The East Indian

Meet Tony: the first Indian to set foot on American soil.

Among the settlers, slaves, and indentured servants that travel across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s, there is also Tony. As a child, his home in India becomes a trading outpost for the English; as an orphaned teenager, he is kidnapped in London and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation.

But Tony is not giving up on his dreams just yet. Under the rule of a sadistic plantation owner, he forms a tender bond with a young boy who will haunt his nightmares; on an exploration inland alongside a trader and Native Americans, he realises the world is vaster and more mysterious than he could have imagined; and in Jamestown, he finally earns himself a position as a physician’s apprentice, an ambition he has long harboured. 

The East Indian is a compelling story of family, friendship, and finding oneself in the seeds of a new world.

About the Author

Brinda Charry was born in Chennai, India, and moved to the US in 1999. She is a novelist-turned-academic-returned-novelist. A specialist in English Renaissance literature (Shakespeare and contemporaries), she has published a number of books and articles in that field. She was inspired to write The East Indian by a one-line entry in colonial records mentioning the first Indian to set foot on American soil: ‘Tony East Indian’. Charry lives in New Hampshire.

Reviews

‘Charry’s most remarkable feat with this novel is that she wears her enormous learning and research lightly throughout. Her cinematic worldbuilding ensures spectacle and substance as it sweeps us along the Coromandel coast, London streets, and the Virginian countryside. The characters are detailed with care and attention so that we find humanity even in the worst of them. Tony’s voice, in first-person point of view, is earnest and endearing, especially when he is filled with wonder about human biology, the beauty and curative qualities of various plants and flowers, and the powerful mystery of falling in love … Just over the last four decades, there has been a slew of books about South Asian or East Indian immigrants―both fiction and nonfiction. Several have won awards. Almost all of them have centred on contemporary stories. Charry’s 'Tony East Indian' plants his own flag in this literary landscape." —Jenny Bhatt, NPR

"Tony, the 'East Indian' of the title of Brinda Charry’s utterly enjoyable debut novel, reads like a character straight out of Dickens. Based on an actual historical figure, the first person from India documented in the records of Colonial Virginia, Tony ventures into the entangled richness of a nascent America―a place he calls, 'this precarious edge of the world.' It is peopled by 'servants'―both white and black, female and male―who find themselves as bound to the New World as they are to the Englishmen who rule it. Picaresque in style, lyrical of voice, gripping, and authentic, The East Indian is a real treat." —David Wright Falade, author of Black Cloud Rising

"Filled with memorable characters, The East Indian grapples with the brutal colonialism and indentured labour of the 1600s with warmth and wit. An entertaining novel that adds more heft to Brinda Charry’s already impressive oeuvre." —Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire and Why I Am a Hindu

‘What a vast and wondrous ocean of a novel this is―throwing up the unexpected and startling, the horrifying and utterly beautiful, moving from shore to shore with spectacularly skilful narrative poise. To journey with The East Indian is to journey through a world shape-shifting into the modern, a world being ravaged and transformed. It is to be reminded that amidst the rough sweep and scour of history, what remains precious are these timeless, enduring things―friendship, kindness, healing." —Janice Pariat, author of The Nine-Chambered Heart and Everything the Light Touches