Paul Scott : The Raj Quartet and Staying on 9781847600561

Citation preview

http//www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk

Running Head  1

Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

Paul Scott: The Raj Quartet and Staying On John Lennard

“a magnificent portrait … of the heart of the British Empire as it ceased beating” For advice on use of this Ebook please scroll to page 2

Publication Data © John Lennard, 2008 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks LLP Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

Reading Options * To use the navigation tools, the search facility, and other features of the toolbar, this Ebook should be read in default view. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked ‘Bookmarks’ at the left of the screen. * To search, expand the search column at the right of the screen or click on the binocular symbol in the toolbar. * For ease of reading, use to enlarge the page to full screen * Use to return to the full menu. * Hyperlinks appear in Blue Underlined Text. To return from an internal hyperlink use the ‘previous view’ button (more than once if need be). * For a computer generated reading use Read out loud>

Licence and permissions

Purchasing this book licenses you to read this work on-screen and to print one copy for your own use. Copy and paste functions are disabled. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Making or distributing copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author.

ISBN 978-1-84760-056-1

Paul Scott: The Raj Quartet &

John Lennard

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008

Staying On

Contents A Note on the Author A Note on References Preface Part 1. Life and Works: An Overview 1.1 Paul Mark Scott, 1920–78 1.2 Work to 1964 1.3 The Raj Quartet and Staying On, 1964–77 Part 2. Facts, Fictions, and Verisimilitude: Representing the British Raj 2.1 Geography 2.2 History 2.3 Biography Part 3. ‘Coming to the end of themselves as they were’: Witnessing Imperial Decay 3.1 The Civil 3.2 The Military Part 4. ‘There’s nothing I can do’: Embodying Personal Nullity 4.1 Edwina Crane 4.2 Daphne Manners 4.3 Barbie Batchelor 4.4 Sarah Layton Part 5. ‘I’ve put it badly’: Class and Silence 5.1 Neo-Puritanism and the ‘Split Century’, 1850–1950 5.2 Ronald Merrick as Antagonist 5.3 Ronald Merrick as Protagonist

The Raj Quartet  

Part 6. Dreams, Nightmares, & Realpolitik: Representing India (and Pakistan) 6.1 Mohammed Ali Kasim, Gandhi-ji, and the Congress 6.2 Sayed Kasim, Jinnah, and the Muslim League 6.3 Ahmed Kasim, Pandit Baba, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 6.4 Hari Kumar as Good and Unknown Indian 6.5 Tusker and Lucy Smalley: Staying On Appendix 1: Granada TV’s adaptations of Scott Appendix 2: Critics’ Corner and Further Reading Bibliography Works by Paul Scott Works on Paul Scott Works on Anglo-/India

A Note on the Author Born and raised in Bristol, UK, John Lennard took a B.A. and D.Phil. at New College, Oxford, and an M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught for the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame du Lac, for the Open University, and for Fairleigh Dickinson University on-line; he is now Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (HEB, 2007). He is General Editor of HEB’s Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, for which he has written on Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. For Literature Insights he has also written on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Nabokov’s Lolita.

A Note on References To help keep footnotes to a minimum references to the texts of The Raj Quartet and Staying On are given parenthetically, by letter and page-number; as ‘J220’ or ‘D87’. The letters indicate the novels as follows: J—The Jewel in the Crown S—The Day of the Scorpion T—The Towers of Silence D—A Division of the Spoils SO—Staying On Full publication and other details are given in the bibliography.

Preface For the serious reader, including students required to write about it, getting through the Raj Quartet once is not enough. The sheer scale of Scott’s work/s baffles easy understanding of matters at large, and critics face a problem in assuming familiarity or explaining at length. I have chosen to believe that my readers will have at least some familiarity with the plot/s, and will remember more as they read: Parts 1 and 2 cover basic contexts and offer some plot-summary and first-order analysis; Parts 3 and 4 turn to thematics, and roam more at large; Part 5 attempts a panoptic view through the common misprision of Ronald Merrick; and Part 6 considers some Indian realities and perspectives. References and explanations are, I hope, provided as necessary, but chapters build on one another, and especially in Parts 5 and 6 what goes before is largely taken as read. For some the necessary detail may in itself be daunting, but Scott is a novelist who richly rewards careful reading. He offers a magnificent portrait of attested accuracy of the heart of the British Empire as it ceased beating; his is also in British literature the outstanding tragedy to encompass World War 2—a conjunction to command attention. To lose oneself for a while in the Quartet’s dramatic action and supple, highly variegated prose is to be steeped in both sorrow and potent argument; and if between readings one accumulates greater historical, social, or linguistic knowledge of (Anglo-)India, each return sparks with yet more things Scott noticed, knew, and included in his weave. I have read him attentively for more than 20 years and still find new things whenever I revisit, so completion is not to be aimed at—and that is partly the point, for such comprehension must diminish its object. Neither India nor empire can be wholly accounted, and Scott reflects at every level the uncertainty of the human mind and will, our failures of perception and adjustments of memory—but he also built over a lifetime a case of deep perception and multiple, braced memories, with vivid actions and scenes at once presenting history and set in relief against historical events. The Granada TV adaptation of the Quartet under the umbrella-title of The Jewel in the Crown (discussed in appendix 1) is a marvellous work and an invaluable guide to (Anglo-)India in the 1940s. Period minds as well as period detail are superbly re-

The Raj Quartet 

presented, and the older social mores that younger readers often have real difficulty in understanding are made coherent in every moment of dialogue. But the adaptation necessarily straightens out Scott’s chronological loops and overlaps, and besides dispensing with assorted minor characters, most of the novels’ dialogue, and at least half of the important metaphors as well as all the prose styles, it thereby dispenses with the structure Scott imposed—the internal ordering of the constituent novels, which are novels, each in its own right, not merely episodes. And yet it is in that structure that a good part of the story lies—in every sense—so the TV series, while superb, cannot substitute for the experience of reading what Scott wrote, in the order he designed. The true key, as one’s knowledge expands or becomes uncertain, as memories are jogged or prove evasive, is to keep contingency in mind. All the novels of the Quartet are about people possessed of or coming to premature judgements, assuming a certitude of factual and usually moral understanding that a later chapter reveals as at best questionable, at worst plainly erroneous or the short-circuit of a bigotry. Even at the end much remains uncertain, morally as factually, for the death of an empire and the birth of several nations are inevitably so, confused, bloody and productive. There is also the sobering thought that though he wrote of the 1940s, Scott wrote for the 1960s and ’70s, and beyond, reporting with great dedication and intensity a casestudy he thought critical to understanding himself and his own present, as the 1940s had shaped it. He said in 1968 that ‘If I write about Anglo-India in 1942 I do so not only because I find that period lively and dramatic but because it helps me to express the fullness of what I’m thinking and feeling about the world I live in’. And that provides an excellent prescription for reading him, for the more fully a reader is engaged, the more profound the lesson Scott can teach about the world we have inherited.

 Paul Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, in Mary Stocks, ed., Essays by Divers Hands, Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, new series, vol. xxxvi (London: OUP, 1970), pp. 113–32, p. 116. See also p. 58, n. 2.

Part 1. Life and Works: An Overview Paul Scott’s life and literary work were shaped by his experience of British India. Called-up to the army in 1940, he was posted to the Subcontinent in 1943, and served in northern India and Burma until demobilisation in 1946—three crowded years that saw Allied victory over the Axis powers of Germany and Japan and the terrible nuclear dawn at Hiroshima, but also the catastrophic collapse of British imperial rule in Asia. The events Scott lived through during that time, and the massacres he knew were beginning to happen as he left, haunted him for the rest of his life, and drove him to train himself simultaneously as a novelist and imperial historian, that he might bear full witness to these experiences. Many others who were there, British and Indian, were also left haunted. Besides the endemic racism and snobbery of much imperial life, and the horrors of the Eastern theatre of World War 2, there were also events in their own ways even more terrible. As many as one million Indians died in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–4, and most historians now agree that between one and two million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims were murdered during 1946–7 in sectarian violence triggered by Partition. Those events laid the foundations for problems that continue even today—the (nuclear) enmity of India and Pakistan, religious extremism in both nations, the ‘Kashmir’ problem, Maoist terrorism in Bengal, and the endemic poverty of Bangla­desh—so there were compelling reasons to be haunted, and to believe that the vaunted power and glory of the British Raj had ended in vileness and disaster. But if some understood that all too well, others, especially those in Britain with little knowledge or  Subcontinent covers the modern nations of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), and Sri Lanka (Ceylon), all part of the British Raj (Hindi, ‘rule’)—the British Indian empire.  Now Myanmar.  Partition (with a capital ‘P’) refers to the 1947 division of the Raj into the independent states of India and Pakistan, which initially comprised West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). India became a secular republic with an enormous Hindu majority, Pakistan an Islamic republic with a very large Muslim majority, and 10–15 million people became refugees—Hindus fleeing areas that would become Pakistan, and Muslims areas that would become India. Terrorists of each religion organised massacres of refugees of the other religion: at the time it was known that more than 400,000 had been murdered, and the accepted death-toll has steadily risen.

The Raj Quartet 11

understanding of the Raj, ignorantly rejected any notion of imperial disaster, let alone of British responsibility. And it was first of all for these fellow citizens, locked into political and moral denial, that Scott wrote. 1.1 Paul Mark Scott, 1920–78 Tom Scott (1870–1958) was born in Leeds, but as an adult moved to London to pursue a career as a commercial artist. In 1916 he married Frances Mark (1886– 1969), daughter of a south London labourer and so (in the rigid stratifi­cation of the British class system) somewhat his ‘social inferior’. Frances, however, had artistic talent and social ambitions, both for herself and her sons—Peter, born in 1918, and Paul, born in 1920. For the first decade of Paul’s life things were good. His father’s career prospered, and he became (with his mother and brother) a film addict, delighting in the new medium and imagining in vivid detail films he might one day make. In 1929 he started at Winchmore Hill Collegiate, a small private school where he flourished and his intellectual ambitions began to take shape. But the Great Depression destroyed his father’s business: in 1933 the family lost their home, moving in with relatives, and in 1934 both Peter and Paul were sent to work, Peter as a car-salesman and Paul as a clerk in an accountancy office. Beyond a searing experience of disappointment, the family’s new poverty was a bitter lesson in the complex relations of class and financial status that Paul never forgot, and that many of his characters embody. Without options, Paul continued in his dull work throughout the 1930s, but continued to harbour ambitions and began to meet Bohemian friends who introduced him to Modernist poetry, notably that of T. S. Eliot. He probably also began to explore his bisexuality. By 1940 he had completed a trilogy of religious poems, published as I, Gerontius by a small arts press in 1941, but the war had begun in 1939, and in 1940 he was sent for officer training in Torquay. Normally this would have led to his commission as a second lieutenant, but something happened in January 1941: details remain obscure, but his biographer, Hilary Spurling, believes that it involved a senior officer and Scott’s sexuality—an interpretation some aspects of his novels support. Whatever the exact event, there were two crucial consequences: immediate demotion to private, with a long delay in obtaining his commission, and the institution of severe sexual self-censorship, leading to a swift, public declaration of heterosexual ‘normality’ in his sudden marriage, in October 1941, to a nurse, Penny Avery. Finally commissioned in 1943, Scott was sent to India, and served in the air-

The Raj Quartet 12

support divisions of General Slim’s reconquest of Burma and advance on Malaya. He was primarily based in Assam and did not see combat, but travelled widely in northern India and after the Japanese surrender in 1945 visited Malaya, before being demobbed and returned to the UK in 1946. Combining accountancy experience with a determined new direction, he became Bookkeeper, then Company Secretary, with Falcon and Grey Walls Press. Relative security enabled him and Penny to start a family, daughters Carol and Sally being born in 1947 and 1948, while he also began to train himself as a writer. In 1950 he joined Pearn, Pollinger & Higham as a literary agent, and by the mid-’50s was a partner with clients including Muriel Spark, John Braine, Mervyn Peake, Arthur C. Clarke, and Elizabeth David. His own writing career began in earnest in 1952, with publication of his first novel, Johnny Sahib, and others followed steadily, always well-received but none especially successful. Conscious by 1960 of conflict between agency work and his own needs, Scott resigned from Pearn, Pollinger & Higham to write full-time. Three further novels followed rapidly, but by 1964 he felt he had reached a watershed and determined to revisit India; if that did not enable him to write the novels he wanted to write, he would return to full-time employment. A six-week trip early in 1964 did give him much of what he wanted, but also left him seriously ill—which, ironically, proved a boon, for on his return it was diagnosed as amoebic dysentery, a chronic infection from which he had probably suffered since his Indian service in the 1940s. The curative treatment was brutal but effective, and left him feeling better than he had for years, an ease that immediately issued in his writing. Over the next 11 years Scott composed the volumes of The Raj Quartet (1966–75), building an extraordinary, multi-stranded and multi-faceted plot dealing principally with the war years and their immediate aftermath (1942–7) but also stretching back, in memory and history, over the whole course of the Raj (1857–1947). It was an astonishing achievement, but one for which he and his family paid a high price, as he became increasingly alcoholic and violent in his domestic behaviour. In 1975, with the Quartet complete, Penny left him and filed for divorce—a judgement on his behaviour he accepted, but which left him devastated and lonely. Seeking company and support, in mid-1976 he accepted a temporary teaching job at the University of Tulsa, in Oklahoma, and proved a hit with colleagues and students alike, returning in 1977. He also completed Staying On, the coda to the Quartet and commercially his most successful novel, but while in Tulsa was diagnosed with bowel cancer, and had to return to the UK for treatment. He died on 1 March 1978, at the Middlesex Hospital, aged only 57.

The Raj Quartet 13

1.2 Work to 1964 After the early volume of poetry published in 1941, Scott turned to drama. Pillars of Salt (1948) was published though never performed, but he had better luck with two radio-plays that were never published but were produced and broadcast by the BBC, Lines of Communication (1952) and Sahibs and Memsahibs (1958). As their titles suggest both drew on his wartime Indian experience, but while Scott always remained interested in the possibilities of drama he had also decided by about 1950 that only the novel could offer him the narrative, descriptive, and analytical scope he needed. There are eight ‘pre-Quartet’ novels, and while none have received much critical attention, all have remained in print and constitute a seriously under-recognised and underrated body of work. Johnny Sahib The Alien Sky A Male Child The Mark of the Warrior The Chinese Love Pavilion The Birds of Paradise The Bender The Corrida at San Felíu

1952 1953 1956 1958 1960 1962 1963 1964

While all are distinct, they may for convenience be considered in two groups of three and a pair. Johnny Sahib, The Alien Sky, and A Male Child all contain passages or ideas that are fairly directly autobiographical, but as a group also establish themes that would be consistent and critical to all Scott’s work—most importantly the difficulty in knowing someone, and the temptations to construct others’ minds and judgments as one wishes them to be. Thus the eponymous ‘Johnny Sahib’, a charismatic officer serving (as Scott did) in Slim’s air-supply divisions, is misunder­stood and misconstructed by friends and superiors alike, leading inexorably to tragedy. Matters become more explicit in The Alien Sky, whose protagonist, Dorothy Gower, is an Eurasian woman (one of mixed race) who is passing for white, and has married an  Sahib (from Hindi, ‘lord, master, superior’) was the usual term in the Raj for ruling whites—i.e. officers, senior bureaucrats etc.; Memsahibs were their wives. Some care is needed: poor or lowerclass whites might be excluded, while wealthy Indians (especially employers) might be included as sahibs or ‘chota sahibs’ (‘little sahibs’).  US title: Six Days in Marapore.  In Scott’s usage (and mine) Eurasian always means of mixed European and Asian ancestry, while

The Raj Quartet 14

Englishman—a deception that also, inevitably, generates tragedy. This novel also marks the beginning of Scott’s (for a male novelist) extraordinarily sympathetic and sensitive portraiture of women, a trope extended in A Male Child, through a bereaved and bitter mother, Mrs Hurst, to ideas of deliberate self-miscon­struction as a form of imprisonment. Each successive novel is longer than the last, and Scott recognised that this growth was potentially problematical. Getting into each story the details and range he felt proper representations of India and British imperialism to require was proving inflationary, and The Mark of the Warrior, a much slimmer and fiercer tale, represents a major development in technique. Perhaps influenced by Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot (in which almost everything happens or is said twice over, but with telling variations), Scott adopted a process of iteration, telling the same story from varying points of view and allowing apparently simply events to acquire tremendous density and resonance. This shaping also achieved a purity of tragic form in dealing with the strange deaths, just over a year apart, of two brothers, and the innocence, or responsibility, of the officer who commanded both. The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise are both substantially longer than The Mark of the Warrior but show diffuser versions of the same iterative and echoing technique, controlling their wide-ranging tragic plots with recursions and revisionings of events that multiply force and meaning with focus and precision. All six of these novels concern, in one or another way, the British presence in Asia during the 1930s and ’40s. India and the Raj are necessarily central, but A Male Child is set largely in the UK and considers those who did and did not return from imperial service, while The Chinese Love Pavilion is set largely in Malaya during and after the Japanese occupation. One minor character from The Birds of Paradise would later reappear in the last volume of The Raj Quartet, suggesting how close Scott was coming to the skills and inspiration he needed, and a meditative passage from a talk he gave in 1961 about how he had composed The Birds of Paradise shows how subtle his thinking as a writer had become: An Indian Prince. They still call them princes, but they have all been divested of their power since the British went. Their feet, you could say, have been cut off. You know something about the princes. […] You have always been interested in their changed fortunes. While the British ruled, the princes were kept going in all their feudal magnificence. Their fine feathers were kept shiny. Anglo-Indian denotes Britons who lived and worked permanently in the Raj.  Written and performed in French in 1953, and premiered in English in 1955.

The Raj Quartet 15

But when the British went and all their lands were merged with the lands of the new dominion they appeared, you might say, in their true light—they had been dead all the time, stuffed like the birds in the glass cages in the central hall of the Natural History Museum. […] I remember […] when the idea of the cage first came. A wet June Saturday afternoon, at about four o’clock, staring at a white wall. It had an onion-shaped dome and bars wrought like lattice-work; once painted gold, but flaked and faded now. It was a big cage, big enough to have housed several fully grown giraffes. And hanging from its tin roof in simulated flight were stuffed specimens of the birds of paradise; below them, as a setting, the trees and shrubs of their natural forest. It was a fine cage; but also curious. The beautiful, ridiculous folly of a man rich enough to indulge an expensive fancy. An Indian Prince. But of the old school. The grandfather, say, of the kind of modern prince who went to Harrow and played cricket for Bombay Province. And however symbolic the cage is to me it is equally symbolic to the old Indian Prince, because he had a joke about it. The birds were like the British: proud, convinced that they excited the admiration and wonder of all who saw them but, in truth, stuffed, dead from the neck up and the neck down. There is much here to note—the idea of footlessness, for example, comes from a nineteenth-century belief that birds-of-paradise had no feet and lived entirely on the wing, while the whole process of imagination Scott reports is strikingly visual and cinematic—but what makes it truly impressive is the evolving reversal. Initially the birds-of-paradise are an image of the Indian princes, gaudy but subordinate rulers whose day was seemingly long gone, but by the end they have become instead, and via a prince’s joke, an image of the British—whose day was equally gone. Many writers might have come up with one or other application of the image, but to generate both as potent reciprocals is a far rarer feat of imagination, and the political subtlety—not of the cage as such but of Scott’s narrative about the cage, his imagination of its occupants and owners—points directly to one of the great qualities of the Raj Quartet. The last two pre-Quartet novels are distinct in relegating India to the distant background, and (with hindsight) represent in different ways Scott’s final preparations for writing the Quartet. The Bender, subtitled Pictures from an Exhibition of Middle Class Portraits, is a brisk comedy of manners, sharp with Scott’s class-awareness and in places very funny indeed. But while Scott had a genuine gift for comedy (as Staying  Paul Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, pp. 17–18.

The Raj Quartet 16

On shows), he could not afford to give it free reign, or even much of a place, in the Quartet, and The Bender functioned in part to get the lighter comic impulses out of his system. Its far more substantial successor, The Corrida at San Felíu, mainly set in Spain and centrally concerned with certain Spanish motifs that Scott had pondered on two family holidays to the Costa Brava, is more of a final self-test—a complete and full-blooded novel that (uniquely in Scott’s work) does not use, nor rely or focus on, the late phase of the Raj. Narrative complexity is pushed to a new level through a structure of multiple inset-documents with distinct fictional authors, a device formally worked on a very large scale in the Quartet, and one idea that underlies much of the Quartet finds its purest expression. This is a notion derived from bullfighting, the baited bull’s querencia—a spot on the sand of the ring that it elects as ‘home’, a place to defend and to which to return, arbitrarily chosen, but once chosen central to the animal’s behaviour. Understanding and correctly identifying the querencia a bull has chosen is vital in allowing a matador both to put on a good show as the bull is baited, incited to charge, weakened with banderillas thrust into its shoulder-muscles, and, eventually, to make an elegant kill in the most approved manner—so the querencia, the bull’s attempt at logic and self-defence in the bare trap of the bullring, is also its agent of betrayal, and the pivot of the mortal theatre-show in which its death is titillatingly prefigured before being delivered. For Scott this idea of what one might call ‘the place of false safety’ spoke directly to his experiences of class, in India as in London—the pro­cesses by which the Empire lured young men with ideals of service, promises of adventure, and mechanisms apparently to enhance status, that concealed an abiding class-contempt and willingness to sacrifice others. The language of bullfighting could have no place in the Quartet, but the idea of the querencia in all its ironic hopelessness and mortal error is woven potently into the fates of Scott’s principal protagonists. 1.3 The Raj Quartet and Staying On, 1964–77 Scott’s magnum opus is inevitably complex and potentially confusing. Its central action spans five years and what became five nations, generating a named cast of more than 300, including 24 principals, each of whom has a particular spin to offer. The whole plot must also constantly be related outwards to the preceding and contemporary framing actions of Britain, Germany, Japan, and the USA, while narration also reflects the act of composition during the 1960s and ’70s. Additionally, the narrative is not linear: the main plots of The Jewel in the Crown and A Division of the

The Raj Quartet 17

Spoils deal with 1942 and 1945/47 respectively, but The Day of the Scorpion and The Towers of Silence both cover 1939–44, dealing with many of the same events from perspectives that supplement or clash with one another. Older histories, personal, social, and political, are constantly recovered in memory and conversation as well as narration; all that has gone before is drawn on in A Division. At no time can one consider any particular episode closed, and much remains in the end kaleidoscopically uncertain. Each novel is self-contained and uniquely structured, but all are tightly bound by shared characters, symbols, themes, and plots. Information is not merely repeated but creatively reiterated, and different foci in each novel, particularly concentration in The Towers of Silence on women of very different social standings, provide a sense of depth attuned equally to the unforgiving forces of history and the dramatic geometry of the Quartet as one work. It is important to be as clear as possible about its internal architecture, and the best guide is simply the volume- and section-titles. In the table on the next page, the dates of publication are in (lunulae) after each volume-title; in parallel column are plot-dates for each section, and, where distinct from general retrospection, the dates of narration. Times and places are clearly charted. Readers travel from ‘The MacGregor House’ via ‘The Bibighar Gardens’, ‘The Moghul Room’, and ‘The Dak Bunga­low’ to ‘The Circuit House’ (places which exist in relation to The Towers of Silence), and spend ‘An Evening at the Club’ and ‘An Evening at the Maharanee’s’ (times which subsist with The Day of the Scorpion). ‘A Wedding’ begets ‘A Christening’, and the doublefocus of ‘Civil and Military’ is repeated in the juxtaposition of ‘The Honour of the Regiment’ with ‘The Tennis Court’, itself in punning contrast with the legalities of ‘An Arrest’ and ‘The Circuit House’. Arching above the sub-titular framework, the four volume-titles name in turn a Victorian picture, a childhood memory, a Parsi building, and a proverbial action—each a primary image of what happened to the British in India that attach­es to Scott’s narrated history a diagnostic attribute: moral aspiration, apparent suicide, silent decay, and moral abnegation. The component plots variously follow the particular and general consequences of a rape to explore links between a sexual tragedy in 1942 and the interracial blood­ bath of Partition in 1947. Multi-generational complex­ity sweeping across times and classes recalls the great tradition of the nine­teenth-century novel but Scott’s narration is Modernist. Sections 2, 3, 4, and 6 of The Jewel in the Crown, the Prologue to The Day of the Scorpion, ‘A Question of Loyalty’, and ‘Journeys into Uneasy Distances’ explicitly admit an author (‘the Stranger’) to the pages of his text as an interviewer

The Raj Quartet 18

The Jewel in the Crown (1966) 1: Miss Crane 2: The MacGregor House 3: Sister Ludmila 4: An Evening at the Club 5: Young Kumar 6: Civil and Military 7: The Bibighar Gardens

1907–42 1942/1964 1942/1964 1964 1888–1942 1942/1964 Feb.–Aug. 1942

The Day of the Scorpion (1968) Prologue 1: The Prisoner in the Fort   i An Arrest   ii A History   iii A Wedding 2: Orders of Release   i The Situation   ii A Christening Epilogue

c.1967 1894–1943 Aug.–Sept. 1942 1894–1939 Oct. 1943 Mar.–Jun. 1944 May 1944 Mar.–Jun. 1944 Jul. 1944

The Towers of Silence (1971) 1: The Unknown Indian 2: A Question of Loyalty 3: The Silver in the Mess 4: The Honour of the Regiment 5: The Tennis Court

1939–42 1942–Oct. 1943 Sept. 1943–Jun. 1944 Jun.–Jul. 1944 Jul. 1944–Aug. 1945

A Division of the Spoils (1975) 1: 1945: An Evening at the Maharanee’s Journeys into Uneasy Distances The Moghul Room The Dak Bungalow The Circuit House 2: 1947: Pandora’s Box

Aug. 1945 Jun. 1944/Aug. 1945 Aug. 1945/c.1970 Aug. 1945/c.1970 Aug. 1945 Aug. 1947

Staying On (1977)

Mar.–Apr. 1972

The Raj Quartet 19

of his own characters; inter­jections confirm his presence else­where, and the Quartet is consistently presented as an historical invest­igation, prompted by the memoirs of Brigadier Reid (who features in the Jewel in the Crown) and conducted in 1964–75, into the rape in 1942 of Daphne Manners and the history until 1947 of those affected by it. Some sections are documents written by characters: ‘Civil and Military’ is a passage from Reid’s memoirs, with supple­mentary state­ments by District Commissioner White and an Indian terrorist suspect, Vidyasagar; ‘The Bibighar Gardens’ is a memoir by Daphne Manners; ‘The Moghul Room’ and parts of ‘Pandora’s Box’ are written by a sergeant-historian, Guy Perron, and ‘The Dak Bungalow’ by his wife Sarah, née Layton. Additionally, ‘The Situation’ contains a stenographic transcript of the examination of the chief suspect in the rape, Hari Kumar, by an officer-diplomat, Nigel Rowan, in May 1944, and ‘A Question of Loyalty’ declares itself an attempt to recon­struct the point-of-view of a long-dead officer, Teddie Bingham, once Sarah Perron’s brother-in-law. There are also inset letters by Daphne Manners and her aunt Ethel, by the investigating police­man in the rape, Ronald Merrick, and by a Muslim Congressman, M. A. Kasim; as well as inset newspaper-articles and editorials, including one seemingly by Kumar, and two poems by ‘Gaffur’, a famous ancestor of Kasim’s, one of which is given in two translations credited to different characters (T174). Beneath this variety lies a rigorous imagination as reminiscent of Joyceans tracing Leopold Bloom’s wanderings on street-maps of Dublin as of Dicken­sian genealogies and litigations. The Stranger’s access to every document and character he quotes can be explained, and his investigation fully reconstructed. He was a publisher’s reader who was sent Reid’s memoir, A Simple Life, in the early 1960s, and became deeply intrigued by references to Daphne Manners’s rape. He journeyed to Mayapore in 1964, staying at the MacGregor House with Lady Chatterjee, once Daphne’s host and guardian, who gave him a photo of her, her letters to Lady Manners, and her journal. He saw her daughter, Parvati Manners, perhaps conceived during the rape, and met various other local players, including Vidyasagar, from whom he obtained a deposition. He visited the Bishop Barnard Missions HQ in Calcutta to examine the relics of Edwina Crane, a missionary attacked on the same day as the rape, which included the allegorical Victorian picture called The Jewel in her Crown, some journals, photographs of Gandhi and others, and letters from another missionary, Barbie Batchelor, written from Rose Cottage and naming the Laytons. In the UK he traced and interviewed more players, including DC White and the Perrons, who provided written memoirs and gave interviews; the Perrons also granted him access to family docu-

The Raj Quartet  20

ments and memorabilia, including notebooks, diaries, and newspaper-cuttings from 1945–7, the transcript of Kumar’s examination (given to Perron by Rowan in 1945), the privately printed translations of Gaffur, and Barbie Batchelor’s copy of The Jewel in her Crown. Through the Perrons the Stranger had access to John and Mildred Layton; to Susan Merrick (who inherited Teddie Bingham’s and Ronald Merrick’s estates) and Edward Bingham; to Rowan; and (after 1972) to one of the protagonists of Staying On, Lucy Smalley in Pankot, herself in touch with still more surviving witnesses of events in 1942. On a subsequent trip to India, informed by the Perrons about the life and death of Ahmed Kasim, the Stranger obtained interviews with Mohammed Ali Kasim, and perhaps had access to Sayed Kasim, since 1947 a Pakistani, and two more high-level players, Count Bronowsky and the former Nawab of Mirat. He may have found Kumar and certainly visited Mirat, where he could have stayed at the Lake-Palace Hotel (SO18) and visited the former guest-house, as well as travelling to Ranpur, and to Pankot to see Rose Cottage, the Dak Bungalow, Flagstaff House, the Summer Residence, and the Pankot Rifles’ Mess. He obtained still more documents from 1942–7, and in parallel to all this specific research read extensively in modern Indian history, becoming expert in three relatively neglected fields: the daily working-life of the Raj; the curious imperial doctrine of Paramountcy and the transfer of power in the Indian princely states; and the Indian National Army, the divisional-strength force raised by the Japanese from among Indian Prisoners of War (PoWs) to fight alongside them against the British. Such historical obligation and precision brings readers through sprawl and variety to the satisfying rigour of chronology. In The Jewel in the Crown the measurement of action against calendar is plain: events of 1964 constellate within the Stranger’s visit to Mayapore, while those of 1942 centre on 9 August, when Gandhi, M. A. Kasim, and others were arrested in the morning; Edwina Crane was attacked in the afternoon; and Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar became lovers in the early evening, before Daphne was raped and Hari and others were arrested and tortured in the night. Later concurrences of plot are less obvious, particularly those binding The Day of the Scorpion to The Towers of Silence, but (for example) Ronald Merrick’s arm was amputated on the day Mabel Layton was buried (7 June 1944); M. A. Kasim was  Discarded transcripts of these interviews are among the drafts of S and D in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas.  Paramountcy was the doctrine whereby Britain recognised the sovereignty of more than 600 Indian feudal rulers (the ‘Princes’) in return for their formal submission to Victoria as Regina Imperatrix, Queen-Empress.

The Raj Quartet  21

freed from detention and Susan Bingham gave birth at the same hour (5 a.m., 8 June 1944); and Sarah Layton’s first one-night stand was on the night of D-Day (6 June 1944), her second on the Sunday after VJ-Day (15 August 1945). These concurrences matter variously—Merrick and Mabel Layton, like M. A. Kasim and Susan Bingham, are related by symbolic readings tying personal experiences to social and political histories, while the dates of Sarah’s sexual encounters underpin her portrayal as a colonel’s daughter who in a troubled war­time ‘wander[ed] down the primrose path’ (D373)—but all fore­ground time, and clocking the chronology is necessary in reading the Quartet. Intimately twined through both the research-narrative and chronology, Scott’s styles—stuffed with history and exactitude, direct despite seeming longueurs, immensely supple in embodying different narrators—vary from the telegraphic to the Jamesian and Proustian. Multiple movements between narrative and investig­ative times and disjunctions between successive narrators or interviewees make ample room for grammat­ical virtuosity, but Scott kept tight control of tangential developments. One measure of the overarching unity of the Quartet is simply to compare its first and last sentences—remembering that they were written a full decade apart (1964–74, when Scott was aged 44–54): Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south. (J9) Fleeting moments: these are held a long time in the eye, The blind eye of the ageing poet, So that even you, Gaffur, can imagine In this darkening landscape The bowman lovingly choosing his arrow, The hawk outpacing the cheetah, (The fountain splashing lazily in the courtyard), The girl running with the deer.

(D598)

From the first word the reader is subject to narrative command, and from the second—  Approximately histoire/fabula and discours/sjuzet.

The Raj Quartet  22

‘Imagine, then,’—to facts already considered, with explanation and judge­ment in process. Commanding Stranger and commanded reader are equally, instant­aneously implicit, and if readers must depend on the Stranger for the facts on which to base a judicial imagination, their imaginative judgements are nevertheless demanded and made complicit; nor should the girl’s and Miss Crane’s ‘idea of immensity, of distance’ be forgotten. Such conscious metaphysics triangulating character, Stranger, and reader are normal in the Quartet, and Scott is unflaggingly alert to them from that first ‘Imagine’ to his decision to end with a stanza displaying the conventional self-apostrophe of classical Urdu poetry, ‘that even you, Gaffur, can imagine’. Reader have now to deal not only with author and compound image, but also with a self-conscious eighteenth-century Muslim poet (Gaffur), his White Russian translator (Bronowsky), an inset-reader of the poem (Perron), and the Stranger’s choice of an oblique ending: but if narratological complexity accurately records progressive elaboration, it cannot disguise the formal continuity of Scott’s achieve­ment. Both sentences are complete paragraphs differingly balanced across a single colon. The verse-paragraph concludes Bronowsky’s translation of a poem ‘said to be the last Gaffur had ever written’ (D598), and the proximate background against which the Stranger places Gaffur’s final meditation is the train-massacre in which Ahmed Kasim (whom Sarah Layton loved) has been assassinated, with the related death of Mirat (where Gaffur was court-poet) by integration into the new Indian Union. Alert readers can reach back much further, from Gaffur’s bowman via Hari Kumar’s choice of ‘Philoctetes’, the wounded archer, as a pseudonym, across an immense space ‘between our history and our lives’ (S315) to another girl once running in a dark landscape, Daphne Manners, whose Indian lover was also reft from her, and so to Scott’s imagination apprehending in one moment the shadow of imperial history. The images of Daphne Manners and Sarah Layton, English women agonised by knowing that in disasters partly of their own making there is ‘nothing I can do’ (J467, D592), and of Hari Kumar and Ahmed Kasim, Indian men lost between dividing nations, cross-match and pair as lovers thwarted by racial tragedy. They do not blur or fade as similar types, but piercingly resonate with one another, a quartet distinct in detail and spanning the Quartet. Such resonance, like the return of a fugue to its tonic key, testifies to the click of a closing box (as Yeats imagined artistic closure), and craft of such precision does not come cheap across the span of a decade and more than a million words.  Cf. Michael Gorra, After Empire, pp. 15–16.  Miss Crane is also briefly of this opinion (J69): echoes of it are heard throughout the Quartet, personal agonies ground between the ‘moral drift of history’ (J33) and the momentum of tragedy.

The Raj Quartet  23

After this tremendous finale one might have expected anything further to come hard, but in fact the coda to the Quartet, Staying On, came easily to Scott, and has become his best-selling and most widely studied novel. Set in 1972, it pictures the fates of two very minor characters from the Quartet, Lucy and ‘Tusker’ Smalley, who ‘stayed on’ in independent India, and retired to Pankot; the choleric Tusker dies of heart failure, and Lucy is left as alone as it is possible to be. Both are amiable, limited, and richly tragicomic figures, and a cheerfully (but never cheaply) satirical portrait of the new India re-released into Scott’s writing the class-humour otherwise suppressed since The Bender. Critics and readers alike have from the first loved the novel’s action and tone, and one can hardly begrudge Scott the belated recognition, and the Booker Prize, it brought him. But at the same time it is horribly clear that Staying On achieved a popular reception that the volumes of the Raj Quartet had never enjoyed precisely because it offers tragicomedy in an ironised minor key rather than tragedy in a major key. Put another way, Scott’s Quartet proper is simply too morally tough, too historically well-founded and socially observed, to be palatable to readers who lack a similar willingness to stare our real and moral histories in the face; and if taken not as the coda to an epic tragedy, but only as a freestanding and elegiac tragicomedy, Staying On cannot serve as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, and is left as only a spoonful of sugar, gratis, which was never its purpose. Like all the volumes of the Quartet it is an act of witness as well as of imagination, one last death with one last survival; and with his own extended act of witness spectacularly complete, Scott’s premature death is oddly like that of people who retire to find that only their commitment to work was keeping them alive.

 The Towers of Silence did win the Yorkshire Post Fiction Award in 1973—until his Booker in 1977 the only literary prize Scott ever won.

Part 2. Facts, Fictions, and Verisimilitude: Representing the British Raj How a novelist deals with history is no easy question. Some in effect choose not to do so explicitly, setting their work in vague presents; others deploy sharply realised and specific historical milieux, writing of real people in real places; and others again do something in-between, imagining an archetypal and verisimilar world plainly in close correspondence with the real, but to be found neither in atlases nor the history books as such. Perhaps the most famous canonical greats among this last group are Anthony Trollope, inventor of the county of Barsetshire; Thomas Hardy, whose Wessex encompasses aspects of Dorset, Oxfordshire and other central southern English counties; and William Faulkner, whose Yokna­patawpha County clearly resembles his home-county of Lafayette, Mississippi, but is other and more than ‘real’, enabling it to represent a far wider swathe of the US South. The archetypal is also Scott’s route and method. Historical writing on India commonly falls into one of two categories—the local study, often originating as a doctoral thesis, that claims to be typical, and the all-India history, happily sweeping across tens of miles and decades. Scott created for himself an intermediate level, an additional, archetypal administrative province, running (as several did in the Raj) from the Gangetic plain to the foothills of the Himalaya, and equipped with a coldweather capital on the plains (Ranpur), a hot-weather capital in the hills (Pankot), and all the villages, countryside, and railway-lines in-between. The real cities of Delhi, Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta can be reached in times that are consistent for the middle-third of northern India. The neighbouring Princely State of Mirat closely resembles the real Princely State of Rampur (in the United Provinces), but has the same non-specific plausibility as the province. As with the real cities and travel-times, historical figures, from Hitler and Churchill to Gandhi and Nehru, appear in the background, and occasionally press upon the plot; but all the principal protagonists are fictional, as are the particular foreground events. A plain clue is offered by the first compositional note about the Quartet that Scott wrote to himself, on a table-napkin now archived with his papers in Austin: ‘Forget

The Raj Quartet  25

the fact that it never happened’, ‘it’ being the rape. Just as the research-trail followed by the Stranger was meticulously imagined in its document­ation and verisimilitude, so Scott treated his whole imagining as practically inter­connected, possessing the same dense reality as history, because it is history. And a major part of the problem new readers face is likely to be their ignorance, not only of the events of that history but of the places where they happened and the actors they involved. Many if not most people know of the British Raj, and will recognise the names of Gandhi and perhaps Nehru, but anything more detailed is now rare outside the Subcontinent. Yet the Raj was an extraordinarily complex polity in every way, and while Scott (far more than any other novelist) has illuminated its reaches and workings, some outline knowledge of his raw materials is a boon in reading. 2.1 Geography It is not chance that the first sentence of the Quartet posits ‘a different landscape but one also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south’. The kind of imperial history that began its summary of British Indian possessions with a brisk outline of the Subcontinent’s physical geography is now cordially despised, but such a procedure is far from stupid. At all times the brute facts of plains, rivers, and mountains determine much of what is possible in life, and in wartime the corrugations of landscape and barriers of river and jungle may decide victory or defeat. As an army-child Sarah Perron’s father taught her the ‘TEWT’, or Tactical Exercise Without Troops, to sharpen her eye for what any given landscape makes im/possible for soldiers, and many other characters are (like the Stranger in his narrations) persistently aware of both immediate topography and a larger physical and political geography. The land-mass of the Indian tectonic plate is relatively low-lying, with modest ranges paralleling both coasts (the Eastern and Western Ghats) and a central plateau. The plate itself, however, is heading north, colliding with the Eurasian plate and pushing up the vast mountain ranges of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya. The foothills of these ranges stand as a great arc of sentinels across the northern Subcontinent, providing the British with sites for panoptic hill-stations, and their drainage-systems create, in the west, the five great rivers of the Punjab, and from the centre to the east the far greater Ganges, whose immensely fertile valley is very heavily populated. The doctrinal importance of the Ganges in Hinduism is thus matched by its social, economic, and agricultural domination of the north.

The Raj Quartet  26

In political terms, domination of the Ganges thus means domination of the north, and in military terms, the flat expanses of the Gangetic plain offer easy passage both to men and materials. The Mughal, British, and Indian capitals have always been at one end or other of the Ganges, in (New) Delhi or Calcutta. And within the time-frame of the Quartet the truly critical battle was the three-month slaughterhouse of Imphal, near what is now the Indian–Burmese border, where the Japanese blitzkrieg that had rolled well over a thousand miles, from Singapore to the River Chindwin, was eventually held in the last jungled hills before the Gangetic plain—the final physical barrier to a Japanese occupation of India. 2.2 History Successive invaders of India before the British came always from the north, overland through Afghanistan, and drove those they invaded south. The process peaked with the Mughals, who from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries built an empire that controlled almost all of the north, and pushed south in the centre, but was held in the west by the Maratha Confederation, and never conquered the great southern Princely States of Hyderabad and Mysore. In consequence the Sub­continent as a whole shows a clear differentiation of north and south in languages, culture, diet, and relative darkness of skin, matching the distinct climates of (sub-)tropical Madras and the snows of mountainous Kashmir. In the south the dominant languages are Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, but in the north Hindi and Urdu—brother-tongues using distinct alphabets (Devanagari and Arabic) and corresponding to the religious polarisation of Hinduism and Islam. The growth of Islam under the Mughals means that Muslims are far more numerous in the north, where sectarian tensions, partly fostered by the British in a deliberate policy of divide-and-rule, erupted in the bloodbath of Partition that created the Islamic state of Pakistan. There are equivalent tensions in the south, as witness the long-running terrorist campaign by the Tamil Tigers, but these have largely developed since independence, and for Scott, as for most historians, the central Anglo-Indian story lay in the north. The map on the next page also shows the complexity of the Raj as a polity, and the dense cross-hatching deserves study. The great fact is that the Subcontinent was never, until its fracturing independence as four (later five) nations, conceived of as a unity. The Mughals wrought the greatest pre-British unification, but many hundreds of feudal Princely States remained, ranging from huge Hyderabad, larger than

The Raj Quartet 27

Britain’s subcontinental empire, from P. E. Roberts, History of British India Under the Company and the Crown (2nd ed., OUP, 1938). Pankot, Ranpur, Mayapore, and Mirat are somewhere in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Awadh), now Uttar Pradesh: Pankot and Ranpur relate as Simla to Delhi (though somewhat closer); Mirat (contiguous with the province of Ranpur, to the south) most closely resembles the princely state of Rampur, which appears (unnamed) just north-west of Bareilly. [For a larger image, use CTR+L to view full screen; or click the map fpr a full page version]

Wales, to personal estates of only a few score acres. And the second great fact is that, unlike all previous invaders, the British came by sea, penetrating the Sub­continent all along its coastline; and they came not with an army intent on conquest and pillage, but as a company greedily intent on profit through the exploitation of its royal mandate and granted monopoly.

The Raj Quartet  28

It is, bizarrely, the plain truth that for its first two centuries and more, from the early 1600s to 1857, the British presence in India was not officially governmental at all, but the private operations of the Honourable East India Company, a paper-monopoly that became a quango and wound up ruling and administering territories far larger than Britain. To be fair, the EIC seems genuinely to have intended trade, not conquest, but as the eighteenth century wore on the effects in the north of Mughal decline, and in the south of self-protection, drew them increasingly into Indian affairs. It is also true that the most decisive period of expansion was imposed on the EIC by the British government, for when, during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the French sought to sap British resources by arming and training the armies of certain Indian Princes, the British responded by sending out Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington; who in a series of swift campaign between 1798 and 1804 crushed both Tipu Sultan’s Mysore and the Maratha Confederation. One consequence was a sharp expansion of the power vacuum generated by Mughal decline, into which the EIC was rapidly sucked; but to be fair again, it also now embraced rule, and the first half of the nineteenth century saw massive expansions of company territory through annexation and outright invasion. Running away with itself, and never fundamentally equipped to rule a sub­ continental imperium, the EIC ran into disaster in 1857, when the northernmost of its three native armies, controlling the upper Ganges, rebelled and slaughtered its white officers and garrisons. The politics and details of the ‘Great Mutiny’ or ‘First War of Independ­ence’ are still controversial, but the facts are clear enough: in the initial uprisings perhaps 5,000 Britons died, and for some months the rebels held Delhi and extensive territory; there was also serious collaborative activity by two feudal rulers, Nana Sahib of Cawnpore (Kanpur), and the Rani of Jhansi. But the other company armies in the east and south did not rebel, British troops arrived in relief, and within a year British rule had been generally re-established (though some fighting continued into 1859). Summary executions by the thousands and military terrorism on an enormous scale, including what looks very like tactical mass-rape, shored up the regime pro-tem, but it was also clear that matters had fundamentally to change, and from 1858 the British government took over. Recognising the role that EIC expansionism and annexations had played in sparking the Mutiny, it formally declared that Britain had no further territorial ambitions in the Subcontinent. The consequences of this policy are what the map’s cross-hatching shows. More than 600 Princely States were now guaranteed their independence, so the doctrine of Paramountcy had to be invented, whereby rulers were recognised but their foreign and

The Raj Quartet  29

defence policies centrally subsumed. It was as a result of Paramountcy that in 1877 ‘Victoria R’, Regina, had to become (as the acknowledged superior of all these rulers) ‘Victoria RI’, Regina Imperatrix—the formal birth of the British Empire. And ‘British Indian territory’, the lands already held by the EIC in 1857, was left permanently as an impossible patchwork, in some places well con­solid­ated, in others a mish-mash of salients, corridors, and enclaves. ‘The Raj’ thus comprised not only the central and provincial governments but more than 600 others, all with their own bureaucracies, jurisdictions, police forces, intelligence services, and sometimes armies, as well as particular traditions, castes, sects, and habits. The tangle of US city, state, and federal jurisdictions and agencies, whose frictions are a cliché of police TV, is by comparison beautifully logical and smooth. It is thus no coincidence that the great Anglo-Indian fictions turn time and again on some aspect of this unholy administrative mess. Besides the many mutiny novels, such as Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896) and J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) revels in the complex social mosaic and turns on counter-intelligence work; E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) involves an accusation of rape, a farcical British Indian trial, and a retreat to a Princely state; and, most detailed of all, Scott’s Quartet presents the extraordinary figure of the policeman Ronald Merrick, whose personality and motives may be disliked but whose professional analyses of rape and rebellion, and of the problems in policing that the Raj presented, have acute factual force. Beyond the sheer scale of India the patchwork polity also helps to explain the typically disjointed and peripatetic British experience of imperial life, and the equally typical encounter with isolated places where society and politics had become hidebound, provincially inert and reactionary. And consideration of how well or ill the polity functioned from 1857–1947 presents two enormous questions, one about the high success of (counter‑)intelligence up to and including 1942, when some 60,000 Congress Party members could be detained within about 48 hours, and widespread rioting be fairly swiftly and efficiently (as these things go) put down; and the other about how that capacity could so collapse by 1947 that the British could only stand by while more than a million people were slaughtered around them. It is against that precise background that Scott’s cast of 1942–7 operate, and it is he, at least as much as any historian, who has offered the subtlest and most persuasive answers to date—which is in large part what makes his Quartet so morally and historically challenging, especially (but by no means only) for Britons.

The Raj Quartet  30

2.3 Biography All of Scott’s principal players are fictitious, but besides those merely mentioned in passing, such as Hitler and Roosevelt, some 20 historical figures act in or are sharply germane to the Quartet. Most obviously there are the major contemporary political and military leaders, on the British side Attlee, Churchill, the Mountbattens, Slim, and Wavell, with the lesser figures of Stafford Cripps and Wingate, and on the Indian side/s S. C. Bose, Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nehru, with the lesser figures of R. B. Bose and Mohan Singh. Scott’s observations of these men (and in some instances their wives) may be brief or (as with Churchill and Gandhi) far more substantial, but are always sharp. Criticism of Churchill is no longer unusual, but Scott’s was earlier than most, and in his trenchant political analysis of Gandhi’s strategic political errors he remains a very unusual voice, in Britain as in much of India. Scott is also very good on the soldier-diplomats Wavell and Slim, and on the radical tactician Wingate. The Indian leaders are in general less deeply analysed, but that is because M. A. Kasim as a principal protagonist provides with his ill-fated family a better place for extended high-level exploration of the Indian political dilemma. There are also two figures who would in the 1940s have constituted recent history: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the man who ordered Ghurkha troops to fire in the infamous Amritsar Massacre of 1919, and Manuella Sherwood, a woman attacked during the preceding disturbances, on whose behalf Dyer had six random victims flogged and instituted his ‘crawling order’, that all Indians using it crawl the length of the street where the attack occurred. Dyer was forcibly retired without benefit of court martial by the Delhi government, but defended in the House of Lords and given more than £26,000 raised by the British Morning Post from among its patriotic readers. Scott correctly shows reactions to Dyer’s conduct in Amritsar as deeply dividing Anglo-Indian society even in the 1940s, and particularly as exposing the mutual incomprehensions of British military and civil commands. Miss Sherwood is mentioned only in passing, but much in her history, including a bicycle and Dyer’s six random victims, were transferred by Scott to his fictions of events in 1942. The curious figure of an Amritsar policeman, Reginald Plomer, is also germane, for, having won the King’s Police Medal in 1919 for his bravery during the Amritsar riots, this man (perhaps Eurasian) disappeared in 1921 (perhaps simply by abandoning European  See Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, pp. 56, 64, and e.g. Alfred Draper, The Amritsar Massacre: Twilight of the Raj (1981; Leatherhead: Ashford, Buchan, & Enright, 1993), pp. 55–72.

The Raj Quartet  31

dress), and elements of his story can be found in Ronald Merrick’s. Finally, there are two historical figures who attach to Guy Perron. The first is his namesake, ‘Sergeant Perron’, the nom de plume of a French mercenary called Pierre Cuiller who enjoyed notable success in the 1790s with the Marathas before they met Wellington and their Waterloo, but also (like Merrick) lost a hand in battle. Here Scott’s point is primarily about historical knowledge, for those meeting the present British Sergeant Perron will either know or not know about his namesake: and those who do know—Perron himself, the Nawab of Mirat, Bronowsky, Rowan, and Merrick—are thereby distinguished from the philistine colonial ignorance of so many British. In Merrick’s case, especially, the proven competence of his research and recall also form part of an intricate pattern of comparison between himself and Perron. The second figure, much more widely known but no longer so commonly read, is the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Essays of 1841 were obsessively reread by Barbie Batchelor in her decline; her copy, inherited by Sarah Layton, passed in 1945 to Perron, and so eventually came to the Stranger, who incorporated into his texts nine short passages that Barbie had especially marked. These must be considered by readers as they occur and in context, but one—‘There is a relation between the hours of our lives and the centuries of time.’ (T77)—is in effect the credo of all serious historical novelists, and a central element of Scott’s composition; and one other is distinguished by being repeated four times: Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them. (T202, D207, 277, 384) This too is a part of Scott’s credo as novelist and historian, and achieves in his application of it to the Raj, and especially to the life of Barbie Batchelor, a resonant tragedy of private loss and doomed attempts at political self-preservation. It is also, like Emerson’s notion of hours and centuries, a principal means whereby Scott connects the great events we shallowly remember with his profound imagination of fictional men and women representing the real and largely forgotten individuals who enacted them.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘On History’, in Essays (1841), para. 3.

Part 3. ‘Coming to the end of themselves as they were’: Witnessing Imperial Decay In the ‘Prologue’ to The Day of the Scorpion, one of the sections explicitly featuring the Stranger as investigative narrator, he says, after describing various aspects of Ranpur, something imaginative and telling: But it is not these things which most impress the stranger on his journey into the civil lines, into the old city itself (where he becomes lost and notes the pass­age of a woman dressed in the burkha in the street of the moneylenders) and then back past the Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and Government House, and on into the old cantonment in a search for points of present contact with the reality of twenty years ago, the repercussions, for example, of the affair in the Bibighar Gardens. What impresses him is something for which there is no memorial but which all these things collectively bear witness to: the fact that here in Ranpur, and in places like Ranpur, the British came to the end of themselves as they were. (S11) Besides its striking formulation, this final phrase is important because Scott used it elsewhere, in a very interesting context. There are two versions of the relevant text, a lecture Scott gave to the Royal Society for Literature in 1968 as ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, and revised for a British Council tour in 1972 as ‘After Marabar: Britain and India, A Post-Forsterian View’. In the later version Scott circled the key-phrase in analysing Forster’s Mrs Moore: [A Passage to India] is not a novel about the nice English allying themselves, or trying to, with the nice Indian against the nasty English, but one that foresees a day when both the liberal and the reactionary instinct, as we have known them, as Forster knew them, will run out of steam, come up against the rock-face of a particular civilization’s terminus, which I see as symbolized in the Marabar Caves where there was that echo that frightened Mrs Moore.  Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, p. 124.

The Raj Quartet  33

That ‘rock-face of a particular civilization’s terminus’ itself connects with Scott’s description of Pankot, where the ‘railways ended against a rocky face that the road found its way round’ (S61); and in the earlier version of the lecture the description of Mrs Moore’s post-Marabar predicament is the key-phrase itself, mildly gramma­tic­ ally shifted: ‘She had come, you could say, to the end of herself as she was’. This notion of an internal, moral and cultural equivalent to ‘the end of the line’, a place from which further progress is not possible without radical change and psychic revolution, thus flows from an individual character in Forster to a representative provincial hot-weather capital and hill-station, and so up to ‘the British’ collectively. Scott’s claim is that the British Empire was not simply a victim of events, but of its inability through senescence and exhaustion to respond to them; of finding in crisis, with unpardonable surprise, that its (supposed) capital of every kind was terminally over-expended and credit no longer available. The economic side of this claim is well-documented, the Sub­conti­nent becoming a net creditor of the UK from 1926 in a clear sign that the economics of colonial empire were waning; but the extension of such bankruptcy to politics, to morality, and to individual as well as collective Anglo-Indian social capacity is less widely considered. Yet that is what the Stranger saw, his whole text/s backing it up, and (looking back to the paragraph in the Prologue to The Day of the Scorpion) one may notice afresh that the journey prefacing the phrase, ‘into the civil lines [...] and on into the old cantonment’ (or army lines), wraps around both the civil and military halves of the administration, and drew both into Scott’s indictment. 3.1 The Civil One obvious problem with the Indian Civil Service (ICS), largely but not entirely inherited from the EIC administration, was its exclusivity. The full member­ship, even in the 1940s, barely exceeded 1,000, and they really were known and treated as ‘the Heaven-born’; predictably enough, this meant that (despite some token Indian admissions from the 1920s) the ICS remained all but exclusively white. A similar picture emerges of a second civilian branch, the Indian Political Service (IPS), which dealt with the Princely States and some aspects of foreign policy. The third branch, the Judiciary, was notably better, both Hindu pandits and Muslim qazis being appointed from the eighteenth century, but the Indian government as a whole remained distinctly mandarin in nature, rarefied, isolated from the governed, and openly racist. The grossest aspect of that racism may be crudely but fairly summarised as ‘divide  Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, in Stocks, ed., Essays by Divers Hands, p. 127.

The Raj Quartet 34

and rule’. Most blatantly, the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 established separate Hindu and Muslim electorates, reserving seats for one or other group, and while the constitutional machinery necessary for power-sharing via elections only came into practical being in the mid-1930s, the Reforms made sectarianism a bedrock of politics in new and more obdurate ways. The British did not invent the Hindu–Muslim divide, but they did enormously exacerbate and institutionalise it; and even while a string of constitutional conferences in the 1920s and ’30s between successive British ministers, Gandhi, Nehru, and others hammered out the plans for more democratic govern­ment, the underlying realities shifted steadily towards the violent religious sectarianism that still animates ‘India v. Pakistan’. Scott is very careful to show individuals of good will and good understanding, but he also shows, remorselessly, their and their nation’s political inadequacy in the face of both the general rise of Indian nationalism (whether of Gandhi’s peaceful or another variety) and the burgeoning consequences of having instituted a sectarian divide. DC White, Governor Malcolm, Nigel Rowan, and other members of the ICS or IPS are shown to be men of diligence, good heart, and excellent mind: but just as White, faced with the riots of 1942, can only call in the troops, however he feels; and just as Malcolm, knowing it to be worse than foolish, must authorise the political detention of M. A. Kasim; so Rowan, discovering what he believes to be the ghastly truth about Merrick’s treatment of Kumar, must suppress it. One must be realistic—there has never been a government anywhere without secrets, and secret wrongdoing—but in these cases there is an ugly and amoral progression. White’s choice, in particular, is not indefensible. Images of Gandhian satyagraha campaigns are one thing, but the ‘Quit India’ riots of 1942 were not of that kind, and while many involved may have been lawful protesters, there were also extremists whose aim was certainly sabotage of the anti-Japanese war effort. Scott chose as exemplars the entirely real Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; see Part 6.3), and with good reason, for, founded in 1925 by an overt admirer of Mussolini’s, the RSS was and is explicitly a Fascist organisation, dedicated to Hindu supremacism, with cadre and youth-organisa­tional structures modelled on the Italian Blackshirts. In the context of 1942 this group at least were both enemy agents and traitors; in any context their chosen strategies have down the years been terroristic; and a DC faced with organised rioting (or anyone in an equivalent position today) must seek to restore order. But Scott nevertheless registers (through Reid and Merrick) several criticisms, notably that White’s professionalism does not extend to any adequate grasp of the insurgent forces—i.e. that his political intelligence is lacking—and that his psycho-

The Raj Quartet  35

logical assessments of the leading local players, including Reid, Merrick, and Pandit Baba, are similarly inadequate. In consequence, he dithers in his own vacuum, and his good will is shown as, in practice, so woolly as to be of little use. Governor Malcolm is a more senior and smarter administrator, but his personal impotence in the situation that arises in 1942 is thereby shown as all the more poignant; or pathetic. Both he, in detaining Kasim, and Kasim, in refusing to avoid detention by renouncing Congress, are sticking to their principles—but those principles, however individually and personally defensible, achieve only waste and disaster. A serious critique of Gandhi’s leadership and Congress’s decisions is involved (see Parts 6.1–3), but so too is a critique of the British for letting things come to such a pass—a charge that reaches back to the 1909 reforms, but also forwards, to the terrible effects after 1945 of having proscribed Congress and detained Congressmen. To put it most bluntly, Malcolm in the name of current unity, and Kasim in the hope of future unity, take a step that denies both. With Rowan’s and Malcolm’s later decisions to cover (as they strongly believe) for Merrick, there is again a justificatory shell, the subsequent agreement between Wavell and Nehru to forestall any witchhunt of officers who ‘exceeded their duties’: but in the light of the Partition bloodbath this looks a far weaker argument than it might have seemed in 1944–5. And hindsight aside, a peculiarly unpleasant moral triage is revealed by Merrick’s case: the problem is Kumar’s accusations of physical and sexual assault amounting to torture, with the strong suspicion that all the Mayapore detenus were innocent victims of circumstance; and the answer, horribly, is Merrick’s severe injuries and decoration for gallantry, which somehow allow the British to release Kumar without acting on his statement. Seeking to educate Ahmed Kasim in the ways of the Raj, Count Bronowsky gives a summary in which irony cannot disguise his distaste: ‘[...] Captain Rowan has recognized with the sure instinct of his race, that Mr. Merrick’s recent history is the key to the preservation of the status quo. It has probably already been decided that the six boys are unjustly detained and must be released. That is the principle of justice re-established. But how preserve the status quo when clearly a mistake was made by Merrick and compounded by superior authority? On paper your prime scapegoat is Merrick. But how unpleasant to have a scapegoat at all. Imagine the relief with which Captain Rowan will go back to Ranpur and initiate discreet enquiries—with the Governor’s approval—into the truth of what he has heard tonight. A citation for bravery in the field and an amputated arm. What luck! It wipes the

The Raj Quartet  36

blot from the escutcheon and solves the problem of Mr. Merrick’s future civil or military employment. The boys go free, the files are closed, and all is—as they say—as it was before.’ (S473) Of course all is not as it was: in India, at least, the trick no longer quite worked, and is plainly a trick that does not deserve to work at all. However politically convenient its thinking, the equations of Merrick’s police service, for good or ill, with his battle­field mutilation, and of that mutilation with the injuries Kumar suffered, are profoundly morally bankrupt, failures of reciprocal commitment not only to Merrick and to Kumar, but also to Daphne, who actually suffered the rape and eventually died of it, and whose real assailants go uncaught. All these civil failures by the British ultimately issued, on a truly grotesque scale, in the comprehensive catastrophe of Partition—also an Indian civil failure (and de facto civil war, as well as the first Indo-Pakistani conflict) that dashed the hopes of the ‘All-India Congress’ even as Independence seemed to realise them, and utterly undermines British claims to have nurtured the Indian polity as imperial ‘parents’ should their colonial ‘children’. After the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ of 16–22 August 1946, in which more than 5,000 Indians were murdered, the Governor of Bengal told the Viceroy ‘I can honestly say that parts of the city [...] were as bad as anything I saw [in 1916] when I was with the Guards on the Somme’: speaking of a city founded by the British in 1690, there can be no more devastating indictment of the civil pass to which 256 years of British rule had brought its Indian possession. 3.2 The Military Since 1945, and certainly since the 1960s, soldiering has (outside the USA) tended to be despised rather than admired as a career. The Indian Army (IA) in particular, probably also imagined as a brutal instrument of colonial repression, is unlikely to be fairly considered: so it is worth pointing out, for example, that even at its most swollen wartime height the white population of India, including all British troops, barely exceeded 300,000—and that was at a time when the total population was well over 300,000,000. The underlying point is that the IA was indeed Indian, only the officer corps being British, and the hundreds of thousands of Indians who served in it did so with pride and honour. It might also be noted, given Britons’ very poor reputation today as linguists, that almost all IA officers spoke at least two Indian languages passably, Hindi as a lingua franca, and whatever the particular language of their own  Quoted in Judith Brown, Modern India, p. 326.

The Raj Quartet 37

troops (which might be Marathi, Ghurkhali, Pushtu, Bengali or any one of a score of lesser languages). Quite a few spoke more, and fluently. Although Scott himself had a strong dislike of old-school officers, he did not make the mistake of underestimating them. Writing to a friend about Brigadier Reid he remarked ‘I loathe the type [...] But I tried to get into his skin’, and the ventriloquy Scott achieved in writing the pages of Reid’s memoir, A Simple Life, for ‘Civil and Military’ is remarkable—persuasive, penetrating, and largely free of satire or condescension. That portrait is succeeded by the reconstruction of Teddie Bingham in ‘A Question of Loyalty’, another astonishing exercise in sympathetic imagination, and one that leads directly to the ‘regimental mystique’ Scott clearly also loathed while simultaneously finding it of the greatest fascination. In its purest material form, the displays of silver and battle-honours in the regimental Mess of the Pankot Rifles, it is easy for loathing to be uppermost: as Mildred Layton says, viewing the Mess for what she knows will be the last time: ‘I thought there might be some changes, but there aren’t. It’s all exactly as it was when I first saw it more than forty years ago. I can’t even be angry. But someone ought to be.’  (T201) Quite so: but the silver and battle-honours in the Mess are only tokens of the real thing, the bond that is formed between officers and men in training and in combat, and whatever one thinks of it, that bond is also, for example, what kept Teddie Bingham going during the retreat from Burma: One could picture him marching out, tired, dirty and hungry, carry­ing more than his quota of small-arms (to relieve a couple of exhausted sepoys of their weight), keeping on and smiling because being person­ally blameless for what he supposed had to be summed up as a stunning defeat, a complete disaster, there was no call to look miserable and every reason to give an example of how to keep going, even when every limb was attached to the trunk by things that felt like loose hot rubber bands.  (T101) And the very endurance of the regimental mystique is what eventually killed Teddie, when he met as enemies, on the field of battle, Indian soldiers once of his own regiment, now allies of the Japanese. It is a commonplace that ‘history is written by the victors’, and readers of history are often alert to the possibilities of distortion; but less so to the greatest power  Quoted in Robin Moore, Paul Scott’s Raj (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 64.  Sepoys (pronounced si-pa-hes) are Indian private soldiers.

The Raj Quartet  38

of victory, which is not misrepresentation, but silence. Historians of World War 2, whatever their nation, have been notably reluctant to acknowledge what was in fact a fairly widespread phenomenon, the turning of PoWs, and the discomfort is easily under­stood when it is considered that there were French, Scandinavian, and British units in the Waffen SS—not the sort of fact any nation is keen to face. The British Legion of St George was raised from among post-Dunkirk PoWs principally to fight the Russians under an anti-communist banner; its chief recruiter, astonishingly, was one John Amery—son of Leo Amery, MP, Churchill’s Secretary of State for India 1940–5—who later became the only British citizen executed for treason after WW2, being hanged at Wandsworth Prison at the same time as the ‘renegade’ Irishman William Joyce (who broadcast from Germany as Lord Haw-Haw). Embarrassing as all this may be (and it has been very effectively suppressed), the numbers involved were fairly small—but that is not true in the Russian case, where General Vlasov and others commanded divisions, nor in the Indian case, of which Scott has been perhaps the most important historian and certainly the outstanding British publicist. The story begins with another well-suppressed fact, that when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942 more than 80,000 Allied troops were obliged to surrender, about 40,000 being Indians of the Indian Army; a further 50,000 troops, many Indian, surrendered with Malaya. The terrible fate of those PoWs, mostly British and Australian, who worked on the Burma railway is rightly memorialised and honoured, but the position of ordinary Indian sepoys as PoWs, separated from their officers, and offered alternating threats and blandishments by eloquent Indian nationalists, does not deserve to be forgotten. And as Scott well understood, after August 1942, when the British arrested Gandhi and more than 60,000 others, proscribing Congress, the political situation of ‘loyal Indian PoWs’ became so severe that the Japanese succeeded in raising among them an army of divisional strength, the Azad Hind Fauj, or Indian National Army (INA). In the event, the combat impact of the INA was minimal, but Scott persuasively identifies its mere existence as the silver bullet that slew the military pride and cohesion of the Raj, and so made immediate post-war British withdrawal de facto a security necessity. His first principal scene of this strand is the whole imbroglio surrounding Teddie Bingham and the two INA men, formerly of his own Muzzafirabad Guides, whom he chases as a would-be saviour to death and disaster. Teddie’s honourable idiocy costs him and an Indian driver their lives, Merrick his arm and looks, and the IA a  See John Keegan, The Battle for History: Re-Fighting World War II (1995; London: Pimlico, 1997).

The Raj Quartet  39

jeep—but the consequences never cease to rebound and grow. Merrick’s speciality in Army Intelligence remains INA cases, one of which provides Scott’s second principal scene, the meeting of M. A. Kasim with his elder son, Sayed Kasim, once of the Ranpur Regiment, then an INA major, and now awaiting trial for turning coat and making treasonable radio-broadcasts. Through the Kasims the split within the Indian Army (between all who had stayed loyal, in or out of captivity, and all who had turned coat) begins to map onto the split in the Subcontinent itself, between India and Pakistan. Partition was itself in part made to happen by the speed of British withdrawal, driven by the fact of the INA, and there are also questions of what part ex-INA personnel played in the massacres of 1946–7. The utter fiasco of the INA show trials at the Red Fort in 1945–6 is only reported, for Scott’s narrative elides that period with Guy Perron’s post-war return to the UK, but the effects of fratricidal division continue in 1947 with the murders of Merrick and Ahmed Kasim (Sayed’s brother). Merrick, seemingly, dies in revenge for 1942, but contemporary reasons of 1947 are far more probable a cause, and Ahmed is certainly assassinated for reasons connected with his father and brother. One great complication is that while the emergent Pakistani army allowed ex-INA officers to hold commissions, the emergent army of the Republic of India (the rest of the quondam Indian Army) did not; but if such complications make detail murky, neither Merrick’s nor Ahmed Kasim’s murderers ever being named, let alone caught, the overall picture is nevertheless clear. Literally in Bingham’s case, quite possibly so in Merrick’s and Kasim’s, and far more than metaphorically where the Raj itself was concerned, the consequences of the INA were fatal because they included the destruction of bonds both within the IA and between the IA and the larger societies, Indian and AngloIndian, that it served. The Anglo-Indian journey was a very strange one. Perron, not least a historian whose speciality was 1830–57, conceived as a period of ‘dress-rehearsal’ for full imperial rule, appreciated its oddity in 1945, writing in his notebook: ‘[...] Paradox! The most insular people in the world managed to establish the largest empire the world has ever seen. No, not paradox. Insularity, like empire-building, requires superb self-confidence, a conviction of one’s moral superiority. And I suppose that when the war is really over the recollection that there was a time when we ‘stood alone’ against Hitler will confirm us in our national sense of moral superiority. Will it be in those abstract terms and on those shifting grounds that we’ll attempt to build a new empire whose

The Raj Quartet  40

cornerstone will be the act of relinquishing for ‘moral’ reasons the empire we actually had?’ He hesitated, then added, ‘Tonight I am a bit drunk.’ (D106) And Scott, by all accounts, might himself have been at least a little drunk (and needed to be?) when he wrote this passage, probably in 1974: but write it he did, and around it wove the closure of his complex tale of the British presence in India, sustained by and only by the people who actually lived and died there, by showing them all exhausting that necessary conviction of moral superiority, and feeling it fade to black in a few short years. He shows individuals valiantly or wrongly defying this ‘moral drift of history’ (J33), like Bingham and later Merrick; or simply crumbling away or indulging in alcohol and adultery, as Mildred Layton and so many did; or defecting to a new loyalty, like Sayed Kasim; or fading with the old one, like the Indian Princes whom the British were sworn to defend but abandoned to their extinction, and perhaps also like Hari Kumar. But as surely as we die, all must live the consequences of coming to the end of themselves as they were, and must in some measure pass as the world of their birth and lives passes; appallingly, the one character who has most clearly come to no such end of himself is Ahmed Kasim, anonymously cut down for a religious identity in which he barely believes. It is a vision of profound bleakness, epic turning to multiple and enveloping tragedy, but also a vision of moral exhaustion and political bankruptcy. And for all, but especially British, readers, it poses Perron’s very awkward questions both of what exactly it was to the end of which the British came, and of what they have subsequently, in consequence of that self-loss, become.

Part 4. ‘There’s nothing I can do’: Embodying Personal Nullity The Raj Quartet begins and ends with similar images of white women kneeling hopelessly amid disaster, simultaneously doing something they apprehend as an attempt at redress and uttering despair. In the beginning it is Edwina Crane, kneeling in the rain, holding a dead Indian’s hand, and saying ‘There’s nothing I can do’ (J69); in the end it is Sarah Layton, kneeling at Premanagar Station to fill water-pots amid the bloody aftermath of the train-massacre in which Ahmed Kasim was assassinated (D592–3). Between them, in different keys, come Daphne Manners, briefly but tellingly of the same hopeless opinion, and Barbie Batchelor, who would never have spoken Miss Crane’s phrase but whose situation in Pankot and erosion of faith profoundly orchestrate it. Collectively these memsahibs illustrate the inadequacies under empire of goodwill, of love, of Christian faith and education, and at the bitter last, even of practicality. 4.1 Edwina Crane The portrait of Miss Crane is only sketched, but powerfully presents several important tropes. An older but still vigorous woman, working as a mission-school superintendent, Miss Crane is shown to have been the object of Anglo-Indian class condescension, and to have been driven by it both to her missionary work and (in time) to admiring support for Gandhi and the creed of non-violent protest, satyagraha—literally ‘truth-force’. In one sense this is clearly admirable, a living by conscience and political liberality that earned her the mild distrust of her fellow Anglo-Indians: by the same token, however, she felt profoundly betrayed in 1942 by Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ resolution, and is the first person readers are shown as losing faith in the Indian as well as the British vision of India’s future. A similar duality marks all Miss Crane’s history. On the fateful day, 9 August 1942, she had been visiting the mission school at Dibrapur, outside Mayapore, and despite warnings of trouble was pluckily determined to drive herself back home. Worrying for her safety, the mission-teacher, Mr Chaudhuri, accompanied her, and when they were

The Raj Quartet  42

confronted by rioters strung across the road, urged her to drive straight through them. But this she was unable to do, and once she had stopped her fate was no longer in her own hands. Her car was burned, she was beaten, and Mr Chaudhuri was killed: She dried her eyes by wiping them on the sleeve of her blouse, once, twice, three times. She felt the first heavy drops of rain. Her raincape had been in the back of the car. She said, in anguish, ‘But there’s nothing to cover him with, nothing, nothing,’ and stood up, crouched, got hold of his feet and dragged him to the side of the road.   ‘I can’t help it,’she said, as if to him, when he lay bloody and limp and inhuman in the place she had dragged him to. ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,’ and turned away and began to walk with long unsteady strides through the rain, past the blazing car, towards Mayapore. As she walked she kept saying, ‘Nothing I can do. Nothing. Nothing.’   A hundred yards past the car she stopped. ‘But there is,’ she said, and turned and walked back until she reached Mr. Chaudhuri’s body. She sat down in the mud at the side of the road, close to him, reached out and took his hand.   ‘It’s taken me a long time,’ she said, meaning not only Mr Chaudhuri, ‘I’m sorry it was too late.’ (J68–9) How admirable, how pathetic, was this gesture? One pays one’s money and makes one’s choice, but the Stranger’s narration leaves no doubt that Miss Crane’s pluck was misplaced, nor that her concern with the lives of rioters (for whom she bore no responsibility) was a primary factor in the death of her subordinate (for whom she did). Like DC White, but with greater experience of the country, her moral, political, and self- assessments were seriously in error, and the hopeless pass she reached was, if not her fault, in part of her own making. The bittersweetness of Miss Crane’s fused admirability and inadequacy recurs with her end, dressing herself in a white sari, the Indian colour of mourning, and burning herself to death in her garden shed. Ronald Merrick, who had to investigate, interpreted her act as that of a ‘good’ Indian widow becoming sati (suttee)—in Hindu theology a state of grace—because she judged the India she knew to have died with Mr Chaudhuri; but Miss Crane also left a note that said, among other things, ‘There is no God. Not even on the road from Dibrapur.’ (T386). Barbie Batchelor was clear that Miss Crane died in despair, and that her suicide was sinful—but Barbie was despairing herself, and knew Edwina Crane more in fantasy than reality, so the question stays open. At a more general level, though, the symbolisms are plain. It may be true that there

The Raj Quartet  43

is nothing Miss Crane can do when she speaks her despair, save hold Mr Chaudhuri’s hand; but there were things that until very recently she could have done, and did not do for reasons of weakness and misjudgement. And what she did do, with the wisdom of hindsight, was to abandon proprieties and self-interest, embracing sorrow with the simplest human contact—never a lesson that the sahibs and memsahibs of the Raj were going to learn save in extremis, and so too late. 4.2 Daphne Manners Miss Manners is another victim for whom readers tend to feel both strongly sympathetic admiration and some considerable exasperation. Without for a moment condoning any bigotry about her interracial affair with Hari Kumar, her gung-ho conduct of it in ignorance of the politicised triangle with Merrick, and in particular the time and place of its consummation, were less than wise. Lady Chatterjee, still mourning Daphne 20 years after her death, thought she was ‘like Pandora, who bashed off to the attic and prised the lid of the box open’ (J118), and the tale revealed in Daphne’s journal, ‘The Bibighar Gardens’, confirms the metaphor, for recognition of hope­less­ ness came only at the end of Daphne’s story, when all else has spilled out. For much of her narrative what is striking (as ‘bashed off’ suggests) is her retention and strangely energetic manufacture of (false) hope. Even at her personal nadir, immediately after the gang-rape, Daphne was determined to act and to force change as she willed: Hari must be silent, both must say they haven’t met since visiting the local temple, a miscarriage of justice must be forestalled. Readers who dislike and distrust Merrick can be swept along with this, as Daphne herself was during her convalescence as a witness in her own case, but even if commended her conduct did not produce the results she desired: Hari and other innocents were arrested, maltreated, and detained, and many others, including those Daphne loved, adversely affected. Under all the circumstances it is hard not to feel anger and sorrow for her suffering and admiration for her courage, yet her lies had such power that one must also wonder what her truth might have wrought, had she spoken it. Despair came to Daphne not only late, but in a minor key edged with hysteria. She had already realised that in imposing silence on Hari she had condemned him by making it impossible for him to defend himself either criminally or politically; ‘even in my panic there was this assumption of superiority, of privilege, of believing I knew  The Stranger later endorsed the metaphor again by titling his narrative of 1947 ‘Pandora’s Box’, a strong prod for readers to connect the rape in 1942 with the catastrophe of Partition.

The Raj Quartet  44

what was best for both of us, because the colour of my skin automatically put me on the side of those who never told a lie’ (J452). Then DC White’s wife, Connie, visiting Daphne in her convalescence and early pregnancy, asked her about that silence, which had condemned Hari to political detention: Connie said, ‘I expect it’s frightfully silly of me, but you know if Hari Kumar had been an Englishman I could have understood his silence better, although even then it would have had to be a silence imposed on him by a woman.’   I began to laugh again. I laughed because I saw that this time there really was nothing I could do—for Connie, for myself, or for Hari, for anyone. (J467) By this stage the claim of impotence is again true, and once again it is also true that there were until shortly before things Daphne could have done. Willing to bear her child despite its uncertain paternity, and rightly contemptuous of the horrified prurience shown on that account by her compatriots, Daphne is nevertheless unwilling either to speak the truth herself or to allow Hari to do so. Unlike Miss Crane, she had made a simple human contact with a living Indian, and found nothing simple about it all, even in the brief period that it could be sustained. 4.3 Barbie Batchelor The Towers of Silence begins with Barbie’s retirement, culmin­ates in her meeting Merrick, and ends with her death. Her obsession in the final stage of her life with the vultures circling a Parsi Tower of Silence visible from her hospital-window provided the novel’s title; her death allowed a narrative only edged chronologically forward in the third novel to recommence in A Division of the Spoils. Scott noted in 1975 he had had ‘no idea that there would be four novels’, but from 1965 letters show he was thinking ‘in terms of a trilogy’ and in 1967 with The Day of the Scorpion nearly complete hoped it would take him ‘right up to the eve of independ­ence’ in 1947; but he finally reached that juncture only in A Division of the Spoils, six years later. Perron, illustrating ‘english ignorance of india’ and ‘convey­[ing] the political historical moment’, bulked the last novel; but Scott construed the structure of the second and third as opening to ‘congress muslim, military family, princely india. hill station’ and narrowing ‘to the view­point of a single character’, so distension to a quartet  The quotations in small caps are from Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, pp. 167–8. The quoted letters are to Dorothy Ganapathy, dated 30/9/65 and 7/5/67, both held at the McFarlin Library of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Raj Quartet  45

must be understood as largely Barbie’s work. One should therefore ask what her inclusion at such length achieves, and answers are not far to seek. The Quartet remains spinally locked to Merrick, the only character to appear and act in all four novels, and Barbie plainly serves in her class and tragedy as a term of comparison for him. Readers who like her and dislike him are presented with a serious problem, for she, almost alone, responded warmly to Merrick—admiring, for example, as masculine and confident the voice so many others heard as betraying plebeian origins, and hence a ‘reason’ for social exclusion. As Barbie’s despair and either spiritual or hallucinatory experiences deepened, she was also responsible for dragging in Emerson, in whose eyes (as in Scott’s) her tiny life embodies all the Raj and its ‘centuries of time’ just as well as any Anglo-Indian’s. Moreover, armed with Emerson’s radical egalitarianism Barbie acquired in her thinking a cutting edge that (especially after Mabel Layton’s death) privately flayed and anatomised Mildred Layton and the Pankot mems even as they publicly demon­strated their cruelty and power in ostracising and slandering her. Barbie was thus a catalyst as well as a mirror and comparison, and like Miss Crane and Miss Manners, Miss Batchelor had a tremendous energy that led her astray. Space here precludes following her revealing divagations and the fascinating processes whereby the echo-sounder of her moral, Christian conviction of righteous­ness maps Pankot’s hollowness in revealing its own. What does matter is the largest pattern, for even on the brink of her catastrophe Barbie tried to deal in hopes, and forced on Merrick as a gift her copy of The Jewel in her Crown: The black glove, [Merrick’s] good hand and one of her hands held the picture. Slowly they each withdrew the support of their living flesh.   ‘There, you can do it. You can carry it.’   There was perspiration on his mottled forehead. He gazed down at the awkwardly angled gift.   ‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember this. Are you giving it to me?’   ‘Of course.’   One eyebrow contracted in a frown. The other—vestigial—perhaps contracted too.   ‘Why?’   She thought about this.   ‘One should always share one’s hopes,’ she said. ‘That represents one of the unfulfilled ones. Oh, not the gold and scarlet uniforms, not the pomp, not the obeisance. We’ve had all that and plenty. We’ve had everything in the

The Raj Quartet  46

picture except what got left out.’   ‘What was that, Miss Batchelor?’   She said, not wishing to use that emotive word, ‘I call it the unknown Indian. He isn’t there. So the picture isn’t finished.’ (T387–8) She and Merrick had just explicitly discussed Miss Crane’s suicide, and ‘that emotive word’ is ‘love’, or, in the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible, ‘charity’, which—as they had discussed faith and she had just mentioned hope—would complete the triad from I Corinthians 13:13. What she sought for her Unknown Indian was not charitable relief (welcome enough) but inclusion in that beneficent love of man-bap the allegorised Queen in the picture was supposed to radiate and represent: a reinforcement of those moral aspirations of the Raj to which Barbie had once been committed, and that she with others had felt dwindle. Knowing Edwina Crane’s despair, and set on her own ‘road to Dibra­pur’ as the very opposite of a ‘road to Damascus’, Barbie could no longer sustain such hope or righteousness, and forcibly passed their symbol to the man she wrongly if understand­ably insisted could ‘carry it’. Barbie was not, as it proved, sharing her hopes so much as giving them away. Departing from this scene in an overladen tonga that crashed in the steep descent from Rose Cottage, she fell through visions of Mildred as the devil into silence. Committed to the Hospital of the Samaritan Mission of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Ranpur, to her as a Bishop Barnard missionary deeply alien in its Catholicism, she ceased to speak and wrote only brief notes, some amusingly abusive, all poignant against her history of loquacity and the social crucifixion she endured in her Pankot passion. And when she died at almost the moment of Hiroshima, in what is the most nearly preternatural moment in the Quartet, upright, ‘eternally alert, in sudden sunshine, her shadow burnt into the wall behind her as if by some distant but terrible fire’ (T397), Barbie achieved an absolute personal impotence in extinction. She may never  ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.’ (AV); ‘So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’ (RSV). The triad appears elsewhere in Paul’s letters (Rom. 5:1–5, Phil. 1:9–10, Col. 1:4–5, I Thess. 1:3 & 5:8, II Thess. 1:3–4) but the instance in I Cor. 13, common at Anglican funerals, is best known; the same chapter has references to prophecy, feeding the poor, giving one’s body to be burned, enduring all things, and apotheosis, as well as the famous line in v.12 about seeing now ‘through a glass darkly; but then face to face’, cumulatively confirming it was I Cor. Barbie had in mind.  Literally ‘(I am your) mother-father’. Originally, in honorific or vocative use, part of a traditional formula of supplication, as Ap ma-bap hai khuda-wand, ‘You, my Lord, are my mother and father’, it came (in the first person) to signify the imperial ideal of benevolent dominance. It had particular force in the army, to express the bond between a regimental officer and his Indian troops, and in the missions, where it encompassed Christ’s stewardship of all and the evangelical and educational pastoralism of missionaries.

The Raj Quartet  47

say either phrase, but she most surely had come to the end of herself as she was, and found that there was nothing whatever she could do to affect anything that mattered to her; or had once mattered, when she could remember why. And while uniquely herself, Barbie also carries, like everyone in the Quartet, a representative burden—much of it social, most of the rest religious. Very early in her sojourn in Pankot Barbie knew that something critical had broken in her faith and could not be mended, leaving her (like Teddie) nothing but determination and trained goodwill to fall back on. A bedroom mat was her habitual place of prayer, a practice undertaken as if working a ‘devotional machine’ as productive as her letter-writing table but able, as faith failed and God turned away, only to generate ‘little rejects’. ‘The prayers hardened in the upper air, once so warm, now so frosty, and tinkled down. But she pressed on, head bowed, in the hail-storm’ (T31). Barbie puzzled over this growing inefficacy, hoping The Jewel in her Crown, hung on her bedroom-wall, might act as ‘a surrogate for God, a half-way house of intercession, capable perhaps of boosting the weak signals from the rush mat and transmitting them through the crackling overloaded ether which her direct prayers could not penetrate’ (T75–6). But encountering the last paragraph of Emerson’s essay on ‘Self-Reliance’, which dismisses false comforts by declaring ‘Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles’: She cried out involuntarily, stood up, pushing back the chair. She went towards the mat and then began to tremble because she could not quite reach it and in any case her knees would not bend. She seemed fixed in this proud and arrogant position. Her jaws were locked too, her mouth still open as if to allow the cry to come back in. She could not remember what her principles were. (T202) Continuing an inexorable diminution, the complex image of Barbie too arrogantly upright to pray and simultaneously forgetful of her principles is of cumulative, crippling loss. She was only 66 when she died, of lost faith, social standing, worth, confidence, health, sanity, and hope; with her died the last person in the Quartet willing to claim imperialism as, in any sense, a mission, and all that was left was a robbers’ and vandals’ division of their spoils in the shadow of the new Pax Atomica. 4.4 Sarah Layton Though she survived them, and was later able to find with Perron something resembling a normal life back in the UK, Sarah’s moments of despairing realisation were

The Raj Quartet  48

in many ways the worst of all. They were certainly the bloodiest, amid the ghastly aftermath of a train massacre, and (as with Miss Crane, who stopped her car so as not to endanger rioters) they were closely haunted by what could have been done by Sarah and others to save Ahmed Kasim, but wasn’t. As she said, still in physiological and moral shock, ‘We just let him go. We all sat here and let him go’ (D584)—not only ‘There’s (now) nothing I can do’, but ‘I did nothing’ and ‘We did nothing’. She later wrote, ‘If we’d been travelling only a week or two later we’d have been prepared for it, because by then the business of stopping trains and slaughtering people had become part of life.’ (D592)—but however humanly understandable and pitiable, and however unsure each of us may be about how we might react to such an emergency, after more than two centuries of British power and nearly one of imperial rule, pleas of needing another week or two while slaughter becomes quotidian can cut very little ice. Sarah never makes an open confession of personal despair, but the two statements already quoted frame a central scene:   It was at the tap ‘down there’ that [Perron] found Sarah. She was on her knees, in the filth and the muck, her skirt wet through, handing up little brass vessels to the man controlling the tap, reaching out for empty ones without looking, placing the filled vessels on the other side. The vessels, mugs, glasses were being brought and taken away by men and women and youths. He knelt by her. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let me take over.’   ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m all right doing this. I can’t do the other thing. But if you can, please do.’   So Perron picked up one of the brass jugs and turned and went among the dying. Or the dead. It wasn’t always easy to tell. (D587) Sarah later recalled this moment as ‘filling the bloody jars, going through my brave little memsahib act’ (D592), but in the Stranger’s account it was as much cowardice as courage (‘I can’t do the other thing’). Perhaps no stigma can or should attach to a woman in her twenties being unable to act as first responder to the victims of a massacre by edged weapons—but incapacity is not Sarah’s usual position, and by 1947 she, like many younger men and women, had little excuse for unfamiliarity with injuries and deaths. Readers should be reminded of her visceral inability to cope with Ronald Merrick’s disfigurement and injuries when she visited him in hospital in 1944, and just as her inability then was in part diagnostic of a moral embarrassment, and of desires for denial, so her inability now to do more than pass water-pots back and forth reflects a paralysis that has to do with far more than squeamishness at the sights of

The Raj Quartet  49

blood and mutilated human beings. From the moment of her contact in 1942 with Parvati Manners as a squalling infant, to her strange, quasi-romantic relationship with Ahmed between their first meeting in 1943 and their shared service in Mirat in 1947, Sarah tried to make that real and human contact with India, and with an Indian, that eluded and destroyed Miss Crane and Miss Manners. And in her civility, timing, colonel’s-daughter’s guts, and willingness to try Sarah had real advantages—but it was already too late, for her as for Anglo-India and any ‘All India’ Congress; neither she nor Ahmed could rise above the political forces they both found so irrelevant to the life in hand. Yet again, therefore, albeit for finer reasons, political intelligence was lacking, and the lack proved deadly, in more ways than one. Sarah may often be admirable, as she is certainly likeable, but her personal survival and later happiness elsewhere with Perron neither can nor should disguise her personal defeat as an Anglo-Indian; just as much as Miss Crane she found herself kneeling in the muck beside the unsaved dead, but she continued a mechanical parody of care and service, as if being a memsahib still meant something, while unable to bring herself to hold a cooling brown hand.

Part 5. ‘I’ve put it badly’: Class and Silence It is hard for readers not born to them to understand the codes of silence that permeated Anglo­phone society from the mid-late nineteenth century to the 1960s. In some ways not much truly changed even then, for in Anglophone (and other) places any number of topics remain strongly taboo, but in one particular regard what is taboo changed radically, at least in the UK. So much sexual information and imagery is now available in almost all media that genuine adult ignorance of sexual mechanics and inability to articulate even basic desires seems impossible, especially en masse. Imaginings of empire, moreover, far more often feature extensive sexual opportunity and compliance than prolonged virginity, but (as J. G. Farrell shows in The Siege of Krishnapur) it and a concomitant ignorance were likely conditions, for bachelors as for spinsters. India certainly offered sexual opportunities to those who knew what they were, but how many took any advantage was another matter, and public pressure for repression was as great then as it is for exposure now. Scott’s treatment of this made him a notable novelist of sex. His accounts of Daphne with Hari, and of her rape (J432–4); of Sarah with Major Clarke and later Guy Perron (S450–2, D333–5); of Mildred Layton with Kevin Coley (T307–08); and of Teddie and Susan Bingham’s wedding-night (T166–7) are all masterly—precise and evocative without ever falling into crudity or prurience, and beautifully structured to reveal minds without parading bodies. Sarah with Clark, and Susan, were certainly virgins; Hari and Teddie were probably so; the others were not, and these encounters collectively illuminate patterns of wartime sexuality that deserve careful thought. But such thought must rapidly come to the Quartet’s spine, Ronald Merrick, in some sense Daphne’s, Hari’s, Guy’s, and Teddie’s nemeses, and Susan’s second husband; and to under­stand the kinds of forces with which he as policeman and intelligencer had to deal—both in his own head and among those he must police—is a central challenge.  There is, for example, a good case that World War 2 had something of the effect on Anglo-Indian sexual mores that World War 1 had had on British ones to kick-start the roaring 1920s.

The Raj Quartet 51

5.1 Neo-Puritanism and the ‘Split Century’, 1850–1950 .

Identification of (supposedly) distinct periods is now unfashionable in historio­graphy, and since Michel Foucault declared in ‘We “Other Victorians”’ and ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’ (both 1976) that the nineteenth century neither can nor should be sexually distinguished, no-one has effectively contradicted him. Yet Foucault was not by training a historian either of modernity or of the Anglophone world, and for those personally familiar with the aftermath of the Anglo-American nineteenth century his claims present serious difficulties. Of course there was no single month or year of sudden change in sexual and conversational mores, but by the last quarter of the century what was un/acceptable had changed completely from the first quarter. In the 1790s and early 1800s there was a vogue for public breastfeeding of infants, with dresses slit to match, while the Regency period from 1810–20 remains notorious for its rakes and revelry. But even then there were sharply dissenting voices—Wellington was thought very straightlaced as a commander, even more so as Prime Minister—and by the later 1840s many of them had coalesced into what became known as the ‘Purity Campaign’. In parallel, interestingly, corseting became increasingly severe and fashionable, at once crushing women’s bodies into a sexualised hourglass-form and sharply elevating (through enforced muscular wasting and interior disarrange­ment) both gross discomfort during intercourse and perinatal mortality—which is probably where the idea of women dutifully enduring sex by ‘lying back and thinking of England’ came from. ‘Catholic Emancipation’ in the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, with other electoral changes embodied in successive Reform Acts from 1832, also meant that non­ conformists (hitherto similarly barred) could for the first time since 1660 become MPs, officers in the military etc., and by the 1870s the Purity Campaigners were in significant numbers entering parliament and government, promoting temperance and teetotalism, and generating a string of legislative acts. The age of sexual consent was raised twice in ten years (from 12 to 13 in 1875, then to 16 in 1885), de facto legalisation of brothels under the Contagious Diseases Act of 1863 was repealed, and (most notoriously) from 1885 all male homo­sexual activity was made punishable by two years’ hard labour—a law whose first celebrity victim would be Oscar Wilde. Legislation affecting India began to be passed in 1888, while similar state and federal legislation began to appear in the US, announcing the moral strain in the  Both pieces are in The History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1976; trans. Robert Hurley, 1978; New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 1–50.

The Raj Quartet 52

Progressive Movement and prefiguring Prohibition. The tones of Anglo­phone society also changed, as literature records, becoming more and more marked by silences as more and more things became taboo in polite conversation: not only sex, but sexuality, and almost all matters of our physical existence between heart and knees; not only doubts, religious and political, but the ethos of scepticism and any awareness of manipulation; not only the offensive, but the unpalatable, distasteful, and merely unwelcome were all consigned to principled social and intellectual neglect. Cued by the centrality in the UK of the Purity Campaign, driven by religious nonconformists, the British socio-political drive for supposed moral renewal through emotional and sensory austerity may be helpfully labelled Neo-Puritanism, for no such pious cohort of people had held socio-political sway in England since the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. The century or so most affected by Neo-Puritanism, 1850–1950, is what I dub for convenience the ‘Split Century’. The repressions of later Victorianism and their lingering aftermath did not mean that there were no promiscuous men or women—on the contrary—but did mean, for example, that Victorians simultaneously built more churches and patronised more brothels than any other regnal group on record; and that in every class and section of society there were significant and increasing numbers of adults whose degree of wilful sexual ignorance was by both ancient and modern standards exceptionally high. Those kinds of polarities also meant the propagation across society of new fault lines, often inward, invidious, psychically debilitating, and marked by silences of denial, repression, and ‘unspeakability’—the very opposite (and root) of our contemporary psychological beliefs in acceptance, expression, and articulation as keys to mental recovery and health. And, crucially, the Split Century includes the whole period of formal empire, 1877–1947, and hence also the high-water mark of imperial Christian missionary zeal. By no means idle at home, the Neo-Puritans found exceptional scope in empire—Africa, above all, but India too, and they brought with them highly developed matrices of intense corporeal shame (the body being altogether Fallen) and corresponding silences. The funniest snapshot of the consequences in the Quartet is the moment when ‘Tusker’ Smalley, after a processing delay of several seconds, ‘went red in the face and said ‘Good God!’’ (T356) because the psychiatrist Captain Samuels, asked directly about Reichian theory, had dared to use the word ‘orgasm’ in mixed company. Far less amusingly, this moment fits into a sequence of scenes in which someone, often Ronald Merrick, commits an equivalent breach of verbal convention, and pays a price. Insisting to Daphne Manners that skin-colour ‘does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell’ he found himself rebuffed, and broke through to the real issue: ‘I’ve put it badly.

The Raj Quartet 53

But I can’t help it. The whole idea revolts me’ (J417). It isn’t clear whether Merrick ‘couldn’t help putting it badly’ or ‘couldn’t help being revolted’, but in some ways they come to the same thing, the apology being more for breaking taboo than for bad grammar. Talking to Sarah Layton about the Manners case in 1943 Merrick made an almost identical apology, but this time elicited a more honest response than Daphne’s angry condescension:   [Merrick] relapsed into silence. Presently he said, ‘I’ve said it all very badly. And I’ve broken one of the sacred rules, haven’t I? One isn’t supposed to talk about this kind of thing. One isn’t supposed to talk about anything much.’   ‘I know,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s how we hide our prejudices and continue to live with them.’ (S226) This is important bluntness, binding oppressive social proprieties to a central part of the moral failure that crippled the Raj, but prejudice was not the only beneficiary of repression. The silences that surrounded the Manners case also surrounded Susan Layton’s wedding to Teddie Bingham, Mildred Layton’s alcohol­ism and grasswidow’s affair, Sarah’s abortion, her father’s experiences as a German PoW, Barbie Batchelor’s humiliation and death, and on a wider political scale the whole matter of the INA—in every case protecting some supposedly necessary standard with cruelly damaging consequences to individuals and polities that the Stranger is careful to report. The corollary and sometimes cause of ‘There’s nothing I can do’ was ‘There’s nothing I can say’—but if a true weight of events generated impossibility of action, only internalised propriety fore­stalled speech. Merrick and Sarah are not the only people Scott shows breaking silences—the unEnglish, like Bronowsky, were far less affected by Neo-Puritanism—but where surprising British conversation is reported one or other is usually involved. The caddish Major Clark, for instance, who relieved Sarah of her virginity in 1944, was able to do so largely through deliberately provocative conversational gambits; and Barbie’s Emersonian strain found its fullest spoken expression in talking to Sarah and in her meeting with Merrick—whose resonant, déclassé voice and controversial actions repeatedly serve to expose within Scott’s narratives silences he though pathological. 5.2 Ronald Merrick as Antagonist For most readers of the Quartet, as for many of its principal characters, Ronald Merrick is simply the villain of the piece. The accusations people make, within Scott’s pages

The Raj Quartet  54

or in response to them, vary considerably and are not always coherent, but it is easy enough to put together a summary list of the main heads. Initially, in 1942, the issue is his first arrest and interrogation of Kumar, with his orders for surveillance. These actions tend to be construed as wholly personal and emotional, a persecution of Kumar as (i) a brown, public-school Englishman and (ii) a rival for Daphne’s hand; the same psychic matrix is supposed to underlie Merrick’s later certainty of Kumar’s guilt in the rape and his assaults on Kumar and other suspects in detention—the most serious charges. Merrick’s manners with Daphne, in warning her off Kumar, may also be cited. The episode of Bingham’s wedding in 1943—including the stone that was thrown, the insult to the Nawab of Mirat, and the woman who prostrated herself—is harder to judge, but the blame laid at Merrick’s door by Teddie, Mildred, and others commonly finds favour. That favour builds sharply with Sarah’s personal distaste from 1944 for Merrick’s injuries, and with her strident conviction (greatly reinforced by Perron) that Merrick’s surprising engagement to Susan in 1945 was the result of highly unethical (if not criminal) manipulation, and would lead to her sister’s personal psychic destruction. Merrick’s general insinuation of himself into the Layton household may also be cited. Attached to this is his professional involvement with INA cases, colouring Teddie’s death and leading to involvement with Sayed and so also Ahmed Kasim. Between the two comes the suicide of Havildar Kareem Muzzafir Khan, for whose sorry death many readers hold Merrick wholly and very unpleasantly responsible. The Stranger’s sympathetic treatment of the debilitated Colonel Layton, with his old-school views of man-bap and the Havildar’s case, also informs condemnations of Merrick’s attitudes and proceedings. Finally there are the events of 1947 leading to Merrick’s death—his riding accident, the man he claimed had thrown a stone from a nullah (or dry watercourse), and his habits of racial transvestism as a bazaar Pathan. Prompted by his murderers’ claim of revenge for 1942, these all become bundled up into a picture of a man, if not evil, then desperately in error—one who uses policing first as a way of arresting romantic rivals, then as an arena for sadism; one who blights successively the lives of Miss Manners, Hari Kumar, Teddie Bingham, Guy Perron, every Layton and Kasim he encounters, and a host of innocent bystanders from Vidyasagar to Muzza­fir Khan. As corrupt as he was Machiavellian, Merrick’s death (so goes this reading) was, however unpleasant, not unrighteous—and around that theme orchestrations of praise for Daphne and Hari, Rowan and Malcolm, and the Laytons and Kasims are easy to

The Raj Quartet 55

develop. Extended psychologically, this becomes an argument that Merrick’s fundamental identity was as a repressed homosexual whose repression led to over­weening misjudgement; and either incidentally or in some supposed consequence of all this, a sexual sadist who took racist advantage of his doubly malign imperial authority as a policeman. This reading has far more problems than tends to be realised and steers a very crooked course to a dubious end. Liberally speaking, one might take sharp aim at the homophobic bigotry to which it has constant recourse. More importantly, and most generally, it forgets the Stranger’s very careful documentary methods, and requires many state­ments that are legally hearsay be taken not only as evidence, but as proof. The spin individuals apply in their narratives must be ignored, and while in some cases (such as Daphne’s journal) there are good reasons to privilege particular evidence, that is by no means always so. DC White, for example, thought in 1964 that there was ‘small reason to doubt [Vidyasagar’s deposition] since there could hardly be much point in his lying at this stage’ (J336)—but as Vidyasagar was very probably an RSS member, and the RSS was just as active in the mid-1960s as it had been in 1942, White thereby only confirms his own lack of political and human understanding. Such considerations do not exonerate Merrick completely, but much of the case against him looks very thin indeed once each bit of evidence is labelled with its source. Most of the later INA material filters in through Perron, whose visceral dislike of Merrick made him a very hostile but not thereby more persuasive witness: Perron’s word alone condemns Merrick in the matter of Muzzafir Khan, for example, yet Perron admitted he was drinking heavily throughout his acquaintance with Merrick, and appears to have conflated Merrick’s responses to the suicides of Muzzafir Khan and Captain Purvis (D78, 210)—an understandable error deeply damning to Merrick. Perron’s deductions are also the only ‘evidence’ that Merrick brutalised the soldier ‘Pinky’ to obtain Susan Bingham’s psychiatric file—and one need not disbelieve Perron’s factual testimony to recognise that his interpretation of what happened was maximally damning. In parallel, with events of 1947 almost every­thing that Perron, Rowan, and Bronowsky said constructs an ignoble Merrick, whose racial transvestism and Machiavel­lianism were connected only to sexual indulgence and bigoted sadism, not to police work; who invented the man with the stone as a form of wish-fulfillment; and whose death was most notable for the hideous strain on Susan of a second widowhood. Moreover, most if not all of the characters who denigrated Merrick were proven wrong. Daphne objected to his suspicions of Hari, and thought she knew better what

The Raj Quartet 56

it was right to do; but her management of her own affair, and affairs, lurched to disaster, leaving Merrick to pick up the pieces. As a policeman he never had a chance, for the victim of the rape lied to him from her initial statement onwards, having privately ordered the only other witness to be silent—and the evidence does not show Merrick leaping to conclusions, but asking Daphne ‘when? How many men? What kind of men? Did [she] recognise any? Would [she] recognise any? How did [she] get back?’ (J439). His suspicions of Pandit Baba’s involvement with extremism, moreover, were later confirmed by Bronowsky, though all too like Daphne, Bronowsky (with Rowan) was in 1947 dismissive of Merrick’s fears of extremist organisation in Mirat—yet Merrick was murdered, and if in connection with 1942 then presumably by Hindu extremists, also the principal suspects in the train-massacre of Muslims (including Ahmed Kasim) that followed: which makes Merrick seem considerably more perspicacious than his reception implied. And whatever others thought of her marriage, Susan was clear that to her and her orphaned son Merrick’s loving care was water in the desert. Beyond bias there is also the question of responsibility, for Merrick was rarely the final arbiter in matters for which he was (and is) blamed. The political detention of Kumar and the rest of the ‘Bibighar Six’, though based in part on evidence collected and prepared by Merrick, could not have been ordered at any level lower than provincial governor, following considerable review. Equally, the stringent policy of keeping INA captives and their former regimental officers apart, to which Colonel Layton so objected with Muzzafir Khan, was made and enforced by the then Viceroy, Wavell, and for it Merrick bore not the slightest responsibility, however much he saw its good sense. And if Merrick had been the messenger bearing news of the INA, it was Bingham who, without orders and against all military sense, took a jeep and driver forwards, unprotected, into unknown territory; Merrick only tried to save him, at great personal cost. In general, one might say that Merrick is repeatedly blamed as an individual for matters that were badly awry in aspects of empire he represents— which would be fine, except that other individuals who represent such malfunctions (White and the ICS, Rowan and the IPS, the Laytons and the IA) tend on exactly the same grounds to be excused personal responsibility; and when one analyses the difference, what flashes red is not Merrick’s greater guilt, but his class and his able willingness to be articulate. In conjunction with structural recognition of Merrick as the only character to appear and act in all four novels, this recognition of him as persistently the victim of snobbish, ignorant under­estimations and class-prejudice that the Stranger carefully

The Raj Quartet  57

includes in his narrations opens the way to a quite different reading, this time with Merrick as protagonist, not villain. Reverting to Scott’s Spanish understanding of a bull’s querencia in the bull-ring (Part 1.2), one can see how the painful idea of a ‘place of false safety’ fits Daphne Manners and the Bibighar Gardens, Barbie Batchelor and Rose Cottage, Teddie Bingham and marriage, or Ahmed Kasim and Mirat: but also how it fits Merrick and imperial service as a whole. He is, after all, the only white man shown to die in the catastrophe of 1947, just as he is the only lower-middle-class Englishman shown as wielding any power in the Raj; and yet somehow no witness sensed anything seriously wrong as they agreed he brought his fate on himself, and prepared themselves to go home safely with and amid their Indian spoils. 5.3 Ronald Merrick as Protagonist On his Indian trip in 1964 one episode in particular proved critical to Scott’s thinking. He went to stay for ten days in rural Andhra Pradesh with a former havildar (or Indian Army sergeant) whom he had commanded during the war, but despite goodwill and much humble hospitality the visit was not a success. Scott grew increasingly ill with dysentery, and paranoid about the public spectacle he had no choice but to be in a village without plumbing or sewerage: On the tenth day, on parting, his wife made her appearance. I thanked her for her kindness and hospitality. She said nothing, looked down at her feet, and I cursed the humility of this Indian woman, knowing that behind locked doors she ruled the roost and would probably have the whole house fumigated after I’d gone. I arrived in Hyderabad next morning, still stunned and vicious. I knocked the hand of a beggar woman off my arm, gave the tongah wallah less than he asked for, ignored his protests and stalked into the Ritz Palace, called for beer and complained about the price. And then sat down in the blessed privacy of a civil­ized bedroom, with bathroom attached—blessed, blessed bathroom with all mod cons. My relief is indescribable. But already in that relief there was the shadow of something that appalled me—the growing shadow of my ingratitude, my ridicul­ous irrational fears, my utter dependence upon the amenities of my own kind of civilization. But the sense of relief was enough to keep the shadow at bay, for a while. So there I was, there he is, if you will picture him: sitting on a comfortable bed: Enoch Sahib: a slight case of cultural shock.  Paul Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, p. 103.

The Raj Quartet 58

This account was given in 1969, and ‘Enoch Sahib’ alludes to the Conservative MP Enoch Powell, who had become notorious the previous year for his anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Scott thus compares himself to a figurehead of racism—and he was not joking: In my old Anglo-Indian days I’d never of course experienced such a cuttingoff from what I must, for this purpose, call my own kind. It simply did not happen. [...] Idleness, illness, primitive conditions, fear of the strange and alien, ready acceptance of tin-god attributes, until I experienced them in one implacable combination, I did not truly understand in my flesh and bones, the rock on which Turtonism is founded, nor the true nature of the stout supporting pillar of their work, the secure nature of the stout encircling wall which they erected to protect themselves. I think perhaps most of them did not understand it either, and still do not. At this level Turtonism is an instinct, not a faith. To me it is still wrong. The thick layer of Turtonism which I discovered in myself is what appals me. The metaphor [of the Raj for my view of life] here is like a stone that has found its real mark. As that painful stone suggests this self-scrutiny was creatively associated with Merrick, at whom stones were also thrown, prompting recognition that of all the Quartet’s characters Merrick is closest to Scott in his class-background and probable bisexuality. That quasi-autobiographical burden does not in itself make Merrick pro­tagonist, let alone ‘the hero’, but does provide good reasons for taking his personal trajectory seriously and refusing to allow his piecemeal denigration. Of course he has racist feelings and beliefs—how else could he represent any element of the Raj with such power?—but the point is that he is aware of them, confronts them in his own mind, and calls them by name; what so many characters (and for that matter readers) loathe in him is his function as their mirror, made possible by the degree to which he was  Mr Turton is the racist Collector (DC) of Chandrapore (in Forster’s A Passage to India) who hosts a disastrous mixed-race party.  Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, in Stocks, ed., Essays by Divers Hands, p. 130. Cf. ‘The India in the novels I write about India is a metaphor for [my view of life]. If I write about Anglo-India in 1942 I do so not only because I find that period lively and dramatic but because it helps me to express the fullness of what I’m thinking and feeling about the world I live in. I am, I suppose, making a comparison of my own not with Forster, but be­tween then and now. To Anglo-Indian fascination has been added a notion of Anglo-Indian pertinence. Perhaps some subconscious anti­cip­ation of that pertinence played a part in the original fascination. You don’t get hooked on a place without some reason.’ (Ibid., pp. 116–17). See also Preface.

The Raj Quartet 59

Scott’s. Try instead to imagine him neutrally, observantly, as a young man, a London shopkeeper’s orphan sponsored by his grammar school to the Indian Police Service; a good scholar and hard worker determined to excel and make a life, rising through the ranks and therefore, this being the British Empire, acquiring a higher social class not so much for himself as for his future children. Imagine as you will his sexuality and probable virginity, but be sure to add the sleepy Mayapore (literally ‘Illusiontown’) to which he was posted in 1938, aged about 22—how conservative its few AngloIndians, how complex its dense Indian layers—and his professional and personal attempts to understand its politics. Remember also the treatment other Britons ‘not from the top drawer’—Miss Crane, Miss Batchelor, the plebeian officers Teddie Bingham snubbed—are shown to have received in the Raj partly for their déclassé manners but also because they believed, and showed their belief, in the effigy all supposedly worshipped. Merrick’s real offence, in one sense, was simply to have been a practicing imperialist—but is it really worse to have been there as a believer than as a cynic? a worker rather than a freeloader? Speaking to Nigel Rowan in 1944 Sarah Layton was clear that while for all Anglo-Indians the ‘outlook was shadowy […] one could not […] make this an excuse for working at half-pressure, nor for standing back from a job that was there to be done’ (D152)—a point of view the Stranger strongly shared; as did Merrick. So far as events in 1942 are concerned, that Merrick was wrong about Kumar’s politics does not make his suspicions unreasonable. Kumar was an odd character, who repeatedly refused to give any explanation of himself, even when found bruised and dishevelled after the gang-rape of his girlfriend. His first arrest in February 1942 generated rapid protective enquiries from both a family lawyer and Judge Menen, and he had contact with Pandit Baba and far more extensively with Vidya­sagar, both of whom Merrick correctly suspected of extremist sectarian nationalism. Merrick alone among the Anglo-Indians is shown as having been rightly and persistently alert to a growing danger, sensing the incipient political demonstrations and riots, and warning both his superiors and Miss Manners to take special care. He was also, of course, roundly congratulated by numerous Anglo-Indians in Mayapore for arresting Kumar so promptly, and widely considered (after his transfer to Sunder­naga) to have been made a scapegoat for ‘showing guts’ at a ‘difficult time’—so readers should be alert to the social pressures generated by Miss Manners and Kumar that Merrick must have been under. But the truly striking thing is a statement that Kumar in 1944 reported Merrick as making on the night of 9–10 August 1942: ‘He said I could forget the girl. What had happened to her was unimportant. So long as I understood how responsible

The Raj Quartet  60

I was for it. “That’s what you’ve got to admit,” he kept saying, “your responsibility for that girl getting rammed. If you were a hundred miles away you’d still be responsible.”’ (S308). This may seem madness, but was actually a mode of eroticised politics that pervaded the Raj (and arguably the Empire at large). Scott called the place of Daphne’s rape the ‘Bibighar Gardens’ not simply because bibighar, ‘house of the women’, is a common term in (post-)Mughal Indian Islamic architecture, but because of ‘that other Bibighar in Cawnpore’ (J146)—a part of Nana Sahib’s palace complex that after the uprisings of 1857 was used to house some 200 captive European women and children, for a few weeks, before their murder. This historical haunting is critical, for after the discovery of the bodies there arose a powerful, widespread, and entirely false belief that mass-rape had preceded mass-murder—a belief that informed an appalling set of ‘revenges’ on captured mutineers; that historians were never able to counter, despite denying it in print from the 1860s; and that led in the later Raj both to a reflexive protection of women and children (by sending them to ‘the funk-holes’) during any perceived danger from Indians, and to a bizarre equation of Indian desires for independence with a sexual threat to white women. Thus the eroticisation of politics—so for Merrick consciously, and most Anglo-Indians rather less consciously, the rising tide and tempo of political events in 1942 would have made for sexual anxiety. Daphne Manners, one might say, acted as an individual lightning-rod for such anxieties; but so too did Merrick, and in a professional capacity he was obligated to maintain. Such eroticised politics alone can explain Merrick’s conviction that Kumar would be ‘responsible’ for the rape even if he had been ‘a hundred miles away’. Believing Kumar guilty at least of extremist associations and dabbling, and potentially of far more serious involvement in an imminent attempt to sabotage on a national scale the anti-Japanese war-effort, he was for Merrick already hip-deep in the politics that had by Cawnpore-logic produced the rape. The ‘situation’ Kumar must understand was a psychological reality among Anglo-Indians, and in one sense the real charge one might level at Merrick is that he misunderstood Kumar because he did see him as the high-born English Anglo-Indian ‘Harry Coomer’, someone with power, and applied a mindset to match. Merrick, that is, construed Kumar’s fumbling courtship of Miss Manners as a deliberate political set-up for a rape that (as in 1857) signalled revolt. His use of the cane to try to force a confession was illegal, but not by contemporary standards either torture or unusual: caning was a common magisterial sen On Cawnpore (Kanpur) see Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London: John Murray, 1996).

The Raj Quartet  61

tence for misdemeanours, and it should be recalled that Merrick correctly believed a major insurgency to be imminent. His interrogation of Kumar was, by Kumar’s own account, drivingly political; what he sought was not information about the rapists per se, but to break a political operative whose (supposed) knowledge might if garnered in time save British and Indian lives. All in Mayapore, even DC White, agreed that in the event Merrick was most valorous, saving many lives (including rioters’) at considerable personal risk: but to him as a Superintendent of Police, charged with intelligence and political as well as ‘law-and-order’ responsibilities, putting the riots down with real skill was a poor second-best to forestalling them and nabbing saboteurs before the act. Kumar (whose loss of childhood privilege makes him also in part an avatar of Scott: see Part 1.2) so plainly invites sympathy that Merrick’s lack of it may seem damning—yet subtract Kumar’s colour and the relative moral standings of the privileged public-schoolboy fallen on hard times and the plebeian policeman rising by merit would not be so clear: Kumar’s vices and Merrick’s virtues would both show more potently. One may not care for the conclusions Merrick came to—but he was surely not wrong to be conscious of, thinking about, and determined to raise the questions, and the degree to which he unsettled Mayapore (as later Pankot and Mirat) indicates the extent to which he was obliging other Anglo-Indians to match his own honesty. Merrick’s fascination with the INA embodied the same trope, and shows him once again far-sighted (seeing immediately the INA’s capacity as a nemesis) and highly professional (learning Japanese, to add to his English, Hindi, and Urdu); just as Teddie Bingham does in some measure reprise Kumar in Caucasian skin, as condescending public schoolboy and victim of his own carelessness. Teddie also drew Merrick into a disaster, but this time the politics, with the agony of his wounds, triggered in Merrick an epiphany, so that holding Teddie’s dying body: [...] for a moment there I was an amateur myself. I fell for it, really fell for it, the whole thing, the idea that there really was this possibility. Devotion. Sacrifice. Self-denial. A cause, an obligation. A code of conduct, a sort of final moral definition, I mean definition of us, what we’re here for—people living among each other, in an environment some sort of God created. The  Even the supposedly clinching evidence of Merrick’s homosexuality is political: Rowan reported Kumar as saying Merrick ‘fondled him’ (D311), but the Stranger (using the transcript) had Kumar say Merrick ‘had his hand between my legs’ (S300), and later (but perhaps re-reporting the same moment) that he ‘smeared his hand over my buttocks’ and then ‘on my genitals’ (S310)—presumably rendering Kumar as he would have been had he raped a virgin or a woman bleeding from multiple assaults, and certainly an act more obviously symbolic than arousing.

The Raj Quartet  62

whole impossible nonsensical dream. (S407–08) The language was again political, but this time the outcome, ultimately, was erotic, Merrick’s marriage to Susan, Teddie’s widow, for whom (as he confessed to Sarah Layton) he would ‘play the game [him]self’ (S383), and did. This later phase of Merrick’s trajectory, his experiences of marriage and (step-) fatherhood, are narrated only in fragments, always from outside. Merrick himself, by Scott’s careful design, is never granted the narrative point-of-view, nor allowed as a writer of inset documents—even his one quoted letter was dictated to a nurse—but in the events of 1942 both Daphne and Hari provided intimate views of him. Susan in her illness and frailty cannot do that for 1945–7, so only Sarah’s grudging tolerance and the post-hoc impressions of a hostile Perron are available, and do not square with either Susan’s gratitude and grief or little Edward’s robust liking for his stepfather. Whatever one feels about Merrick’s apparent acceptance of family partly as responsibilities to a dead comrade-in-arms, very few Anglo-Indian men of any class would in 1945 have been willing to take on a widow with Susan’s psychiatric history; fewer still would have made such a therapeutic success of the marriage. And the image of family that Merrick created with his wife and stepson did not feature little Edward in a traditional English sailor-suit, but in a miniature Pathan costume, complete with its accoutrements—the kind of gift Kipling’s Kim would have loved, and a clear sign of Merrick’s genuine engagement with India. Much could be elaborated here, but space precludes. Merrick’s meetings with Barbie Batchelor, the Kasims, Bronowsky, and Rowan, as well as his encounters with Pankot as hill-station and Mirat through his post-war transfer to the States Police (a federal reserve to deal with local failures of policing), all limn and orchestrate a protagonism of doomed but sincere belief backed up by intelligence, application, and searing commitment. The little readers are told of the sexuality of Merrick’s and Susan Bingham’s marriage fascinatingly raises the issue of her physical care for the stump of his amputated arm, perhaps a symbol of genital sexuality, perhaps a substitute no less intimate, and certainly a conjunction of silences. What demands space, however, is understanding Merrick’s murder in 1947, and (as suggested above) once again the accounts the Stranger showed the survivors giving simply do not square with the facts as reported, nor with good sense. The story was complex, involving the boys who came to Merrick’s house begging for work and their putative identities as (i) agents of the RSS or equivalent Hindu extremists plotting revenge, (ii) double/agents recruited by Merrick, and/or (iii) a pool of homosexual lovers; what makes no sense is the insistently private, sexual-sadistic reading provided by Bronowsky,

The Raj Quartet  63

Rowan, and Perron. Merrick was in charge of the Mirati police, and had intelligence responsibilities; if Hindu extremists killed him (which is most probable), it can hardly have been unrelated to the train-massacre they perpetrated less than a month later. At the very least one must imagine that the sectarian killers did not want Merrick about to hinder or pursue them: his death may have been a sweet revenge for 1942 but preparation for 1947 was better served. And in that case Merrick’s funeral oration, on which Perron choked, was actually rather less than he deserved, for he died in the field, at enemy hands, fighting to quell a sectarian war he well understood had not ended in 1945, and would continue in and between India and Pakistan long after 1947. The Raj Quartet comprises many intertwining personal tragedies, amounting through integration and refraction to a British tragedy of exhausted imperial abnegation and an Indo-Pakistani tragedy of sectarian disintegration. Even in the strict, old-fashioned definition demanding death, the truncated lives of Miss Crane, Miss Manners, Captain Bingham, and Ahmed Kasim, like the exhausted deaths of Mabel Layton and Barbie Batchelor, have strong claims on tragedy, and collectively achieve tragic stature. But Merrick’s life and death have the strongest claim of all, and it is he who most plainly shows the ancient tragedic topoi of hamartia, ‘error through ignorance’, in his belief; anagnoresis, recognition, in his epiphany; peripeteia, ‘reversal’, in his career, marriage, and perhaps sexuality; and sacrifice. He also massively extends the nature and concept of the tragedies involved, through the silences that pressed on his life and death, with their relations to class-status and the politico-sexual neuroses that pervaded Anglo-India after 1857. Once Merrick’s protagonism and agony are recognised, the dislikes expressed and slights offered to him by others begin to glow like the background of a cameo or intaglio, leaving him as the principal design; or in a slightly different metaphor, he is the hollow shape that the lines spoken by others describe, the blank area drawn by the spirograph’s calculated tangents. So when readers are swept into sympathetic agreement with those nicer characters who condemn Merrick, and ignore the Stranger’s carefully included and tellingly placed doubts, uncertainties, signs of traducement, complications, hind­sights, and evidence of class bigotry, the internal mechanics of prejudice, silence, and willed ignorance that drove Merrick’s tragedy are re-enacted and affirmed within the reader’s world, and their consequences extended. Thinking of Merrick as an Indian Kurtz at the heart of imperial darkness may seem satisfying, even righteous, but it cannot be right, for Merrick was a poor and orphaned Londoner: what he knew and did were what he was taught and shown,

The Raj Quartet  64

and if his death, presumably at Indian hands and certainly in Indian clothing and an Indian manner, was as Indian as his life, the extent to which he as an individual may be held responsible (as distinct from accountable) for its tragedy is logically limited. Just like the bull, trying earnestly to fight a shifting and insincere opponent with its choice of a querencia to defend, Merrick’s may have been the will, but his was not the way. Scott shows him as an isolated and lonely man, at least so far as ‘his own kind’ were concerned, but his presence in the Quartet is profoundly and vitally an act of inclusion in the larger portrait.

Part 6. Dreams, Nightmares, & Realpolitik: Representing India (and Pakistan) To write of a former colony from a former imperial centre is always risky, and Scott has sometimes been damned for meddling, for Anglocentrism, or for not writing an Indian’s book about India. E. M. Forster’s lamentably confused A Passage to India (1924), which also confronts the legacy of Cawnpore through imaginations of rape but then burkes just about every issue that matters to become a novel about how a miscarriage of justice was averted, remains far more widely admired and taught, leaving Scott at best as the poor Anglo-Indian relation. He has also been popularly eclipsed by Salman Rushdie, not only because Midnight’s Children (1981) rides high in literary fashion, but through a savage personal attack Rushdie made in ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984). Rushdie was responding to reviews of the Granada TV adaptation of the Quartet, to David Lean’s film of A Passage to India, to a TV adaptation of M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, and to a Granada docu­mentary about S. C. Bose he had disliked, but Scott drew the heaviest fire: The Raj Quartet and [Kaye’s The Far Pavilions] are founded on identical strategies of what, to be polite, one must call borrowing. In both cases, the central plot-motifs are lifted from earlier and much finer novels. In The Far Pavilions, the hero Ash (‘A Shock’)—raised an Indian, discovered to be a sahib, and ever afterwards torn between his two selves—will be instantly recognizable as the cardboard cut-out version of Kipling’s Kim. And the rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens derives just as plainly from Forster’s Passage to India. But because Kaye and Scott are vastly inferior to the writers they follow, they turn what they touch to pure lead. Where Forster’s scene in the Marabar caves retains its ambiguity and mystery, Scott gives us not one rape but a gang assault, and one perpetrated, what is more, by peasants. […] […] And all around […] is a galaxy of chinless wonders, regimental grandes dames, lushes, empty-headed blondes, silly-asses, plucky young things, good sorts, bad eggs and Russian counts with eyepatches. The overall effect is

The Raj Quartet  66

rather like a literary version of Mulligatawny soup. It tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra-parochially British, only with too much pepper. The euphemistic opening accusation of plagiarism is silly, and like the contra­dictory state­ment about Scott’s supposedly gross travesty of a rape shows plainly that Rushdie had not the slightest understanding of what Scott was about in re-writing Forster. It even seems horribly possible that when he penned this attack Rushdie had only seen the TV adaptation, not read Scott’s novels, for nothing in his essay demonstrates knowledge of the complex texts while much suggests the greater melodrama and linear chronology of the adaptation. In any case, Rushdie’s bundled attacks on living white representers of India served a strategy to promote himself as their greater nemesis, and affirm his own authenticity as an purveyor of Indian truth; and the strategy has worked, for ‘Outside the Whale’ is often respectfully cited by British and American critics as a voice crying truth in an Orientalist wilderness. To think carefully about the literary claims and judgements that Rushdie makes in ‘Outside the Whale’ is all too often to discover their shallowness, contra­dictions, short-circuits, and self-promotions. And to talk to Indians and Pakistanis who have read Kipling, Forster, and Scott is in my experience to find a uniformly greater admiration for Kipling and Scott, and a strong appreciation of Scott as an observer and analyst of Indian politics—so it seems necessary to consider carefully what they find in the Quartet to which Rushdie was blinded by his own overdose of pepper. 6.1 Mohammed Ali Kasim, Gandhi-ji, and the Congress For 40 years or more on either side of Independence and Partition Indian politics was dominated by the Indian National (later All India) Congress, founded in 1886 and to an astonishing extent responsible for the nation’s existence. The Subcontinent as a whole (never minding Sri Lanka and Burma) had never been politically unified, and the best efforts of both the Mughals and the British had fallen well short. With more than 600 Princely States as well as extreme linguistic, cultural, and climatic variety, unity at independence was no kind of foregone conclusion, and did not, of course, come to pass. The dominant size and continued survival of the Republic of India as a polity and the world’s most populous democracy are eloquent testimony to how much  Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, pp. 89–90, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books/Penguin, 1991), pp. 87–101.  The relationship is like that of Lord of the Flies to Coral Island, and Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre—a deliberate revision, not an act of ‘borrowing’.

The Raj Quartet  67

the Congress achieved, but at the same time the sectarian partitions of the Punjab and Bengal were an extremely serious defeat whose consequences continue to be acted out on the world stage. Scott’s primary representative of Congress is the sometime Chief Minister of Ranpur, M. A. Kasim, universally known as MAK, and it is critical that he is a Muslim Congressman. Despite the handicap of the formally divided electorate, in the 1937 provincial elections Congress won roughly half the seats reserved for Muslims. Though a devout man MAK was also an urbane statesman, deeply committed to civil tolerance and the politics of democracy; the pointedly secular, pluralistic Congress dream of unity in independence was his own dream, and to it he was unswervingly loyal. But the Quartet shows that dream coming apart, and while Gandhi as the dominant leader of the Congress and as MAK’s friend and correspondent is never openly slighted by the Stranger, the narrative of the slide to political disaster asks some very awkward questions. MAK first comes into focus in 1942 because he had to be arrested. All Congress­ men and members above a certain status were detained, because Congress was proscribed for passing Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ resolution, adjudged treasonable by the hard-pressed wartime authorities. There is a good case that Gandhi was himself fairly panicked by the Japanese blitzkrieg, and genuinely thought the British would be forcibly ousted within the year; in any case, he pushed the resolution through, and 60,000+ Congress members went into detention while funds were sequestrated. Nor was this the first such mistake, for Gandhi had in 1939 insisted on the resignation of all provincial Congress ministries elected in 1937 on a point of principle, the Viceroy having failed to consult Congress before declaring India at war with Germany and Italy. So to put it bluntly, Gandhi first insisted that Congress give up its hard-won political power, and then so miscalculated that for more than two years the whole organisation was almost entirely paralysed and inoperative. According to Brigadier Reid’s memoir, Merrick: described Gandhi [...] as a ‘crazy old man’ who had completely lost touch with the people he thought he still led, and so was the dupe of his own ‘dreams and crazy illusions’, and had no idea how much he was laughed at by the kind of young men, he, Merrick, had to keep in order. (J318) In Reid’s bluff military voice, and given readerly dislike or disapproval of Merrick, it is easy to dismiss such a view: but Merrick was right. The effects of Congress’s suppression (for which, of course, the British have the greater responsibility) was to leave a vacuum into which the Hindu right and in Bengal the Communists glee-

The Raj Quartet  68

fully expanded. Gandhi had already given Hindu supremacism several hostages to fortune in his adoption of the explicitly Hindu dhoti, championship of village weaving, and reactionary distaste for industry, all tending to exclude Muslims from his image and symbolic meaning; but 1942 proved a catastrophic miscalculation, for in 1945 Congress won only 71 of 496 reserved Muslim seats and c.11% of Muslim votes, making Pakistan inevitable.   These effects of ‘Quit India’ are of course widely noted in Indian discourse, and the skill and depth of Scott’s portrayal may be judged by comparison with an earlier home-grown version, R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955). Though Gandhi wearing a dhoti and overwrap it begins as romantic comedy, Sriram joining the at Downing Street, 1931. ‘Quit India’ campaign largely for the sake of Bharati, a girl in Gandhi’s entourage, he does not surrender peacefully with her to the police (as Gandhi requested of supporters when the suppression orders were issued) but remains at large and at a loss, and so is readily drawn by a clever recruiter into terrorism and sabotage. The names are quasi-allegorical, Sriram (a Hindu devotional name and chant equivalent to ‘praisegod’) signifying an ordinary man of the Hindu majority, Bharati sounding Bharat, ‘(Mother) India’, and for all its comedy the novel is meant to relate historical truth, including a putative train-massacre that Sriram survives only because the assailants are on this occasion Hindus. An abrupt ending on 30 January 1948 registers Gandhi’s assassination by a former member of the RSS (see Part 6.3). Narayan’s marvellous comedy and wisdom are his own, and Waiting for the Mahatma is a novel of the first water, but it certainly does not outdo (or challenge) Scott’s portrayal. It does complement it, and Scott’s capacity of dialogue on such an intimate national matter with as great and as Indian a writer as Narayan is a fair example of the observant wisdom Indian readers find in him, but not in Forster (or even Rushdie). Equally, though he went there fictionally only in Staying On, Scott appreciated the situation that the new Indian government of 1947 inherited. His discriminating eye for US influence is evident in the details of ‘Halki’s’ cartoons of 1947, but perhaps the single deftest sign of the breadth and gravity of Scott’s attention to India’s geopolitical situation

The Raj Quartet  69

is the ‘Appendix’ to The Towers of Silence, an ‘Extract from a letter dated in August 1945 from Mr. Mohammed Ali Kasim to Mr. Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi’: ‘I find myself uncertain which of two recent events—the election of a socialist government in London and the destruction of Hiroshima by a single atomic bomb—will have the profounder effect on India’s future.’ (S397; cf. D449) The ability to pose such a question as a stark coda to a novel overwhelmingly concerned with the last years of a retired, rather ineffective, and barely tolerated spinster missionary deserves thought, and in its Indocentric balance of Britain and Japan does not suggest any ignorance of nor slight to India; quite the opposite. 6.2 Sayed Kasim, Jinnah, and the Muslim League The Kasims’ importance, though initially concentrated in MAK, extends through his sons Sayed and Ahmed, and the family collectively exhibits the disastrous effects of the concatenation of the INA and Partition. As a King’s Commissioned Officer of the Ranpur Regiment—one of the first Indians to become a KCO—Sayed once represented an aspect of his father’s Congress dream, an integrated military; but his experiences as a PoW led him to the INA, a dishonourable discharge that would have barred him from the post-Independence Indian Army, and support for Jinnah and Pakistan, hence for Partition. Sayed’s turncoating for the INA was to his father stupidity and Islamic dishonour, a breach of contract as well as treason, but he still met Sayed and advised him about his defence. Support for Jinnah, however, meant a more absolute mutual rejection, and Sayed would as a Pakistani for some years after 1947, and often thereafter, have been unable to meet his father in India; as MAK was unable to meet any of his grandchildren. The Muslim League, founded in 1906, had as its brief representation of Muslims within the Raj and a future independent Indian polity. The British responded (suspiciously rapidly) in 1909 with the Morley-Minto reforms establishing separate electorates—but the League struggled to compete with Congress, and in the 1937 elections took only about half the reserved Muslim seats. But all the while British disingenuity and foot-dragging over Dominion status, coupled with worries about Hindu extremism, were escalating Muslim demands for a separate independence. In 1930 Sir Muhammad Iqbal suggested federating the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, Sind, and Kashmir as a Muslim state within an Indian polity; in 1933 Choudri Ramat Ali coined ‘Pakistan’ as an acronym of Punjab + Afghan (= NW Frontier Province) + Kashmir + Sind, the whole meaning ‘Land of the Pure’; and in

The Raj Quartet  70

1940 the League, led since 1916 by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, made Pakistan its primary aim. Jinnah’s thinking as Qaid-i-Azam (‘Great Leader’) has been much debated. What is clear is that he was a better political analyst than Gandhi and that errors by Congress in 1939–42 advanced Pakistan from marginal possibility to near certainty. When Congress ministries resigned and their provinces reverted to direct rule, the League stayed in office and began to bank IOUs from the British. In 1942 Jinnah again kept faith, and when in the 1945 elections the League won 425 of 496 reserved seats and c.89% of the Muslim vote he acquired the power of a constituency of tens of millions. The scale of his victory attests to Muslim fear of the Hindu right, and as fears grew, attitudes hardened. Mohammad Ali Jinnah Sayed Kasim’s belief in 1945 that unified independence would for Muslims only exchange a British for a Hindu raj underlines the extent to which Congress ideals had become contaminated by association, and withered where they were most needed. In good company, Scott leaves the Muslim organisation of massacre in 1946–7 in the shadows, though he is properly even-handed in noting the victims and murderers of all creeds. It was very probably the responsibility of hard-line elements within the League itself, but (Pakistan not being so democratic as India) Scott could not know and did not say. He did implicitly point to the presence in the League from 1945 of (ex-)KCOs and INA officers, like Sayed, whom the League allowed to retain their commissions, a consideration Pakistan’s military history strongly promotes; and he certainly showed, in his depictions of the Hindu right, the kind of thing that most reasonably made Indian Muslims afraid of a Hindu-majority government, and of a fully federated post-British raj. The Kasims paid in blood as well as sweat and tears for their patriarch’s political failure to unite India by drawing his co-religionists with him, and it is MAK’s loyal devotion to Congress that is astonishing, not Sayed’s defection. But that is also exactly why Scott concentrated on MAK wearing his Congress cap ‘Straight and firm […] like a crown of thorns’ (S486), and under­standing even in his profound disapproval that his elder son’s dilemma had been ‘a question of choosing between [his] own integrity and [his] country’s integrity’—but also that ‘this is an explanation […] not an excuse’ and legally ‘not even a mitigating circumstance’ (D417). Whatever else they do, Kasim and his sons carry a burden of Indian tragedy, weaving the apprehension of irreparable damage done to its subjects into the picture of the Raj as no other white British novelist has done.

The Raj Quartet  71

6.3 Ahmed Kasim, Pandit Baba, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh MAK’s younger son, Ahmed, was a disappointment to his father in his hedonism and impiety, but the real difficulty was a complete lack of interest in politics. Even in 1945, urgently pressed for an opinion, Ahmed insisted that ‘It all means nothing to me, parties and such-like’ (D439), and his own passions found their fullest expression through his ancestral connection with the Nawab of Mirat, in training a hunting falcon and reverting to an aristocratic form of life seemingly above the political fray. Mirat points back to the Mughal traditions of rule that the Kasims inherited, and served Scott by connecting the Northern Indian Muslim past with its present, and by acting as a focus for his portrayal of the Princely States and their fate. But Ahmed’s tragedic role as a victim of assassination—and he alone of the massacre victims was singled out—shows that such detached disinterest as he desired was to some anathema. Why exactly he was targeted is moot, but the bottom line was plainly sectarian and his unknown killers presumably extremist Hindus. In the Quartet as a whole Scott mentioned several possible organisations, including the Hindu Mahasabha (‘Great Hindu Assembly’) and the Marathi Shiv Sena (‘Army of Shiva’), but his prime exemplar and the most probable candidate was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, ‘National Self-Help Organisation’), whose organiser on the ground in Mayapore and later Mirat was Pandit Baba. The RSS was founded in 1925 by Dr Keshava Baliram Hedgewar, an admirer of Savarkar’s anti-Muslim Hindutva revision of history and a fan of Mussolini. It has a cellular structure for direct action, junior cadres resembling the ‘Hitler Youth’, and now shares member­ship with the mainstream Bharata Janata Party (BJP, ‘Indian People’s Party’) to maintain official distance—as Sinn Feín from the IRA in Ireland and Heri Batasuna from ETA in Spain. Hedgewar died in 1940 and was succeeded as M. S. Golwalkar Sarsanghchalak (‘supreme leader’) by Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, under whom the RSS was active during the war in anti-British and antiMuslim activity of various kinds. The RSS has grown very significantly since 1945,  The usual form, but Swayam Sevakh is sometimes thus divided, giving RSSS.  On RSS history see Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (London: Sangam Books, 1993).  The RSS–BJP relationship is complicated by a middle term, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, ‘Hindu Workers’ Council’), founded in 1964, but commentators refer to the ‘RSS–VHP–BJP combine’ to suggest their practical indivisibility.

The Raj Quartet  72

was notably active in the 1960s–70s when Scott was writing, and from 1997–2004 was de facto in national government with the BJP. This long-sought electoral triumph was earned in part with a primary role in the relentless violence at Ayodha in the early 1990s, culminating in the mob-demolition of the Babri Masjid, a mosque supposedly usurping a site sacred to Lord Ram; similar RSS-led violence and the politics of fear underpinned BJP regional successes. And the unchanged nature of the RSS in government is horribly clear in the Gujarat Riots of 2002, more than a thousand murders, mostly of Muslims, sparked by a train-massacre of 58 Hindus, supposedly by a Muslim mob but in the view of very many an atrocity engineered to provoke anti-Muslim feeling. In 1942–7 the RSS had no official national power, but it was just as merciless—Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, was certainly ex-RSS and perhaps under orders—and Merrick in opposing it tooth and nail was fighting self-proclaimed fascists. Pandit Baba as recruiter and agent provocateur represents a form of local RSS organisation that was one among several. There is of course no hard evidence of his involvement in anything except Shalini Sen Gupta’s self-prostration before Merrick at Teddie Bingham’s wedding in 1943, but that token stands as strongly as anything in the Quartet for a greater truth. Cold certainties about the Pandit’s involvement with violent protest extending to murder come from many sources besides Merrick, including Bronowsky and MAK, and Baba’s bland denials and perfect alibis suggest no innocence, only an equally cold opponent confident of his opponents’ self-imposed rule of law and lack of evidence acceptable to a court. He apparently failed utterly in an attempt to recruit Kumar, whose personal circumstances must have made him seem a very promising target, but equally succeeded with Vidyasagar and others at the newspaper where Kumar worked. It is also perfectly possible that he was responsible for either or both of the Mayapore attacks on white women: RSS involvement need not be postulated for either, but the killing of Mr Chaudhuri (presumably as a collaborator and mis-educator, as well as a Christian), leaving-alive of Miss Crane (as an unsettling burden on the British community), and attack on Miss Manners (at such a symbolic location as the Bibighar Gardens, and in a way maximally agonising to Kumar as forced witness and prime suspect) all have elements consistent with a thoughtful and violently malign strategy that would perfectly fit both the RSS and the Pandit. The Pandit and his recruits to a local cell, or equivalents elsewhere contacted through RSS organisation, are also prime suspects in the minor but sometimes vile persecutions of Merrick after 1942—various incidents in Sundernaga, Mirat, and

The Raj Quartet  73

elsewhere involving rusty bicycles, inauspicious graffiti, and at least once a rotting pork chop. Trivial in themselves these incidents nevertheless attest to an organisation capable of tracking Merrick through his official postings and arranging local action against him irrespective of any supposed security. Baba’s presence in Mirat in 1943 also makes him much the most probable organiser of the stone thrown at the Nawab’s car, but though he was suspiciously provided with a glowing alibi in 1947 Bronowsky believed that Baba had ‘probably long ago been superseded by someone with a more modern and intelligent approach’ (D568). Bronowsky was speaking before the trainmassacre, and if he was right that superior RSS operative fooled him too, presumably as part of a strategy for dealing with the Muslim-ruled but Hindu majority state of Mirat by ensuring that its traditional rulers, the Kasims, were eliminated (one way or another) from the political board. Killing Merrick was primarily a security prophylactic (crookedly attesting to his efficacy as a counter-insurgent), and revenge, the scrawling of ‘Bibighar’ on the mirror in Merrick’s murder-room, was both the sign of a principal RSS recruiting rhetoric, and a deliberate red herring to distract attention from the real target, Ahmed Kasim, of political value, whatever his personal indifference to the partisan, for his name and for the effects of his death on Mirat and on his father. The Congress, not the Hindu right, fathered India, as Jinnah fathered Pakistan, but both extremist organizations, like the RSS, and the sectarian swell in the kind of Hinduism that built around Gandhi’s dominance, played significant roles in the birth and shape of the nation; as they have equally in its independent life. Kipling’s Kim pointed the way to politics of counter-/insurgency, and offers a much more historically realistic view of intelligence activity than many critics seem willing to allow; the far more fashionable Forster abandoned any notion of governmental thought or design; and Scott returned in full modernity to Kipling’s mark. No account of the later Raj can sensibly ignore the pressures of the Hindu right, and when the Pakistani critic and activist Tariq Ali praised Scott’s intertwined grasp of political history and fictional form he articulated an admiration shared by many Subcontinental readers. 6.4 Hari Kumar as Good and Unknown Indian So often a victim, of himself as of others, Kumar finally escaped the Stranger’s investigation and the pages of the Quartet. When Perron tried to find him in 1947 he was out, so Perron could only leave a card and wonder ‘what harm or good [he’d]  Tariq Ali, ‘Fiction as History, History as Fiction’, in the Illustrated Weekly of India for 8 July1984.

The Raj Quartet  74

done’ (D597). Whichever it may have been, Kumar’s absence from the Stranger’s researches suggests he did not avail himself of the opportunity to contact Perron, and many readers see little choice in accepting Kumar as ‘the permanent loose end […] Too English for the Indians, too Indian for the English’ (D499). Given his burden of representing Macaulay’s imperial ideal of creating ‘brown-skinned Englishmen’ it may seem right that Kumar disappear with the history that created him, but just as much as Gandhi, Jinnah, and Golwalkar he represents a kind of Indian with his own inalienable validity. Initially traumatised by his abrupt translocation to an Indian ‘home’ that was wholly alien, Kumar is a reciprocal of the Anglo-Indian children shipped home to the UK for schooling—but while they represented precisely a refusal of imperial miscegenation, and an expensive means of inoculating future Anglo-Indians against ‘going native’, Kumar represented the need for an emergent Indian polity to assimilate its own inevitably Anglicised elements and inheritances. The Stranger never had direct access to him, but did have a transcript of his interrogation by Rowan in 1944, and thus a first-hand account of a crucial moment in 1942 that came after the worst of his interrogation by Merrick: I managed to crawl out of bed and grope round the wall until I found the lightswitch. It was pitch black and it took me quite a long time just to stand upright. When I had the light on I noticed [Merrick had] left the tin mug near my bed. There was still some water in it. I put the towel round my middle and walked up and down so as not to stiffen up again. The water was warm, the room was probably stifling, there wasn’t a window, only a ventilator high up, but I was shivering. Even after I’d drunk the water I went on walking up and down, holding the tin mug. What I was doing reminded me of something but for a while I couldn’t think what. Then I got it. Like my grandfather, going off to acquire merit. The loin-cloth and the begging-bowl. It was funny. Aunt Shalini’s inlaws were always on at me about becoming a good Indian. This wasn’t what they meant but I thought, well, here I am, a good Indian at last.   (S312) This self-image of Kumar’s as a sannyasi, a religious mendicant, connects him with Lady Chatterjee, who (discussing Miss Crane with the Stranger) described becoming sati (that is, a widow ‘committing suttee’ by burning herself to death) as ‘sannyasa without the travelling’ (J123). But Kumar’s symbolic burnings (first with Vidyasagar of his English solar topi, then here as a sannyasi in purgation of his old identity) were also symbolic rebirths through new acceptances of self. Lady Chatterjee, as Indian as any Rajput dowager, cheerfully admitted that her ‘funny old tongue [… was] only properly at

The Raj Quartet  75

home in English’ (J80), and that was presumably true of Kumar even after he did finally acquire Hindi. Certainly, if the journalist who signed himself ‘Philoctetes’ was indeed Kumar, as Perron and the Stranger seem to have believed, he remained in English-language journalism; but that journalist’s awareness of his English school-memories and hopes ‘as illusions; as dreams, never fulfilled, never to be fulfilled’ (D536) is refutation, not nostalgia, offering from his point-of-view not only loss but cleansing hopes of becoming ‘just his own kind of Indian’ (D499). Barbie Batchelor’s apprehension of the ‘unknown Indian’ (see Part 4.2), the figure she believed missing from The Jewel in her Crown, plainly connects with the orphan she befriends in Pankot and with the representative figure Perron described as emaciated, crushed, or abandoned in Halki’s cartoons. It does not obviously connect with Kumar at all, but in its origin Kumar played a curious part. Seeing ‘Edwina [Crane]’s act of guarding [Mr Chaud­huri’s] body’ as ‘one of startling simplic­ity and purity’, and connecting ability in 1942 to do such a thing with ability in 1914 to dismiss rioters from her school-door, Barbie fantasised about having a body of her own to guard (T73). She also had a romantic image of Miss Manners as ethereal victim, ‘half-sitting, half-lying on a couch in a shaded room with her eyes closed and one hand, inverted, against her aching forehead’ (T68), but later, when rumours of Kumar reached Pankot, as transgressive lover: ‘The girl’s hand was no longer pressed inverted against her forehead but held by another which was brown like the dead teacher’s’ (T77). Barbie ‘found it difficult to distinguish between the teacher who died in the attack on Edwina and the Indian who was supposed to have had Miss Manners infatuated with him’ (T79), a confusion deepened by humiliation after revealing her enthusiasm for The Jewel in her Crown as a teaching-aid; but she hung the picture, stored since her retirement in 1939, above her writing-table and tried to think things through: The picture shimmered, became fluid. Colours and patterns ran. When Barbie sat at her desk and gazed at the actual picture she was no longer sure of what she saw: Edwina guarding the body; Mabel kneeling to grub out weeds or inclining to gather roses; or herself, Barbie, surrounded by the children she had presumed to bring to God; or Miss Manners in some kind of unacceptable relationship with a man of another race whom she was intent on saving.   From this there emerged a figure, the figure of an unknown Indian: dead in one aspect, alive in another. (T77–8) Subsequently, in nightmares, the corpse Barbie had imagined herself guarding ‘sat up. And howled’ (T78), and came to her as Mr Chaudhuri ‘blinded by cataracts’, ‘his mouth wide open in a continuous soundless scream’ (T81). This anonymous, unend-

The Raj Quartet  76

ing agony (recalling Munch’s iconic Skrik, ‘The Scream’) winds on to other connections with Mabel Layton’s corpse, the orphan, and the cartoons, greatly deepening the portrait of Barbie, but these origins make clear the perceptive connection that developed from imperfect apprehen­sions of Kumar and Chaudhuri. Both were relatively westernised Indians made vulnerable to other Indians by British in/actions, and the fate of each manifests in a different way the terrible bankruptcy of man-bap, the imperial claim of parental wisdom and responsibility. Kumar’s disappearance into his own silence, and evasion of the Stranger’s investigation, coupled with his strange role in Barbie’s fantasies, allows his reticent transformation into his own kind of good Indian to bear an additional identity as another avatar of the ‘unknown Indian’. Scott once described India as a ‘land of deafening noise and intense, melancholy silence’, adding in implicit refutation of Forster’s famous boum in the Marabar caves that ‘It seems to me to have no echo’. But beyond any refutation the remark also suggests an apprehension of India’s capacity (especially for a Briton) to deprive all utterance of redemptive answer and meaning; of the knowledge that even the fullest witness cannot procure atonement, nor meaningfully lessen the cost. Kumar’s slow fade from the pages of the Quartet, his passage from a confident object of enquiry and tragedic construction in The Jewel in the Crown to a haunting enigma in the preludes to Partition, is also an act of humility and acknowledgement of limited capacity by Scott that is equivalent to Kipling’s construction of India in short stories acknowledging themselves as fragments of a mysterious whole, and in absolute contrast to Forster’s strategies of symbolic summation. In a distinct view one may also ask about the increasing number of British Indians in the UK population while Scott was writing the Quartet. Before 1947 the demographic was relatively as rare as Kumar’s history suggests, but by 1955 more than 60,000 had arrived from the Subcontinent, and annual numbers peaked exactly during the frame of composition, between 1965 and 1972, latterly boosted by Idi Amin’s expulsion of nearly 100,000 Ugandan Indians. Kumar can hardly stand in detail for any of these later migrants, but Scott’s analysis of his situation as a cultural hybrid has an acute relevance for any multiethnic British polity. 6.5 Tusker and Lucy Smalley: Staying On Kumar was not the only living relict the Anglo-Indians left behind in 1947. How  Paul Scott, ‘The Raj’, p. 70, in Frank Moraes & Edward Howe, eds, John Kenneth Galbraith Introduces India (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974), pp. 70–88.

The Raj Quartet  77

many Anglo-Indians chose to stay on is uncertain, but certainly some thousands for some years. There were compelling financial reasons to stay: Britain not only made no effort whatever to deal with the problems of return, but in many ways offered only embarrassed denial and did its best to consign an entire imperial generation to a scrapheap of early and very impoverished retirement; while in India, for all the terrible sectarian violence, very few Britons were harmed or even threatened during Partition. India was also, of course, in many cases all that they knew. Scott’s tragicomic portrait in Staying On of how two such lives might by 1972 have faded into a new India is in almost every way oblique. Besides Tusker and Lucy themselves, bit-players in the Quartet, no other familiar character actually appears, though names occur and updates are conveyed in a letter from Sarah Layton Perron. Nothing much is made of it but the background has, however faintly, the malignant glow of the Third Indo-Pakistani war (in 1971) as a reminder of Britain’s still repeatedly fatal legacy to the Subcontinent. And while everything seems to partake of Tusker’s imminent ending as final eclipse, the last agony of the novel is not a death but a survival, Lucy’s, and the last prose note is of her desolation. Tusker was 71 when he died, and Lucy only 67, so one should not imagine (as many readers seem to) that she must inevitably soon have followed Tusker to the grave. She could equally have faced a quarter-century of widowhood, still stuck in a modernising Pankot and having to make her own way at last into India, as Tusker was shown doing in his ‘unseemly’ play with the town-children at Holi and his melodramatic, mutually enjoyable disputes with the grasping Mrs Bhooloabhoy and the long-suffering, affectionate Ibrahim. India in its vastness and bewildering variety has always harboured and absorbed stray oddities. It has ancient Jewish and Parsi communities that have survived for millennia, and it absorbed the Mughals, as the British after them. Scott’s combination of a death and a survival rightly functions as ending; but as with Kumar in Division neither is, nor implies, termination. Scott’s more modern India is more than a snapshot, and if inevitably a much lesser representation than his Raj, never less than vibrant and—even in its most satirical attention to a grasping modernity—balanced and weighted with deep and perceptive affection. Looking back to Rushdie’s attack on Scott and the Quartet from this final perspective (which Rushdie did not himself bother to mention), one may see afresh that what truly demands explanation is not Scott’s appeal, especially to the informed (a group naturally weighted towards Sub­ continental readers), but Rushdie’s own peculiar violence of distaste. As a coda Staying On is carefully in a minor key and in tragicomic rather than fully tragedic mode. It probably could not be otherwise, and its comedic delight cor-

The Raj Quartet  78

responds closely with Scott’s personal relief (despite his separation from Penny) at finally completing the Quartet, and discharging the obligation to bear witness that he conceived during his wartime service in the Raj. But his chosen year for the actions of Tusker’s last months and death, and of Lucy’s survival into widowhood, 1972, was the year of his own third (and as it proved) final visit to India, utilising a British Council tour to seek refreshment and resources for A Division of the Spoils. His own momentum then was thus still very much forward, not truly imagining he had only five years of living left for himself, and the later period of composition in 1975–6 was not only bleak with Penny’s loss and his own self-reproach, but marked by new friends and challenges teaching in Oklahoma, by popularity with students and sudden colleagues alike. These biographical combinations do something to explain the extraordinarily dual tonalities of termination and survival that mark Staying On, but the dualities themselves go well beyond anything biographical, resonating with the Emersonian understanding of a ‘relation between the hours of our lives and the centuries of time’ that so magnified Barbie Batchelor’s small life and is the mainspring of the Quartet’s intellectual form. So all ends as it began, absorbed in processes of apprehension and imagination, insisting on behalf of both British and Indian alike that the continuing real, political, and moral costs of empire, and of its ending, require our best attention, as Scott had—magnificently—given them his.

Appendix 1: Granada TV’s adaptations of Scott In 1979 Granada TV made a feature film of Staying On. Riding the novel’s Booker Prize publicity, the venture was also a trial in organising an Indian shoot, and its success led to a green light for the massively larger venture of adapting the Quartet. Screened in 14 parts in 1984, The Jewel in the Crown took ten months to film and had a budget of more than £6,000,000—then a massive sum. Driven by an out­standingly faithful screenplay and a galaxy of British and Indian acting talent (including Dame Peggy Ashcroft as Barbie Batchelor, her last great role), the series was an enormous hit, garnered many awards, and continues both to rank in polls and to sell on DVD. It is a joy to watch, and an essential resource in reading Scott, but also potentially a very dangerous trap. Precisely because Ken Taylor’s screenplay is so faithful, almost exclusively utilising textual dialogue and capturing so much of the original version, it is easy to miss those few lines and scenes that are inserted—DC White with Pandit Baba, Merrick with ‘Sophie Dixon’—and not to miss those that more critically go missing: the older protagonists’ earlier lives, Merrick with Susan and little Edward. More fundamentally and far more dangerously, the camera in its nature is taken to confirm what it shows, so that film is a very difficult medium in which to capture near-certainty and dreadful awareness of possible short-circuit. When viewers of The Jewel in the Crown see Merrick with a bound Kumar, or hear Merrick say what Perron reports him as saying, actions pass into certainty, and contingency is lost. The screenplay does once attempt a serious trick, when Perron initially sees the servants collecting Merrick’s trunk as men carrying a coffin—freeze the DVD and it is clear that in the first shot it is a coffin, and in the second, after Perron has blinked, a trunk—but also shows in close-up Merrick’s bruised knuckles and the boy Aziz’s battered face, turning the strange story Bronowsky had from the khansamar (or watch­man) into a cold certainty. Cumulatively, while the bones and musculature of Scott’s Raj are wonderfully present, and the whole breathes with life, the nerves and apprehension of uncertainty are very seriously diminished, so the adaptation must serve only as an adjunct to reading, and cannot be a substitute. It is also an object of investigation in its own right in TV and media studies,

The Raj Quartet  80

and a fair amount of documentary material is available, but perhaps the single most interesting issue attaches primarily not to The Jewel in the Crown but to Staying On. Tusker and Lucy Smalley were played by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, very movingly—but above and beyond their actual performances, what rang bells was their personal histories. The only other film in which, famously, they appear together is David Lean’s and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945), a stunning tear-jerker about a married man and a married woman who fall desperately in love, honourably decide not to have an affair, and part for ever. The metacinematic awareness in Staying On of the actors’ loving irony in counter-reprising their Brief Encounter roles recreates to an astonishing degree the tenor of Scott’s novel, and is an exceptionally deft manipulation of a possibility that is not always so benign. In watching The Jewel in the Crown, for example, it is worth remembering that Eric Porter, who played Bronowsky, had played the principal villain, Soames, in the late 1960s BBC hit The Forsyte Saga. Less amusingly, Tim Pigott Smith, who very brilliantly and sympathetically played Merrick, found himself for more than a decade repeatedly asked to play dodgy policemen, but then in 1997 to narrate Dynasty, the BBC’s four-part, very mealy-mouthed tribute to 50 years of Indian and Pakistani independence. One doubts whether the BBC intended it, but to establish the voice with a little of The Jewel in the Crown and then listen to Merrick narrating Dynasty is an exercise both highly entertaining and variously instructive. In something of the same vein perhaps the greatest value of Granada’s work was as a superb publicist for some at least of Scott’s major concerns. In the early years of Thatcherism and the penumbra of the ‘Falklands War’ the sombreness and gravity of Scott’s indictments of imperial failure and cost were not in many quarters at all welcome. Robin Moore’s study of Scott’s sources begins with the reception of his moral contentions about historical responsibility as The Jewel in the Crown portrayed them, and the comments beggar belief: Gita Mehta called the series ‘soap opera’, and Ferdinand Mount ‘barley water rather than a chota peg’; Rushdie (as noticed) thought it ‘grotesquely overpraised’; John Morton, ex-Indian Police Service, believed ‘The portrayal of the Indian police in the film would be as deeply offensive to Indians in India as it is to British officers who survive in Britain’; and Enoch Powell developed  Moore, Scott’s Raj p. 2; other quotations in this paragraph pp. 3–4. I assume Mount meant ‘burra peg’, a double measure, rather than ‘chota peg’, a single or half-measure. Mehta’s comment stands ironically beside her own fiction of Partition, Raj, advertised as ‘The Gone With the Wind of India’, but bearing (p. [ii]) an assurance from the Daily Mail that it is ‘a more important book than Jewel (in the Crown) [sic]’.  Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 89–90.

The Raj Quartet  81

Mehta’s attack by contending on TV that: a story had been constructed about human passions and human qualities in interaction which could be acted perfectly well anywhere else—in the hothouse atmosphere of a London suburb just as much as in the hot-house atmosphere of a hill-station in India. The absolute and dangerous absurdity of this argument, and its chilling resonance with Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, was pointed out by Sir Denis Forman (then Chairman of Granada) in The Listener: In the light of his past prophecies, [Powell] would, of course, be less surprised than most of us if the 6.28 from Victoria pulled into West Croydon dripping with blood from the scores of dead and dying victims of a racist massacre mounted at Clapham Junction. In such an exchange aesthetic judgement and political stance can barely be distinguished, and readers as much as viewers must decide behind whom they will stand up and be counted. It is easy, as Forman showed, to lampoon Powell, but any continuing need to do so warns that Enoch Sahib’s prejudices did not die with him. To look at this reception afforded Scott, appropriately enough in 1984, is to be forcibly reminded of the extent to which he, like Merrick and the best of his other Anglo-Indians, broke silences for good, in time for us if mostly too late for himself.

The Raj Quartet  82

Appendix 2: Critics’ Corner and Further Reading Setting aside Rushdie’s attack in 1984 and its unfortunate influence (see Part 6), Scott has been decently served by scholarship but less well by criticism. His letters and Indian library are held at the McFarlin Library of the University of Tulsa, with draft materials of Staying On. Other drafts, including MSS, TSS, and galley proofs of all the Quartet novels are held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. All are wellcatalogued and kept, but programmes of digital or hard-copy publication remain a desideratum; a selection of the letters is overdue, and the drafts, which include a number of deleted scenes as well as providing remarkable evidence of Scott’s fluency in composition, deserve to be edited in full. Critically and historically, as my lengthy bibliography shows, there is a great deal to consult—so much so that it is easily overwhelming. This appendix therefore provides some brief notes on the best places for readers (and especially students with limited time) to start. Spurling’s biography of Scott is an essential resource for facts, but less helpful in literary terms, and the best single critical book is Moore’s study of historical sources and accuracy. Among the critics Ali, Brann, and Childs are outstanding; Brandt deals best with the Granada adaptation; Weinbaum offers psychoanalytical views at length; Gorra a personal and somewhat wider view, and Haswell a different but also highly theorised view of ‘relationality’ between persons and places. Among the Indian commentators Badiger and Rao are best, and have enjoyed some commercial success. Others of all nationalities have interesting things to say, both enthusiastic and argumentative, but commonly fall into error—literally, in misstating plot or history, and more broadly in jumping prematurely (and clean over the contradictory or qualifying evidence) to their own particular conclusion. A summary list of the eleven named items with full publication details is given on the next page. For those obliged to write criticism of their own about Scott two pieces of advice might be offered. The first is Vladimir Nabokov’s admonition to ‘Caress the details, the divine details’, the other an observation—that (as with essays on Marvell) what is required is not conclusion but resolution, and resolution is as properly optical, into focus, as it may be political, into closure.

The Raj Quartet  83

Ali, Tariq, ‘Fiction as History, History as Fiction’, Illustrated Weekly of India 8/7/1984. Hard to get hold of, but a clear and very provocative approval of Scott’s representation of India from a leading Pakistani intellectual. Badiger, V.R., Paul Scott: His Art and Vision (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1994). A sincere introduction with interesting praise. Brandt, George W., ‘The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott — Ken Taylor): The literary serial; or the art of adaptation’, in, George W. Brandt, ed., British Television Drama in the 1980s (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), pp. 196–213. The necessary place to begin with the Granada TV adaptation. Brann, Eva, ‘Paul Scott’s Raj Quintet: Real Politics in Imagined Gardens’, in Knippenberg, Joseph, & Lawler, Peter, eds, Poets, Princes & Private Citizens: Literary Alternatives to Postmodern Politics (Lanham, MD: Rownan & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 191–209. A persuasive personal and political reading. Childs, Peter, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: History and Division (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1998 [ELS Monograph Series 77]). The only critic yet to give Emerson his proper due; the single best critical essay on the Quartet. Gorra, Michael,  After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). A vigorous set of readings, insufficiently sympathetic to Scott while indulgent of Naipaul and Rushdie. Haswell, Janis E., Paul Scott’s Philosophy of Place(s): The Fiction of Relationality (New York, Frankfurt, & Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002 [Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature]). Some interesting and mature thought, but unhappily stodgy in its polysyllables. Moore, Robin, Paul Scott’s Raj (London: Heinemann, 1990). An excellent, detailed study of Scott’s sources by an Anglo-Australian historian that found one-and-ahalf mistakes; required reading. Rao, K. Bhaskara, Paul Scott (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980). A worthy introduction with a few surprises. Spurling, Hilary, Paul Scott: A Life (London, Sydney, Auckland, & Johannesburg: Hutchinson, 1990). The only full biography; necessary reading, but much better with facts than interesting about fictions. Weinbaum, Francine S., Paul Scott: A Critical Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). A highly psychoanalytical approach from a critic who knew Scott at Tulsa.

Bibliography Works by Paul Scott Unpublished ‘A Selection of some of the Characters in the sequence, listed under the title of the book in which they first appear’, TS added to a letter to Roland Gant 21/11/1974, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Appointment’, TS of an unfinished novel, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Blue Waltz: A Play in one act’, TS, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Careerist’, longhand MSS & TSS of an unfinished novel, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Colonel’s Lady’, TS outline for a TV comedy, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Last Day in the Life of Mrs Pender’, TS, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Mango Rain’, notebooks, longhand MSS, TSS of an unfinished novel, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. ‘The Third Sister’, TS, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Lines of Communication: A new play written for broadcasting, broadcast on the BBC Home Service 12/2/1951, microfiche in the BBC Document Archives, Reading. Sahibs and Memsahibs: A Play for broadcasting, broadcast on the BBC Home Service 2/6/1958, microfiche in the BBC Document Archives, Reading. The Situation: A Play, TS with autograph corrections, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.

The Raj Quartet  85

Scott’s Raj — Or India Returned, also entitled A Division of the Spoils: Outline for a possible TV Book Programme, dated May 1975, in the Scott Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Published I, Gerontius: A Trilogy: The Creation — The Dream — The Cross (London: Favil Press, 1941 [Resurgam Younger Poets, no. 5]). Pillars of Salt, in Four Jewish Plays (ed. H. R. Rubenstein, London & Southhampton: Camelot Press/Victor Gollancz, 1948) Johnny Sahib (1952; London: Grafton, 1979). The Alien Sky (1953; London: Grafton, 1974). A Male Child (1956; London: Grafton, 1974). The Mark of the Warrior (1958; London: Grafton, 1979). The Chinese Love Pavilion (1960; London: Grafton, 1973). The Birds of Paradise (1962; London: Grafton, 1969). The Bender: Pictures from an Exhibition of Middle Class Portraits (1963; London: Panther, 1975). The Corrida at San Felíu (1964; London: Grafton, 1974). The Jewel in the Crown (1966; London: Panther, 1973). The Day of the Scorpion (1968; London: Panther, 1973). The Towers of Silence (1971; London: Panther 1973). A Division of the Spoils (1975; London: Panther, 1977). As The Raj Quartet (London: Octopus, 1984; in 2 vols, New York: Knopf, 2007). Staying On (1977; London: Grafton, 1978; ed. Roy Samson, London: Longman, 1991 [Longman Literature]). After the Funeral (with illustrations by Sally Scott, Andoversford: Whittington Press/ Heinemann, 1979). My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961–75 (ed. Shelley C. Reece, London: Heinemann, 1986; in the USA, differently paginated, as On Writing and the Novel: Essays by Paul Scott, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1987). ‘The Raj’, in Frank Moraes and Edward Howe, eds, John Kenneth Galbraith Introduces India (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974), pp. 70–88.

The Raj Quartet  86

‘How Well Have They Worn? — 1: A Passage to India’, in The Times, 6/1/1966, p. 15. ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, in Mary Stocks, ed., Essays by Divers Hands, Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, new series, vol. xxxvi (London: OUP, 1970), pp. 113–32. ‘Imperial Fathers’, in The Sunday Times 7953 (16/11/1975), p. 40. The Jewel in the Crown, dir. Christopher Morahan & Jim O’Brien (Granada Television, first broadcast in 14 parts, 1984); 21st Anniversary Special Edition, a 4-DVD set, Granada Ventures 37115 07413, 2005. Staying On, dir. Silvio Narrazino (Granada TV, 1983); Granada Media GV0197, 2000. Works on Paul Scott Essays and Articles Ali, Tariq, ‘Fiction as History, History as Fiction’, Illustrated Weekly of India 8/7/1984. Banerjee, Jacqueline, ‘A Living Legacy: An Indian View of Paul Scott’s India’, in London Magazine new series 20.1–2 (April/May 1980): 97–104. Beloff, Max, ‘The End of the Raj: Paul Scott’s Novels as History’, in Encounter xlvi.5 (May 1976): 65–70. Boyer, Allen, ‘Love, Sex, and History in The Raj Quartet’, in Modern Language Quarterly 46.1 (March 1985): 64–80. Brandt, George W., ‘The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott — Ken Taylor): The literary serial; or the art of adaptation’, in George W. Brandt, ed., British Television Drama in the 1980s (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), pp. 196–213. Brann, Eva, ‘Paul Scott’s Raj Quintet: Real Politics in Imagined Gardens’, in Knippenberg, Joseph, & Lawler, Peter, eds, Poets, Princes & Private Citizens: Literary Alternatives to Postmodern Politics (Lanham, MD: Rownan & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 191–209. Burjorjee, D. M., ‘The Raj Quartet: A Literary Event’, in New Quarterly 2 (1977): 121–8. Copley, Anthony, ‘The Politics of Illusion: Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet’, in IndoBritish Review 11 (1984): 58–73. Cundy, Catherine, ‘Paul Scott: Conflicts and Obsessions’, in Wasafiri 13 (Spring

The Raj Quartet  87

1991): 37–8. Degi, Bruce J., ‘Paul Scott’s Indian National Army: The Mark of the Warrior and The Raj Quartet’, in CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 18 (Fall 1988): 41–54. Desai, Anita, ‘The Rage for the Raj’, in The New Republic, 25/11/1985, pp. 26–30. Farrell, J. G., ‘Indian Identities’, in The Times Literary Supplement (23/5/1975): 555. Gant, Roland, ‘Paul Scott’, in The Bookseller 3768 (11/3/1978): 1786. Gooneratne, Yasmine, ‘Paul Scott’s Staying On: Finale in a Minor Key’, in Journal of Indian Writing in English 9 (July 1981): 1–12. —— ‘The Expatriate Experience: The Novels of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Paul Scott’, in Acheson, James, ed., The British and Irish Novel Since 1960 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 48–61. Granada Television, ‘Viewers Companion to The Jewel in the Crown’ (Manchester: Granada Television, 1984). Hannah, Donald, ‘‘Dirty Typescripts and Very Dirty Typescripts’: Paul Scott’s Working Methods in The Raj Quartet’, in Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 149–70. Hitchens, Christopher, ‘A Sense of Mission: The Raj Quartet’, in Grand Street 4 (Winter 1985): 180–99. Johnson, Richard M., ‘‘Sayed’s Trial’ in Paul Scott’s ‘A Division of the Spoils’: The Interplay of History, Theme, and Purpose’, in The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin new series 37 (1986): 77–91. Kim, Suzanne, ‘Histoire et Roman’, in Etudes Anglaises 36.2–3 (April-September 1983): 168-80. Kleinstuck, Johannes, ‘Paul Scott und sein Raj Quartet’, in Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 105.1-2 (1987): 94–114. Lennard, John, ‘Paul Scott’, in Jay Parini, ed., World Writers in English (2 vols, New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), II.645–64. Leonard, J. L. & F. S. Leonard, ‘The Pivotal Role of the Invert: A Comparison of the Quartets of Lawrence Durrell & Paul Scott’, in Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal 1 (1992): 91–6. Levin, Bernard, ‘A passage to the heart’, in The Times, 15/6/1991, ‘Saturday Review’ section, p. 15.

The Raj Quartet  88

MacFarquhar, Roderick, ‘India: The Imprint of Empire’, in The New York Review of Books XLIV.16 (October 23, 1997): 26–32. Mahood, M. M., ‘Paul Scott’s Guardians’, in Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 244–58. Parry, Benita, ‘Paul Scott’s Raj’, in South Asian Review 8.4 (July/October 1975): 359–69. Peterstone, Karina, ‘The Concept of History in Paul Scott’s Tetralogy, The Raj Quartet’, in Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 37 (1989): 228–33. Pollard, Arthur, ‘Twilight of Empire: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet’, in DanielMassa, ed., Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature (Msida: University of Malta Press, 1979), pp. 169–176. Ringold, Francine, ‘A Conversation with Paul Scott’, in Nimrod (University of Tulsa) 21 (Fall/Winter 1976): 16–32. Rushdie, Salman, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Granta 11: Milan Kundera (Spring 1984): 125–38. —— ‘Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!’, in The New Yorker: The Fiction Issue: India (June 23 & 30, 1997): 50–61. Scanlan, Margaret, ‘The Disappearance of History: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet’, in CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 15.2 (Winter 1986): 153–69. Shahane, Vasant A., ‘Kipling, Forster and Paul Scott: A study in sociological imagination’, in S. N. A. Rizvi, ed., The Twofold Voice: Essays in Honour of Ramesh Mohan (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, University of Salzburg, 1982), pp. 195–208. Singh, Satya Brat, ‘Rudy Wiebe, Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie: Historians Distanced from History’, in The Commonwealth Review 1.2 (1990): 146–56. Tedesco, Janet, ‘Staying On: The Final Connection’, in Western Humanities Review 39 (Autumn 1985): 195–211. Weinbaum, Francine S., ‘Paul Scott’s India: The Raj Quartet’, in Critique 20 (1978): 100–10. —— ‘Psychological Defenses and Thwarted Union in The Raj Quartet’, in Literature and Psychology 31 (1981): 75–87. —— ‘Images of the British Raj in the Granada Television Film Serial, ‘The Jewel in the Crown’’, in South Asian Review 8 (1984): 133–7.

The Raj Quartet  89

Zorn, G. Jean, ‘Talk with Paul Scott’, in The New York Times Book Review 21/8/1977, p. 31. Books and Theses Badiger, V.R., Paul Scott: His Art and Vision (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1994). Banerjee, Jacqueline, Paul Scott (Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council, 1999 [Writers and their Work]). Banath-Nouailhetas, Emilienne L., Le Roman Anglo-Indien: de Kipling à Paul Scott (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1999). Bonhaim, Jill, Paul Scott: Humanismus und Individualismus in seinem Werk (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982). Bose, Sujit, Attitudes to Imperialism: Kipling, Forster, and Paul Scott (Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1990). Childs, Peter, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: History and Division (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1998 [ELS Monograph Series 77]). Glover, Patricia A., Occasions of Grace: Interpretations of Truth in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet (University of Keele, 1993) Gorra, Michael, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Granada Television, The Making of The Jewel in the Crown (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983). Haswell, Janis E., Paul Scott’s Philosophy of Place(s): The Fiction of Relationality (New York, Frankfurt, & Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002 [Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature]). Hoffman, Barbara, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: Fiktion und geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982 [Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 14, Angelsächsische Sprache und Literatur]). Kohliu, Indira, Paul Scott: His Art and Ideas (Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1987). Mahajan, Chhaya, Women in Paul Scott’s Novels (Bangalore: Ultra Publications, 1997). Moore, Robin, Paul Scott’s Raj (London: Heinemann, 1990). Pugh, Janet M., Belonging and Not Belonging: Understanding India in novels by Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and V. S. Naipaul (University of London, 1995) Rao, K. Bhaskara, Paul Scott (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980).

The Raj Quartet  90

Spurling, Hilary, Paul Scott: A Life (London, Sydney, Auckland, & Johannesburg: Hutchinson, 1990). —— Paul Scott: Novelist and Historian, or The end of the party and the beginning of the washing up (Austin: College of Liberal Arts, Harry Ransom research Center, 1990). —— ‘Introduction’ to the Raj Quartet (New Work: Knopf, 2007). Sivastava, Aruna, The Pageant of Empire: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and related versions of imperialism in the Anglo-Indian novel (McMaster University, 1988) Strobl, Gerwin, The Challenge of Cross-cultural Interpretation in the Anglo-Indian Novel: the Raj Revisited (Lewiston, NY, & Lampeter: Mellen, 1995 [Salzburg English and American Srudies, 3]). Swinden, Patrick, Paul Scott: Images of India (London: Macmillan, 1980). —— Paul Scott (Windsor: Profile Books, 1982). Tedesco, Janet, & Popham, Janis, An Introduction to The Raj Quartet (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1985). Verma, Anil Kumar, Paul Scott: A Critical Study of His Novels (New Delhi: Radha Publications, 1999). Weinbaum, Francine S., Paul Scott: A Critical Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). Works on Anglo-/India Essays and Articles Chaudhuri, Amit, ‘Lure of the hybrid: What the post-colonial Indian novel means to the West’, in The Times Literary Supplement 5031 (3/9/1999): 5–6. Chaudhuri, Nirad C., ‘Passage to and from India’, in Encounter II (June 1954): 19–24. Desai, Anita, ‘The Rage for the Raj’, in The New Republic, 25/11/1985, pp. 26–30. Ghosh, Amitav, ‘India’s Untold War of Independence’, in The New Yorker: The Fiction Issue: India (June 23 & 30, 1997): 104–21. Murshid, Ghulam, ‘Modern Bangladeshi Writing’, in Wasafiri 21 (Spring 1995): 66–9. Rao, Venkat, ‘Self Formations: Speculations on the Question of Postcoloniality’, in Wasafiri 13 (Spring 1991): 7–10.

The Raj Quartet  91

Sen, Amartya, ‘The Threats to Secular India’, in The New York Review of Books XL.7 (April 8, 1993): 26–32. Studdert-Kennedy, Gerald, ‘Gandhi and the Christian Imperialists’, in History Today 40 (October 1990): 19–26. Trevelyan, Raleigh, ‘Burra mems at home’, in The Times Literary Supplement 4826 (29/9/95): 29. Tully, Mark, ‘My Father’s Raj’, in Granta 57: India! The Golden Jubilee (Spring 1997): 139–46. Books Ahmad, Akbar S., Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London & New York: Routledge, 1997). Akbar, M. J., India: The Siege Within—Challenges to a Nation’s Unity (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin, 1985). —— Nehru: The Making of India (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). Aldrich, Richard J., Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America, and the Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). Alexander, Horace, Gandhi through Western Eyes (1969; Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1984). Allen, Charles, ed., Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (1975; London: Futura, 1977). —— Raj: A Scrapbook of British India 1877–1947 (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). —— Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South-East Asia in the Twentieth Century (1983; London: Futura, 1984). —— The Savage Wars of Peace: Soldiers’ voices 1945–89 (1990; London: Futura, 1991). —— Soldier Sahibs: The men who made the North-West Frontier (London: John Murray, 2000). Allen, Louis, Burma: The Longest War, 1941–45 (1984; London: Phoenix, 1998). Ballhatchet, Kenneth, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). Barr, Pat, The Memsahibs: In Praise of the Women of Victorian India (1976; London,

The Raj Quartet  92

Sydney, Auckland & Johannesburg: Century, 1989). Basu, Tapan, Datta, Pradip, Sarkar, Sumit, Sarkar, Tanika, & Sem, Sambuddha, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (London: Sangam Books, 1993 [Tracts for the Times 1]). Bayly, C. A., Indian Society and the making of the British Empire (1988; Cambridge: CUP, 1990 [The New Cambridge History of India II.1]). —— Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996 [Cambridge Studies in Indian History & Society]). —— Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: OUP, 1998). Bence-Jones, Palaces of the Raj: Magnificence and Misery of the Lord Sahibs (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1973). —— The Viceroys of India (London: Constable, 1982). Brantlinger, P., Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988). Brown, Judith M., Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928–1934 (Cambridge: CUP, 1977). —— Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: OUP, 1985 [Short Oxford History of the Modern World]). Burton, David, The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India (1993; London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994). Campbell-Johnson, Alan, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1951). Chakravarti, Gautam, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 [Cambridge Studies in Nine­teenth-Century Literature and Culture]). Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c.1850–1950 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998). Chandra, Bipan, Mukherjee, Mridula, Mukherjee, Aditya, Panikkar, K. N., & Mahajan, Sucheta, India’s Struggle for Independence 1857–1947 (1988; New Delhi & Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). Chandra, Sudhir, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi: OUP, 1992).

The Raj Quartet  93

Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993 [Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History]). Chaudhuri, Nirad C., Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952 (1987; London: The Hogarth Press, 1990). Clark, T. W., ed., The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1970). Collingham, E. M., Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800– 1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). Copland, Ian, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire 1917–1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997 [Cambridge Studies in Indian History & Society]). Curry, J. C., The Indian Police (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1932). Davies, Philip, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India 1660–1947 (1985; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Dewey, Clive, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London & Rio Grande, OH: The Hambledon Press, 1993). Draper, Alfred, The Amritsar Massacre: Twilight of the Raj (1981, as Amritsar: The Massacre that ended the Raj; Leatherhead: Ashford, Buchan & Enright, 1993). Edney, Matthew H., Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Edwardes, Michael, The Last Years of British India (1963; London: New English Library, 1967). —— Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975). Fergusson, Bernard, Beyond the Chindwin: Being an Account of the Adventures of Number Five Column of the Wingate Expedition into Burma, 1943 (London: Collins, 1945). Fischer, Louis, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1951; London: Granada, 1982). Follows, Roy, The Jungle Beat: Fighting Terrorists in Malaya (1990; 2nd ed., Bridgnorth: TravellersEye, 1999). French, Patrick, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994; London: Flamingo, 1995). —— Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Harper Collins, 1997).

The Raj Quartet  94

Ghai, Prem Vati, The Partition of the Punjab 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1986). Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A., Images of the Raj: South Asia in the Literature of Empire (London: Macmillan, 1988). Goradia, Nayana, Lord Curzon: The Last of the British Moghuls (Delhi: OUP, 1993). Gordon, Leonard A., Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). Greenberger, Alan J., The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960 (London & New York: OUP, 1969). Griffiths, Sir Percival, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police (London: Ernest Benn/Bombay: Allied Publishers Private Ltd, 1971). Hewitt, James, ed., Eye-Witnesses to the Indian Mutiny (Reading: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 1972). Hibbert, Christopher, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). Holmes, Richard, Sahib: The British Solider in India (London: HarperCollins, 2005). Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (1990; Oxford: OUP, 1991). —— Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game (London: John Murray, 1996). Hubel, Teresa, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History (London: Leicester UP, 1996). Hunt, Roland, & Harrison, John, The District Officer in India 1930–1947 (1980; London: Scolar Press, 1982). Hyam, Ronald, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 1990). Jeffrey, Robin, People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi: OUP, 1978). Johnson, Gordon, Cultural Atlas of India: India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka (Amsterdam: Time-Life Books, 1995). Kanwar, Pamela, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (Delhi: OUP, 1990).

The Raj Quartet  95

Keay, John, The Honourable Company: A History Of The English East India Company (1991; London: HarperCollins, 1993). —— Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East (London: John Murray, 1997). Kennedy, Dane, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 1996). Kennedy, J., Asian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (London, Melbourne, & Toronto: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press, 1968). Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–1900 (Delhi: OUP, 1997). Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997). Khosla, Gopal Das, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events leading up to and following the Partition of India (1949; Delhi: OUP, 1989). Krishnamurti, J., ed., Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State (Delhi: OUP, 1989 [Indian Economic and Social History Review]). Leask, Nigel, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1992). Lewis, Ivor, Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of the Words of AngloIndia (1991; Delhi: OUP, 1997). MacMillan, Margaret, Women of the Raj (1988; London: Thames & Hudson, 1996). Meadows Taylor, Philip, Confessions of a Thug (1839; Oxford: OUP, 1986). Menon, V. P., Integration of the Indian States (1956, as The Story of the Integration of the Indian States; with additional appendices, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1985). —— The Transfer of Power in India (Himayatnagar, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1957). Metcalf, Thomas R., Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: CUP, 1994 [The New Cambridge History of India III.4]). Moon, Penderel, Divide and Quit: An Eyewitness Account of the Partition of India (new ed., Delhi: OUP, 1998). Moraes, Frank, Witness to an Era: India 1920 to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973). Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983; Delhi: OUP, 1988). Nehru, Jawaharlal, An Autobiography: with Musings on Recent Events in India (1936; London: The Bodley Head, 1989).

The Raj Quartet  96

Neillands, Robin, A Fighting Retreat: The British Empire 1947–97 (1996; London: Coronet, 1997). Noble, (Sir) Fraser, (ics, nwfp, 1941–7), Something in India: A memoir of service in the Frontier Province (Edinburgh, Cambridge, & Durham: The Pentland Press Ltd, 1997). O’Brien, Terence, The Moonlight War: The Story of Clandestine Operations in SouthEast Asia, 1944–45 (1987; London: Arrow, 1989). Omissi, David, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London: Macmillan/King’s College London, 1994). —— ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (London & Houndmills: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). Page, David, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control 1920–1932 (1982; with revisions, New Delhi: OUP, 1999). Palmer, Alan, Dictionary of the British Empire & Commonwealth (London: John Murray, 1996). Pandit, H. N., Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: From Kabul to Battle of Imphal (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1988). Perkins, Roger, The Amritsar Legacy: Golden Temple to Caxton Hall, the story of a killing (Chippenham: Picton Publishing, 1989). Pigott Smith, Tim, Out of India (London: Constable, 1986). Robinson, Jane, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1996). Roland, Joan G., Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era (Hanover, NH, & London: UP of New England, 1989 [Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry series 9]). Rothermund, Dietmar, An Economic History of India from Pre-Colonial Times to 1986 (London, New York, & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988). Royle, Trevor, The Last Days of the Raj (1989; London: Coronet, 1990). —— Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier (1995; London: Phoenix, 1998). Rubin, David, After the Raj: British Novels of India since 1947 (Hanover, NH, & London: UP of New England, 1986). Sarkar, Sumit, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985). Slim, Field-Marshal Sir William, Defeat Into Victory (1956; London: Four Square, 1958).

The Raj Quartet  97

Spain, James W., The Way of the Pathans (1962; 2nd ed., Karachi: OUP, 1972). —— Pathans of the Latter Day (Karachi: OUP, 1995). Studdert-Kennedy, Gerald, British Christians, Indian Nationalists and the Raj (1991; New Delhi: OUP, 1999). —— Providence and the Raj: Imperial Mission and Missionary Imperialism (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, & London: Sage Publications, 1998). Suleri, Sara (Sara Suleri Goodyear), The Rhetoric of British India (Chicago & London: Chicago UP, 1992). Tarling, Nicholas, Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Pacific War (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). Taylor, P. J. O., gen. ed., A Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 (Delhi: OUP, 1996). Tharu, Susie, & Lalita, K., Women Writing in India: Volume II—The Twentieth Century (London: Pandora, 1993). Thompson, Edward, The Other Side of the Medal (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925). Trevelyan, Raleigh, The Golden Oriole: Childhood, Family and Friends in India (1987; Oxford: OUP, 1988). Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989; London: Faber & Faber, 1990). Wainwright, A. Martin, Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India, and the Balance of Power in Asia, 1938–55 (Westport, CT, & London: Praeger, 1994). Ward, Andrew, Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London: John Murray, 1996). Wilkinson, Theon, Two Monsoons: The Life and Death of Europeans in India (1976; 2nd ed., London: Duckworth, 1987). Yule, Colonel Henry, & Burnell, A. C., Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (1886; new ed., ed. William Crooke, Calcutta, Allahabad, Bombay, & Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1986 [Centenary Edition]).

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginal Hill: On Beulah’s Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals

History Insights The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Lenin’s Revolution Methodism and Society Oliver Cromwell

Literature Insights Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Ibsen: The Doll’s House Hopkins: Selected Poems Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest

Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Contemporary Epistemology Critical Thinking Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Meta-Ethics Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Sport Plato Wittgenstein History Literature and Philosophy titles also in preparation: India and the British 1757-1947 The Italian Risorgimento The New Deal Lord Palmerston World War II: the North Africa Campaign, 1940-43 Aesthetics Business Ethics Foucault Heidegger Islamic Philosophy Lacan Marxism Mental Causation Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Plato’s Republic Žižek Renaissance Philosophy Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wonder Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell’ Chatwin: In Patagonia Eliot, George: Silas Marner

Eliot: Four Quartets Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Fielding: Tom Jones Heaney: Selected Poems Lawrence: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Toni Morrison: Beloved Shakespeare: Macbeth Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet