine and, in fact, irrelevant: it was, according to Pompa Banerjee, “an everywhere that is not Europe”. [31] In the conceptual horizon of many of Milton’s contemporaries (especially those not very well versed in geography), the boundaries between India and Mesopotamia would have been fairly blurred and porous anyway, with the attributes of the one being easily transferable to the other. It is this cavalier disregard for the fixity of borders while imagining the Orient that made Samuel Purchas denounce those who have “comprehended under this name [of India] a a huge Tract of Land, no lesse in judgment… then the third part of the Earth.” [32] Milton’s India too, despite not being identified as the place where Eden had once flourished, does appear to be freighted with Edenic associations, since it is there that the primordial fig tree is to be found “at this day”. The banyan, thus, is a tangible relic of a hoary Biblical past, a relic which links the time of the epic narrator (“this day”) with the time in which the unrepeatable scriptural events had transpired; and the fact that it is to be found in the plains of Deccan and Malabar implies India’s primeval origins and proximity to the place from where human history began. In Paradise Lost at least, India is not the land of servile devil-worshipping barbarians.
ENDNOTES
[1] Quoted in Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 118.
[2] Ricks, 119.
[3] Walter S. H. Lim, “John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost,” in The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, ed. Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 203.
[4] The John Milton Reading Room, “Of Education”,
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/of_education/text.shtml (accessed May 2, 2019).
[5] Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50.
[6] Ricks, 120.
[7] Ricks, 120.
[8] Morgan Ng, “Milton’s Maps,” Word & Image 29:4, 428-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.798092
[9] Lim, 209.
[10] C. A. Martindale, “Milton and the Homeric Simile,” Comparative Literature 33:3 (Summer, 1981), 224.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1770903
[11] Martindale, 224.
[12] Martindale, 225.
[13] Rajan, 50.
[14] Milton seems to have had rather inaccurate ideas about the size of banyan leaves, which are seldom as broad as Amazonian shields; and it is possible that had confused them with the leaves of banana. For a survey of the various opinions concerning this confusion, see Marissa Nicosia, “Milton’s Banana: Paradise Lost and Colonial Botany,” Milton Studies 58 (2017): 49-66.
[15] Ricks, 116.
[16] Lim, 220.
[17] Lim, 216.
[18] Lim, 218.
[19] Lim, 209.
[20] S. Viswanathan, “Milton and Purchas’ Linschoten: An Additional Source for Milton’s Indian Figtree” Milton Newsletter 2:3 (October, 1968), 43.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24443431
[21] Quoted in Viswanathan, 44.
[22] John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (New York: Longman, 1968), 502.
[23] Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, & Christianity (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2001), 173.
[24] Alice M. Mathews, “The Fruitless Tree in Paradise Lost: Symbol of Sin,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove : Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 22.
[25] Fowler, 502.
[26] Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152.
[27] Mathews, 22.
[28] Rajan, 57.
[29] James H. Sims, “Christened Classicism in Paradise Lost and The Lusiads,” Comparative Literature 24:4 (Autumn, 1972), 338.
[30] Ng, 436.
[31] Pompa Banerjee, “Milton’s India and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 37 (1999), 142.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26395911
[32] Quoted in Banerjee, 142.
Milton 