Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fire on the Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nature of Freedom
Honesty and Self-Reflection
Trauma and Suffering
Class and Privilege
Female Oppression
Summary
Analysis
A British colonel named MacDougall built the house in 1843 in hopes that the mountain air would prove wholesome for his sickly wife and children. It didn’t. After their deaths, the house stood empty, but not quiet: one day its roof blew off in a thunderstorm and decapitated a poor laborer nearly two miles away in another town. After the roof was replaced, the pastor of Kasuli’s only church lived in the house with his wife. He planted—and loved—the apricot trees. His wife hated him so much she tried daily to murder him until her own accidental death. He later died in a tuberculosis sanitorium, and his ghost allegedly still haunts Carignano.
Carignano has a vexed relationship with domesticity. The history described in this passage suggests circumscribed roles for women. The book doesn’t reveal the sources of the pastor’s wife’s hatred, but it's clear that she was unhappy in the context of her marriage and wanted to escape it by any means necessary. And while MacDougall built the house out of evident affection for his wife and children, affection couldn’t save them from suffering.
Themes
Afterward, a series of English maiden ladies occupied the house, starting with Miss Appleby, a former governess with a wicked temper, who once severely beat the gardener for planting marigold flowers. Then it was occupied by Miss Lawrence; the two Miss Hughes, who planted the yellow creeper rose which blooms extravagantly all around the house and garden for one month each year; and Miss Jane Shrewsbury, who brewed herbal medicine and once tried to save her cook from choking by stabbing him in the neck to create a passage for breathing. He died anyway, and her actions caused a brief scandal. Miss Weaver and Miss Polson lived in the house before and during World War II, entertaining British soldiers far from the front lines. But they fled, along with the rest of the British, on the eve of Indian independence in 1947.
The single women who occupied the house model the kind of carefree, autonomous existence that Nanda Kaul wants. But they are members of a special class of women—maiden or unmarried ladies—without familial responsibilities. As white British women living in colonized India, they’re also privileged. It isn’t until the political situation changes, the book suggests, that Indian women like Nanda Kaul can fully experience the societal positions formerly reserved for their colonial overlords.
Themes
