**2. Writing God Lives: From Plutarch's** *Parallel Lives* **to the Victorian Jesus**

Germane to a rereading of *Krishnacaritra* (and Bankimchandra admits to the same) is its situatedness within a veritable explosion of historicised 'life-narratives' of gods in the nineteenth century, and especially the 'lives' of the Victorian Jesus7. A 'naturalised,' historically verifiable Christ figure proliferates the nineteenth century European print world. The texts range from the highly controversial *Das Leben Jesu, Kritisch Bearbeitet* (*The Life of Jesus Critically Examined*, 1835)8 by David Strauss (Strauss 1892), to Ernest Renan's *Vie de Jesus* (*Life of Jesus*, Renan 1863), John Robert Seeley's *Ecce Homo*: *A Survey of the Life and Works of Jesus Christ* (1865), Frederic William Farrar's *The Life of Christ* (Farrar 1893), and Reverend William Hanna's *Life of Christ* (Hanna 1876) 9. All the above-mentioned books were best sellers and attracted public attention in critique or admiration. For example, William Ewart Gladstone admired *Ecce Homo* enough to collate his essays on Seeley's work, initially published in the journal *Good Words*, into a book entitled *On Ecce Homo* (Gladstone 1868). However, what has been somewhat less discussed is the generic form that these books assumed and the close connections between the rise of historiography as a scientific discipline and the life-writing genres in a Victorian world10.

Bankim's *Krishnacaritra,* the 'life' of a man who is godlike, is also informed by the European Enlightenment obsession with the self and the emergence and popularity of auto/biographical genres. The British Romantic tradition of naturalizing religions and the scienticisation of Protestant Christianity is evident in the emergence of a flurry of studies such as William Paley's *Natural Theology or Evidences of the Essence and Attributes of the* Deity (Paley 1809), George Wilson's *Religio Chemici* (Wilson 1862), and T.B. Gallaudet's *The Youth's Book on Natural Theology* (Gallaudet 1883). Such a tradition (scienticising Christianity) coincided with the rise of biographical genres and the historicising of hagiographies. European life narratives, like other generic forms emerging at the juncture of modernity, were not culturally conceived entirely in terms of unprecedented rupture and newness, but in terms of recasting and carrying traces of one of the oldest and most respectable of European cultural forms—the narration of eminent or sacred 'lives'. The narrators of such 'lives' that I could mention at this point are Hesiod, Thucydides and Plutarch. The modern auto/biography retains, even in a secular world, this fascination with heroic worthy lives to a substantial degree, with lives devoted to public service that are exemplary, and therefore near divine. I contend that the auto/biography as a distinct genre evolves in modern Europe at a juncture when older forms of life narratives imbued with frankly hagiographical/adulatory

<sup>7</sup> Refer to Ian Hesketh's work entitled *The Victorian Jesus*: *Religion and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity* (Hesketh 2017), and its racy commentary on Macmillan's publication strategies of occluding the author's name (Hesketh 2012), and to Daniel Pals' "The Reception of *Ecce Homo*" (Pals 1877).

<sup>8</sup> This was translated into English by Marian Evans or George Eliot in 1846 and created an intellectual furor, not unlike what happened after the publication of Salman Rushdie's *The Satanic Verses*.

<sup>9</sup> Hanna's work is publicized in a Positivist, historicist fashion as "Written after William Hanna's own personal visit to Palestine".

<sup>10</sup> The idea of a seamless, ever expanding Victorian empire is peculiarly Seeley, and his historiographical ideology is informed by the same. Refer to the Duncan Bell edited *Victorian Visions of Global Order.*

intent are also being translated, recast, and read with unprecedented vigour. It is a juncture when distinctive national imaginaries are being forged, and life narratives are being founded within the same. This process is best appreciated in tracing the reception history of perhaps the most well-known of European life narratives, Plutarch's *Lives of Noble Greeks and* Romans, also popularly known as *Parallel Lives* because of Plutarch's narrating of eminent Greco-Roman lives in pairs11. The European interest in *Lives* from the seventeenth century onwards was predominantly ethical rather than historical as such fascination was predicated upon the book's ability to build character, reinforce a putative national imaginary, and strengthen the ethico-moral fabric of impressionable minds.

John Dryden introduced the word 'biography' for the first time in the English lexicon while lending his name as editor and translator in chief to *Plutarch's Lives: Translated from Greek by Several Hands* (Dryden 1683) 12. That one as culturally preeminent as John Dryden was lending his name to the translation of *Lives* is indicative of a larger cultural desire to appropriate such genres—and their classical respectability—to inform the English national imaginary. The enormous influence that Plutarch's *Lives* wielded in Europe13 in times of print modernity is borne out by the fact that the book was severally translated in the nineteenth century at the height of English imperial glory, and by academics as culturally central as Arthur Hugh Clough in 1859 (Clough 1859). Clough belonged to a revered circle of high culture gurus such as Benjamin Jowett and Mathew Arnold. English translations of Plutarch's *Lives* was included in reading/pedagogic courses of premier institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Arthur Quiller-Couch testifies that the reading of "a simple translation of a Greek book, Plutarch's *Lives*", swayed European minds and shaped ideologies to such an extent that it "made the French Revolution" possible and that "anyone who cares may assure himself by reading memoirs of that time" (Quiller-Couch 1922). The cultural belief that the reading of great lives serves a talismanic function, that such reading practices shape character (national and individual), and humanise (literally) societal beings, is best exemplified in Mary Shelley's narrative *Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus* (Shelley [1818] 1831). The Victor Frankenstein-created creature discovers within "a leathern portmanteau" three books, of which the second is Plutarch's *Lives*14. The contemporary reader is offered an acute insight into the influence of Plutarch's life-narratives on the best of European minds, given that Mary Shelley was the child of the finest of European intellectuals, literally and figuratively. A reading of *Frankenstein* offers an equally acute insight into the 'powers' of life-narratives to structure unformed minds, especially those of pre-human creatures, women and children! Victor Frankenstein's creature admits that, "Plutarch taught [him] high thoughts; he elevated [him] above the wretched sphere of [his] own reflections to admire and love heroes of past ages" and that "[he] felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within [him]; and abhorrence for vice (Shelley [1818] 1831).

The creature recognizes that with the reading of Plutarch "perhaps [his] first introduction to humanity had been made" (Shelley [1818] 1831). The point about a new form of life narratives in enlightenment Europe being recast in terms of older assumptions alongside the retelling of secularised god lives need not be overemphasised. Exemplary secular life narratives are popular as they serve as cultural milestones and mark out the ethico-aesthetic directions of a national imaginary.

<sup>11</sup> Originally belonging to the second century AD, the first edition came out in 1517 in Florence in Italy. Plutarch's *Lives* was translated in several European vernaculars, including French, German and English, and Thomas North's translation of *Lives* became the basis of many of Shakespeare's plays. The first English edition was printed by Jacob Tonson in 1688.

<sup>12</sup> Refer to Rebecca Nesvet's essay "Parallel Histories: Dryden's Plutarch and Religious Toleration" (Nesvet 2005, pp. 424–37) for more on this.

<sup>13</sup> Refer to Simon Goldhill's chapter on the reception of Plutarch in Europe in *Who Needs Greek: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism*.

<sup>14</sup> The two other books that Dr. Frankenstein's creature reads, to humanize itself, are Goethe's *Sorrows of Young Werther* and John Milton's *Paradise Lost.*
