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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

Edwina Crane’s life and death fade more rapidly and are kept alive only in the memory of another missionary, Barbie Batchelor, and in an allegorical picture which they both owned. ‘The Jewel in the Crown’ shows a dumpy Queen Victoria as Empress of India. She sits on her throne while angels soar overhead and representative Indians cluster around her feet. One holds out a cushion with a jewel. Edwina was ambivalent about the unreality of the Indians and the ‘smugly pious’ emotions it called up. Barbie, a comic and deeply touching figure, who in her own confused way often hits on the truth, forces it into Merrick’s crippled hand with the observation that it shows pomp and circumstance but it misses one thing: the unknown Indian. In the last novel, A Division of the Spoils, Merrick gives it to his little stepson, perhaps the only person who genuinely loved him. It is now 1947. India is falling to pieces as the British withdraw leaving Hindus and Muslims to kill each other. The picture has spots of mildew. ‘The Queen’s dead now, of course,’ says the boy briskly.

One of Scott’s great virtues, to my mind, is that he is not E. M. Forster, whose loathing for the sahibs and memsahibs (one suspects in part because they were not Bloomsbury intellectuals) led him in A Passage to India to create caricatures. Unlike Forster, Scott tries to understand how the Raj pressed on the British, forcing them to play roles. There were millions of Indians, so few of them. Not surprisingly they huddled together, trying to make a huge alien land cosy with their bungalows and neat cantonments. The Laytons and their like in the Muzzafirabad regiment (‘the Muzzy Guides’) see the hills behind their station as gentle when, as Sarah Layton knows, they are ‘unfriendly, vast and dangerous’.

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