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Monday 1 December 2008

The Raj Quartet 1: The Jewel in the Crown, A Division of the Spoils

When the sun finally set

Margaret MacMillan

He missed most of the huge wave of nostalgia for the British Raj, fuelled in part by the marvellous television series made from the Quartet but also by the more romantic writers such as M. M. Kaye. In the public mind, the British presence in India was not about constitutions, law courts and railways but about rajahs, holy men, tigers, and the sahibs and memsahibs in their clubs. Scott got some of the sheer drama of the small island ruling the huge, complex country but he also asked awkward questions. What were the British doing there anyway? Were they, as several of his characters wondered, doing any good at all? And he insisted on putting power and politics at the centre of his novels, not as some static background for his characters to play against. His India is the one of the second world war, when the power of the European empires in Asia was broken for ever by the Japanese advance. Although India itself remained under British control, time was clearly running out for the Raj. Indians demanded independence and the British no longer had the energy or the will to refuse them.

Two stories which lie at the heart of all four novels show how difficult it was to move beyond that relationship between ruler and ruled. In The Jewel in the Crown young Daphne Manners is raped by unknown Indians, and Edwina Crane, an elderly missionary, burns herself to death. Both women had in their own ways gone outside the bounds, Daphne because she had fallen in love with a young Indian, and Edwina because she had come to doubt that she had ever done any good at all in India. Daphne’s lover Hari Kumar (Harry Coomer at his English school) himself belongs in no-man’s-land, not in an India which sees him as a fake Englishman or among the British who see him as a jumped- up native. Daphne dies in childbirth and Hari, falsely accused, disappears into prison and then obscurity. The policeman, Ronald Merrick, who framed him, flourishes in his own sinister and inimitable way, but so, more happily, does the child.

In the later three volumes Sarah Layton, surely one of Scott’s heroines, comes to her own terms with Indians. Daughter of an officer, and brought up to be a memsahib, she lacked, in the words of a sardonic observer who perhaps speaks for Scott himself, that ‘compound of self-absorption, surface self-confidence and, beneath, a frightening innocence and attendant uncertainty about the nature of the alien world they lived in’. She is aware that the world of her childhood is vanishing for ever. She sees that the British still all play by the rules but that they have a sneaking fear that someone is about to say that the game is over. She is a dutiful daughter to her mother, a masterly drawn bitch, but she slowly goes her own way. She ignores her community’s disapproval and meets Daphne’s aunt who is bringing up the orphaned baby and becomes firm friends with Ahmed Kasim, the son of a jailed nationalist politician.

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