C H A P TER
IV
T H E M E S A UP A T T I TUDES
At m i d n i g h t
was
lowered
and
thus
b r i nging
rule
over
on August
1947 the Union- Jack
the t r i - c o l o u r was ho i s t e d on the Red Fort,
to a cl o s e the t u o - h u n d r e d years
India.
The be g inning
India R e s o l u t i o n of Aug u st 8,
this
14,
of the end uas
1942.
an act c a l c u l a t e d to d r i v e the nation
resist
the efforts
the D a p a n e s e i n v a s i o n of
Gandhiji
v i o lence,
ever,
For,
the mass of people
thereby c o m p e l l i n g
w h o thourht,
that
the
1946,
like C a p t a i n
the Raj to assert
evoking
Purvis
to p a r t i t i o n
of Tho Raj
circumvent
tho c o m m u n a l
handim
over power
On duly
26,
granting
from
Lord Mountbatten,
1947,
to
Quartet,
viable
On Bure
a n n o unced
3,
the plan
t-ngln .that, sto o d in the ury of
of the s u b -continent.
British Parl i a m e n t
India ind e p e n d e n ce.
Pakistan
How­
parsons
nc longer
219).
of
p r a c t i c e ! s o l u t i o n to
to the people
the
of
itself
Srgh m a s s a c r e .
India uas
India as the only
and w i t h o u t
the days
there were se v e r a l
British p r e s e n c e in
the Viceroy,
Party
of the sails
lesderless,
e c o n o m i c s 1!'/ or a d m i n i s t r a t i v e l y . (IV,
1947,
of the Congress
indu l g e d in acts
Oyer and the d a l l i a n u a l l a h
by the end of
the
The Ej-itish put
the wind out
uith characteristic ruthlessness,
General
an act of sedi t i o n
But the p opular r e a c t i o n uas
c o n t r a r y to this expec t a t ion.
any direction,
..
of the G o v e r n m e n t to
and all other k n o u n leaders
of the n a t i o n a l m o v ement.
Quit
to anarchy uith
Indie.
in prison h o p i n g ,t h e r e b y , t o take
the
British
The Raj c o n s i d e r e d
to be an act of the g r a v e s t nature,
i n t e n t i o n of s u b v e r t i n g
long
p a ssed tho
A great exodus
India and of M u slims
from
Bill
of Hindus
India
to
10X
t
Pakistan began, occompanisd by the holocaust of communal
killings that shocked the world. As has already been
mentioned, Scott has woven the fabric of the Quaxtet
within the limits of these borders. Tho men and women
belong to both the races, the white and tho brown, and
they are caught at a given point of time in the web of
history. Quite naturally, there are many 'motifs' woven
into this fabric. In this chapter it is proposed to
examine the important themes, and attitudes that the
author seeks to explain. The theme, in the main, is
indeed Indo-British relations at individual, political
and historical levels. Uhila enalysing this theme, at
these levels, an attempt has also been made to find
out the author's attitude to them.
Broadly, there are two races depicted in
the Quartet, namely, the English and the Indian. They
are as distinct and separate from each other as their
respective colours,and they remain within clearly
demarcated zones. As little Uilliam Conway (in The
Birds of Paradise) realised, there are always two
Indias, the British India and the Indian India (p.21).
Hari Kumar says that it would not be possible for him
and his English friend Colin Lindsey to meet in India
because they belonged to these separate ’Indias* and
had no meeting place at all. Hari says:
"And every week that went
could only add to
the width of tha gulf he’d realise there was between
a man of his colour and a man of mine who had no
official position, who was simply an Indian who
worked for his living and lived in a native town.
He would feel it widen to the point where he realised
there was no bridging it at all. because the wish to
bridge it had also gone.” (J,25B)
b
y
\03
Their respective areas are divided by impregnable walls,
unfordabla rivers and inhibiting lines.
As Fierrick said,
there was always a line between the English and the
I n d i ans:
"But i t ’s essential, isn't itV You have tn draw a
line. Uall, it's arbitrary. Mine tiii.es out of ten
perhaps you draw it in the wrong place. But you
need it there, you need to be able to say: There
is the lino. This side of it is right. That side
is wrong."
( I I , 214)
But there are individuals who transgress these limits
and pay dearly,
the limits
also there ere individuals who cross
but keep their own identities
escape the punishment.
in tact and
There are also individuals who
.believe ttiat white is white and dark is dark; they should
not most and mingle,
reminding themselves often that they
are the rulers who have to keep the ruled sver subjugated.
This_, of course .could be a way wf keeping tneir ego s atiated
knowing fully well that in India they can afford to be
what thay pretend to be.
Gone of the varices ratifications
of the
thema
of Indo- British relations are the less of paradise for
individuals, the quest Ion of r OOtl93 s n a ~s of th • Angloand the preoc cup eti oc­ with work as a m •.inns- of
ray:
s el P-axpre: • ion. These ean be discer net1 in the port
Indi an?,
and bohrvion ral patter ns of th e vari O Uii charact ere
ir re spactiv a of their racial a1 ignme n tr . This t ir;rro of
Indo -Rri ti eh T'eJ ations , the novelist of3rc e i v e d , ecu Id
bast be prer anted through the d aline'?tiu n o f vc r i o vw
characters v io-a-vis their rel a t i c n ship with en cil u the
as individua lc and as members of thei two races in t!r •
104-
context of certain identifiable events and incidents of
a given period in the history of the British Raj in indie.
In a uay, The Ral Quartet is a metaphor, a metaphor of
•the fading away of the Raj, But it is not fchesinging of 1
requiem for the Raj because Scott does not seem to be
concerned with the demise of the Raj. He perceived uith
the clear acunen of a historian that this demise was a
historical necessity because tho empire had outlived
its utility. He does not believe that the British
Empire was like a huge uork of art or that it uas
resplendent and beautiful. Uhat he has looked askance
at in The Rai Quartet is the attitude of racial snobbery,
insolence and conceit of the English men and woman who
managed the Raj in India. However, he does not maintain
that these trait3 are peculiar only to tho English in
India. There are also Indians who are not free from
these blemishes.
To portray this theire at individufl levels,
the novelist weaves tho story of two individuals who
belong to the two races. Their relationship leads to a
grave violation of an accepted code of human behaviour
w-hich, in turn, paves the uay for a chain interference
of actions and reactions of most of the characters
involved. The novelist, therefore, uses the rapo as the
springboard from where the story i3
spiralled out»
Thus, the rape is the centrifugal aspect cf the theme
of Indo-British relations because in it, as the novelist
says, "there era the action, the people, and the piece.
\Oi>'
all of which are
interrelated but in their totality
incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of
human affairs"(I,1). Early in thB work, the author has
thus pinpointed his subject. The fact that Scott does
not point out the victim of the rape but only mentions
•a girl who is running in the deeper shadows of the
Bibighar Garden walls’ suggests that sha ig running away
from something sinister. This seems to impart to the act
of the rape a symbolic significance. In other werds, Scott
has depicted a microscopic experience of a macroscopic
phenomenon, that is, the rape cf a country symbol is3d
by the rape of a girl. But hou did this rope coi o about?
It is the result of a moral continuum and it goes back
to two hundred years. A country undergoes the experience
of being ravished by people who neither loved nor tried
to understand nar. There is an old, disreputable saying
that when rape is inevitable, lie back end enjoy it. And
it is Daphne, the victim, who cays;
"(Jell. there has bean mere than ore rape. I can’t
say, Auntie, that I lay beck and enjoyed mine. But
Lili was trying to lie back and enjoy whet we have
done to her country."(I,434)
Lady Lili Chat.terji knows that India is being ravished
by the British. She understands the inevitability of
this .’rape' but realises that she can dc precious
little to stop this act of violation. To she t r i t o
make the best of it. She is fully anolicisad and is on
Christian name terms with the English who matter, like
the Governor of Ranpur and his lady end the Deputy
Commissionor of Hayapore and his wife. These enlighfcened
people are, like Daphne, surra of the rape of India but
are unable tc do anything about it. This is what Scott
means uhen he says that the novel is the story of a
rape. Uhen Daphne undergoes the ignominious experience,
the entire British community is shocked and it cries for
vengeance.
But the same people do not even notice that
they have been subjecting a country to perpetual rape
for tuo hundred years. So, whereas Daphne cannot enjoy
her rape, Lady Chatterji, representing India, is compelled
to pretend to enjoy the inevitable. Ue are then tcld that
the Quartet is about such an act, about tho people who
are concerned with it, and also about the place of its
occurrence. So the people, the place and the action are
co-ralated. The act:is not detractabla as an isolated
incident. It is, for India, an everlasting experience.
But at the individual level, it creates situations which
are, at times, intractable. The rape produces far-reaching
repurcussions not only in the livas of individuals but
also in the lives of the tuo nations. Scott says that it
’’ended with the spactabio of tuo nations in violent
opposition, not for the first tine, nor as yet for the
last” bncausa they have been living in such situations
for such a long time that ”it uas no longer possible
for them to know whether they hated or loved one another1’
(l,i). Thus Scott makes it clear that the story of the
rape is analogous to the Indo-British relations.
It now becomes necessary to analyse tho
Indo-Qritish relations at political level. Colonization,
it is argued, is necessarily to enlighten and civilize
i o>
the conquered.
The British cane to India with this
civilizing zeal; the aim uas, as so many Englishman
like Kipling and Macaulay have asserted, ostensibly,
the good of the Indians.
But the Indians did not appre­
ciate it; rather they felt obliged to resist. Scott seems
to think that this uas so because the conquerors often
failed to realise the psychological element of this
colonization. The colonizing : zeal of the British,
though well-meant, uas rather abstract in its applica­
tion; they did not try to realise that no real and
lasting relationship could exist on the basis of an
abstraction. On this aspect of colonization,
0. Mannoni
has observed:
"Civilization is necossarily an abstraction, contact
is made not betueen abstractions but between real,
live human beings."'
But the British, in their hurry to amass riches From
India, overrode all such considerations.
like Prospcro,
They believed,
that what they considered good for the
conquered uas in the bast:interest of tho latter.
Like
Caliban, tho conquered necessarily resisted, because
they were not quite satisfied with the bona fides of
their conqueror’s intentions uhich were,
in effect,
self-aggrandizement. The; result ur.e mutual r sc.rim Jnetions
and misunderstanding.
The whole atiuoop.Vira of I.ido-Critic
relations uas under this cloud nil ths while. Bcott uas
able to perceive this aspect aid its dnvaotetin
on both ths ruler
effects
and the ruled, and so he tried to
bridge ths chasm by introducing the element of personal
relations between mamhera of the two racer.
v08
Uhen Oaphne Planners talks about the violation
of India, she does so possibly in this context. Scott's
interest in the Indo-British relations possibly arises
from this violation of India. So the argument that if the
rape is ‘used as a metaphor, the victim ought to have been
an Indian girl and not an English girl, does not stand.
It Is to be understood clearly that Daphne Planners is
not used as a symbol of India. The rape of Daphne shows
the evil that is hiddan in the hearts of all men including
Indians. It is interesting to note that in her long journal
Daphne herself has not made mrny indignant remarks against
the rapists. She took it as 6 work of spoilers who uern
aluays present In the Indo-British relations. The attack
on Daphne in the
Bibighar is not an act of crime committod
against the Raj. It ought to be viewed as a primitive
instinct to defile or destroy something that is different
from one’s own. After all, nothing could be as strikingly
different as the colour of Daphne compared with that of
Mr.r assailants. But this violation, which was no doubt
crave, paved the way for the yet grosser violation of
India by the British. The rape is used by Scott as a
metaphor to analyse the feelings and situations of the
English in the context of the peculiar historical
circumstances available during the period. Consequently,
the rape has to be viewed not as an end in itso.lf, but as
a means, that is, the rape of Daphne triggers off a
series of actions and reactions which become a saga of
the Indo-British relationship. Scott uses the rape in
the first volume as a sort of a metaphor for the fear
and paranoia that always lay beneath the surface of the
109
certainty of the white man. Ever
since the uprising
of 1057, as we have seen earlier, the attitude of the
English, that is, of the type represented by the Reids
and the Herricks, has been to rule India with a strong
hand with the sole purpose of keeping the nld empire
firmly in the saddle.
But beneath this bravado there
has been the constant fear that some dry the Indians
would rise in rebellion.
That was why just two stray
incidents in n place like Hayapora made man like Herrick
and Reid adgy; as a result they forced the situation to
grou out of control in spits of the restraining hands of
Robin SJhita, and then used excessive force to quell i.ha
riots. Evan immediately after the assault on her, Daphne
did nnt worry about herself; she worried about the effect
this atrocity would have on Mari.
It was an act of love
between Ha.ri and Daphne but what followed was an act of
shner barbarity. Daphne saw, only as a member of the
white race could sac, how this was going to affect llari,
nnd so took the situation into her own hands and told
him to insist that they had not seen each ethos since
the day of their visit to the temple,
she made him
promise to stick to this lie. She kr.ew Hrri would stick
to it because it was Daphne, the member of the; ruling
class, who took 'tho decision. She admitted thet
"even in my p o m c there uor this assumption of
superiority, of privilege, of believing I knew
what was best for both of us, bocauto the colour
of my skin automatically put me on the side of
those who never told a lie." (I, 425)
t«o
This a u t o m a t i c
a s s u m p t i o n of s u p e r i o r i t y
put the lid on
any ot h e r p o s s i b l e way of finding an alibi and co m p e l l e d
Hari to m a i n t a i n
a stiff upper lip,
s i t u a t i o n that gave Merrick,
to suppress,
sau uas
facets
to the
an o pportunity
the ruled.
inda-3riti.sh
as u s have seen but w h a t M e r r i c k
tha p r e d o m i n a n t o ne for m o s t of the rulers.
Kumar r e c o u n t e d
at the
the ruler,
even w i t h barbarity,
r e l a t i o n ^ have many
leading
Hari
the s t a t e m e n t of M e r r i c k in the prison
time of'his
interrogation!
'•/"Merrick said thnt7rel a t i o n s h i p s between people
utro b « . d on contempt, not looe, and that c o n t e m p t
uas tha prime h u m a n amotion b ecause no human being
uas evor goinfj to b e lieve all hu m a n beings w e r e born
aqual. If th e r e uas' an emotion almost as strong es
cantarnpt it ues envy. Ho said
man s portions! 1 ty
e x i s t e d r.t the point of e q u i l i b r i u m betueeri the
^
d e g r e e of his envy and the d e g r e e of his contempt.
&
(II,
Zn0)
In
!ndo-3ritish relations
e l e m e n t s of l o v e and hate.
illustrate
viduals
through
the a ctions
of i n d i ­
b e l o n g i n g to both the races.
Scott makes
use of
and b e havi o u r a l
characters, be l o n g i n g
Indo-Oritish
characters
He,
be l o n g i n g
T h a n e char a*:torn
characteristics
viable
Q u a r t e t , this
to an o s t a o l i s h e d society
e n ough for their
unravel
and
free play.
ce r t a i n
basic
Indo— Bricish r e l a t i o n - .
Taking up,
at the i n d i v i d u a l
portrays certain
c o n c e r n e d w i t h their actions
and s i t uations
of
of v arious
of the fence to reflect
therefore,
that are p r i marily
situations
patterns
to both sides
relations.
as i n d i v i d u a l s
I
N - a e s s a r i l y , the a u thor has to
this r e l a t i o n s h i p
the .inter-actions
creates
there have bean the
first,
level,
tha
in the
I n d c — —r i t i o h r e ’ nt j n<">~
first v o l u m e
theme is r epresented,
m a inly
of The
by the
two
then
lit
characters, Miss Eduina Crane and Daphne Manners. Mies
Crane did not come to India to spread the light of
aducation ot uith any othar philanthropic zeal. She
joined the Protestant Mission to teach Indian children
and became its Superintendent at Mayapore. She uas quite
ot home uith Indians; she had the picture of Gandhiji
hanging on her drawing-roa»well; she had littlo in
common uith the English either emotionally cr socially.
But she did not raject her own people or go egeinst
them:
"She know that the India she found full of compen­
sations uas only the white man's India. E’ut it was
an India of a kind, and that at l3ast was a
beginning. "(1,7)
She h8d laughed at the Europeans who said that Gandhjji
uas not to be trusted.
But when it seamed to her that
he had extended what looked like an open invitation to
the Bananese to co ie and help him rid India of the British,
she felt let down by him and so she promptly took down
hie. picture.
It may bo mentioned that the admirrtion of
Miae Crana for Gandhiji uas not mare fiction. There were
English miunionarias who thought,
even during th
j
troubled
days of August 1242, that he uas a good man.^ In her admi­
ration for Gandhiji, Pliss Crane is in gaud company.
Tha
Deputy Comtsissionor of f-leynen-G, Robin 'Jliite, observed:
"I die trusted Gandhi because I couldn't :><-*-• hou a
man who wielded such power and influence could
remain uninhibited by it, and always make the riant
decisions for the right reasons. And yet I always
felt h ir. appeal to my conscience benind even my
severest doubts shout hlo jntsntions*"(I, 318)
But the Indians, however, did not accept Miss Crane uith
the same warmth. In the author’s words,
"she had never been wholly accepted by the Indians,
and had tended to reject the generality of the
English-. "(I, 3)
It was possibly because she did not love Indians as
individuals! she only loved the idea of Indie. That is
w^y srie coulci not have any rapport uith Mr Chaudhuri,
the teacher in. the Mission School at Dibrapur. Scott
exposes the essential nature of the English attitude
towards Indians when he shows her reluotanca to depend
on the batter judgement of an Indian in a moment of'
crisis, fit such a. time, Miss Crane thought
m e t she was
automatically in charge though she regretted this
attitude;
"And in my voice, she said to herself, there always •
there - the note of authority, the
• pecistl note of us talking to them, which perpahs
passes unnoticed when what we talk about is the
small change of everyday routine but at times of
stress always sounds like taking charge."(I, 4?)
Her sense of racial superiority asserted itself aven
in moments of crisis and led her to her inevitable doom.
This kind of love for. India does not play any positive
role in the Indo-British relations because it Jacked
the essential quality of mutual trust and understanding.
So it only ended ih disaster;
Generally there were two types of Englishmen
who governed Indie - those who thought they oere respcnsibl
for the well-being of the people whom they governed, v.and
those who were indifferent but managed their responsibility
as a matter of duty. Robin Uhite belongs to the former
*
Wh
group, fls the Deputy Commissioner of the district, Uhi'e •
had a vary important pole to play in the schema of things.
Hs uas, like Hiss Crane, free from any racial feelings. The
English, by and larga, kept themselves aloof from having
personal contact of any kind with the Indians including
their servants, fiut White was an exception to this
general rule, lie kept the company of the Indians; even
the servants he treated as Fellou-human beings giving
them kindness and affection. Lawyer Srinivasan remarked
later:
"And Robin, you know, looked at servants when he
spoke to them. You could see him receiving a brief
but clear impression of them as men. He did not
feel superior to them, only more responsible for
them."(I, 185)
''either Robin White nor Miss Crane suffered from racial
-T
prejudice. Geott makes White admit that the English did
precious little to bring either the Indians and tho
English toe ther, or the different communities of India
closer. He say3 th?t if the English built railways,
linking different parts of the country, it was only to
carry their wealth more quickly to the English pockets
(I, 320).
lira Mabel Layton who faintly reminds the reader
of Mrs flooT'o in A Passage to India is another character
who has some contribution to rank a towards M ns Indo-irition
understanding. In 1020 the British Government had retired
General Dyer at half pay for his shooting doun the unarmed
Indians at Zallianuallah Oagh in Amritsar. The English
in India had taken that as a g n a t affront because they
belioved that what Dyer did was to loop the Onion Gael;
«
114
flying over tha .lad Fort.
-
Aft >r all, the empire was thoir
mainstay. So thay decided tc pees the hat around end
present a nice sum of money to their horo. Mabel Layton,
who had refused to contribute to this fund, however,
contributed secretly one hundred pounds to the fund
raised by the Indians in aid of the orphans and widows
of the Oallir.nwallah 3agh massacre.
Her argument was
that since the sum presented to the General amounted to
tuentysix thousand pounds for killing
sixty Indians,
two hundred and
the price or' each Indian killed,
by their
reckoning, would be one hundred pounds. This is riot the
sort of thinQ that tha English in India uculd tolerate.
When they came to know about it aftar twenty two years,
they fait badly lot down by Mabel. 31r nkter Ali Kasim,
a marobar of tha Governor*s Executive .'kiuncil to whom
firs Layton had hended over tha draft for the rnuuni,
thought that her action war. 3 straw in the wind, the
manifestation of English sympathy for the Indian:;, on
small ;•tap towards butter understanding hot we m
j
tho two
-aces. Aftar the death nf i-iabel, we a u told by Mildred
Layton, her step-daughter-in-law,
that the for iinr had
been making contributions to help Indians ennnymnunly.
Thero were InrUod philanthropic parsons like fioLnl who
acted as some kind of s bridge Lot-. ;;:n the Indians and
the English.
Mabel’s grand-dacg h i o r , Zr. rcl ,
her attitude towards Fndi».
di 1 w
L,;y f w.p ^ 1 nheri
t c*k ui.u not L.ali •
keeping n distance between . j r ‘- e l f nii..! tnu Ir.ui 1 n: .
j.O
d
So, at Mirat, when she went out riding with Ahmed Kasim
who kept s certain distance throughout the ride, at one
point aha manipulated her horse in such a manner that,
momentarily, she closed the gap, and metaphoricaJly
bridged their tuo worlds. But like Hari Kumar, Ahmed,
too, did not proceed in a manner that would have been
natural for an English boy; like Hari Kumar, he, too,
hesitated, end then backed out. Because Ahmed realised
what could be expected if he chose to use thet bridge
thrown across the racial chasm by Sarah. But, signifi­
cantly, it is Sarah and Ahmed who round off the Quartet.
After th8 murder of Ahmed in the communal killings,
Sarah tells herself:
"Ahmed and I weren’t in love. But we loved one
another. Ue recognised in each other the compulsion
to break away from what I car call a received life."
(IV, 592)
All along, both Daphne and Sareh rebelled against this
received life. They wanted to take a new path rejecting
a trodden one. But Sarah realised quite early that
Merrick was the 'arcane side' of British imperialism,
the outsider, the repository of racism’s obscenities and
the corruptions with which some individuals who served
imperialism were infected. Like Daphne, Sarah, too, made
herself useful to the Indians as soon as she became
free from her bondage at home. She came to Mirat where
she spent her time teaching Shiraz, the only daughter
of the Nawab, useful things for herself and the community
she also worked in the local hospital for women. She
became friendly with Ahmed and many thought that they,
I
L 6
too, uould meat the fate of Daphne and Hari Kumar.
fate decided otherwise,
But
and the communal disturbances
claimed the life of Ahmed. When the author leaves her
at the end of the book, we get an idea of a young girl
trying to do her bast to pour water into the mouths of
the dying
Indians as if to atone for her inability to
stall the death of Ahmed. Sarah's contribution towards
bridging the gap that existed between the British and
the Indians is indeed noteworthy; aha dares the accepted
norms and breaks the artificial barriers provinn that
racial prejudices need not darken the sky of personal
end human relations.
The friendship that existed between Lady
Chatter ji and Lady Planners transcended all racial
bias.
Their h u s b a n d s >too,were very friendly,
even to
the extent of Sir Nello Chatterji caricaturing Sir
Henry Manners although the Governor's
aide-de-camp
felt scandalised that an Indian should be alloued
such freedom.
There is nothing to point out that there
was any irritant caused by racial prejudice. Uhen Lady
Manners realised that her days were numbered,
her friend,
Lady Chatterji,
of her niece,
she asked
to take care of the child
Daphne Manners.
Lady Manners felt that
he should bring up Parvati as a child of the East and
the Uest,
to respect her niece's desire that her child
- "My own typically hamfisted offering to the East.'"
(I, 352) - should grow up as an Indian:
"I intend to bring her up as an Indian.which is
one of the reasons
I have called her Parvati."
( I , 442)
Parvati was no doubt conceived in tragic circumstances,
but she uas conceived with love.
There is a symbolic
victory in the child. During her pregnancy,
convinced
that the child uas Hari's and not of any of the rapists',
Daphne felt that she uas carrying
India in her uomb.
The
child Parvati uho grew up aa an Indian uas of Britain as
uell.
Lady Manners understood this feeling of her niece
and took it upon herself to bring up the child even at
the cost of losing the friendship and sympathy of her
fellow-countrymen.
In fact, she cut herself off completely
from English society for the sake of Parvati.
uay,
In her own
Lady Planners and Lady Chatterji made substantial
contribution towards mutual appreciation and u n d e r ­
standing between the two communities.
Scott has used several characters to emphasise
the various aspects of the Indo-British relations.
Sister Ludmila remarked that there were some members
of the English community uho could come out of the
crevices and holes in which the English, metaphorically,
elected to remain in so far as their relations with
Indians were concerned.
She said that there were those
wh o had the courage to defy racial prejudice and
insolence.
One such person was Daphne Manners.
She
reminds us of Adela Quested of ft Passage to India.
She found nothing
unnatural in her aunt's friendship
with Lady Chatterji.
Chatterji,
During her journey with Lady
she got the taste of the average English
men and women in India. She realised how her compatriots
treated Indians even if they were knighted by their own
king. The English acted as if they owned the country.
They could not tolerate an Indian travailing in the first
class compartment along with them. The English lady who
had to travel in tha -erne compartment with Daphne and
Lady Chatterji screamed:
"I don't care. The whole thing is a disgrace. I
don't know what the country's coming to. After
all, first class is first class." (I,9i)
Lady Chatterji called her a harpy and sunh harpies
continued to come to India. Mrs Peabody was such a
woman who, even on 8 August 1947, found it difficult
to travel along with an Indian. Scott describes:
"Perron joined Sarah and Nigel. 'I have a feeling
that at least two members of the departing Raj
aren't going to leave without standing by their
old rights. Or anyway making a fuss about Ahmed
and Ayah travelling in the first-class compartment.'
(IV, 574)
Scott has maintained thst the tradition has continued.
He has a good dig at the work-a-day English who give
themselves airs in India where they come to work even
after Indie's independence. His remarks on the wife of
a technical manager of the British Indian Electricals
at Mayapore, firs Crigson, are indeed interesting. It
was 1964 and yet there was this sense of racial
segregation. The lady was hardly polite even to the
English guest of Lady Chatterji who was her husband's
friend. The entire scene depicting the old memsahib
in the company of Indians is re-enacted. Earlier it
was Daphne who was snubbed by the Enrlish at Mayapore
for staying at the MacGregor House; in 1964 it was
Lady Chatterji's English guest. Just as the newcomers
1 V?
like Adels Quested and Mrs Moore or Daphne in those days
were not averse to being friendly uith the Indians, the
young lady uith Mrs Grigson, possibly fresh from England,
uas interested in talking to the Indians, but, as Scott
reports,
•'Mrs Grigson, uith a perfect sense of timing, turns
the ’Sunday Times' magazine towards her and points
some extra-ordinary detail of Coventry Cathedral
so that they are then both lost in the illustrated
complexities of modern Anglo-Saxon art; and the
uncharitable thought occurs that, for the English,
art has anyuay always had its timely, occupational
value."(I, 160)
This may not be altogether true of all English residents
in India, but, by and large, Scott means to say that they
tend to be so. These women are the logical successors to
characters from earlier novels such as Mrs Turton, the
wife of the collector of Chandrapore (A Passaoe to India)
and Mrs Quorn, wife of the Superintendent of Police (in
Dictators Limited) or an author like S.H. Uoolf who says:
"Uhat has kept us top dogs in this country so long
has been our prestige. Once we lose that we might
as well pack up and clear out. And can the native
possibly respect us when he sees our women folk
making themselves cheap and gadding about uith
stray 'Nauabzadas' and such like gentry? The
Oriental simply does not understand the meaning
of chivalry to women. Apart from breeding purposes
he has only got one use for women and I needn't
tell you what that is."^
Daphne broke away from this tradition. The depth of
animosity that separated the two races was known to
her. She had courage. She used it to challenge the
Anglo-Indian dictuma. Sister Ludmila has said that
between the two communities, symbolized by the Mac­
Gregor House and the Bibighar - built by a Scott and
a Maharajah respectively - there was
"a currant. The flow of an invisible river. Do
bridge was ever thrown across it ... To get from
one to the other you could not cross by a bridge
but had to take your courage in your hand and
enter the flood and let yourself be taken with
it, lead where it may. This is a courage Firs
Fanners h a d . ” (I, 136)
And with courage only she died. She was told by several
persons to drop her esociation with Hari Kumar.
But
this she did not do. She defied the Anglo-Indian world
and told the policeman f'lerrick who warned her against
her association with Hari Kumer
policeman'.
’to stop acting like a
She went to H a r i ’s house for dinner and made
friends with his sunt. She went the whole hog in her
friendship with Hari.
Her relationship with him did not
end with holding his hand and moving around like that
wherever they went regardless
of what people commented.
That was why Merrick told her to be cautious because
people had been talking. This in itself is something.
She treated Hari as an individual and a lover. She nave
him an identity.
She found nothing unnatural about it.
She tried, as it were,
to let the English world know
that Hari Kumar existed not in the siy and sexy glances
of the memsehibs but in flesh and blood.
Even during
his return journey to India Hari Kumar had become
invisible to his fellow-passengers once the ship was
in the tropics.
And in Hayr.pore he became totally .invi­
sible to all the English.
"As you saw,
Hn once told Sister Ludmila:
I ’ve become invisible to white people."
But Sister Ludmila believed that was not exactly
correct:
1X1
"Perhaps he had not noticed the uay the white women
eyed him. Perhaps only he had noticed the way they
pushed past him, or turned their backs,or called to
the assistant he wss already speaking to."(l, 146)
To Daphne such behaviour did not occur at all. She knew
there was a bridge between her India and Hari Kumar's
India but realised that it uae no good waiting for the
bridge to be built, that it was a question of entering
the flood, and meeting there, and lettino the current
take them both. Ue have, again, Sister Ludmila's
observations here:
"It is as if she said to herself; yell, life is not
juet a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an
illusion that some of us stand on one bank and
some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that,
ue are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump,
jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if ue
drown, at least for a moment or two befors we die
ue shall be awake and alive."(I, 137)
Daphne did precisely that. But she left behind the bridge,
her child, whom at first her aunt brought up giving her
the name Parvati, "consort to Shiva, the dancer leaping
within a circle of cosmic fire, with one foot raised and
the other planted on the body of ignorance end evil to
keep it in its place" (I, 137), and when Lady Manners
is gone, she is brought up by Lady Chatterji. One has to
wade through the water of racial prejudice. It is here
that in spite of all his good intentions and daring,
Sven a man like Robin White failed. He could not come
lown to the human level because he was satisfied with
superficial relations with Indians, But Daphne's risk
was indeed very great. It is not that aluays Daphne and
'IZX
Hari Kumar walked hand in hand. It was not a relationship
of love-hate; it was a natural relationship. Yet there
was a touch of hesitation, of tentativeness, in their
love. It would be normal for an English boy to touch
his beloved after a lovers' tiff but Hari would do
nothing of the sort. Daphne reminisced about this later
in her journal;
"He would only have had to touch me, for the
stupidity to have ended then, but he didn't. He
was afraid to. He was too conscious of the weight
that would have made touching a gesture of defiance
of the rule Ronald had described a few evenings
before as 'basic', and he didn't have that kind
of courage, and so I was deprived of my own. The
defiance h8d to come from him first, to make it
human, to make it right." (1,398-99)
However, she had the answer to Hari's refusal to touch
her. To many, her friendship with Hari Kumar was terrifying
"because even they couldn't face with equanimity the
breaking of the most fundamental law of all - that
although a white man could make love to a black girl,
the black man and white girl association was still
tabpo. ", '(I, 355)
The British historian, Max Beloff, pinpoints this taboo:
"And even when social constraints were a little
loosened, the reluctance to contemplate the sexual
involvement of British women and Indian men remained
a rooted one."4
In this connection, what Merrick told Sarah is also worth
noting:
"There is this connotation paleness has of something
mors finely, more delicately adjusted. Uell - superior.
Capable of leading. Equipped mentally and physically
to dominate. A dark-skinned man touching a white-skinned
woman will always be conscious of the fact that he is
diminishing her. She would be conscious of it too."
(II, 217)
12.3
Daphne felt exasperated at such behaviour of her compa­
triots* So »he said:
"I thoght the whole bloody affair of us in India had
reachfi a flash point."(I, 400)
India was volated by ths British, was still being violated.
And this vilation uas likely to continue* Of course she
appreciatedbhat "perhaps at one time there was a morel
as well as physical force at work. But the moral thing
had gone so. Has gone sour" (I, 400). Daphne is here
connecting lr rape with the British conquest of India.
At first, peibly, there uas a sense of mutual under­
standing ancjppreciation between the English and the
Indians. Buthen avarice and craze for power began to
override allther considerations. The paradise of mutual
appreciationiowly began to fade. So Dsphne realised that
her peradise-.oo, had been defiled by a man like Merrick
on the one hi, and a man like Pandit Baba on the other.
So she said:
"Perhaptiere was love. Oh, somewhere in the past,
and noupd in the future, love as there uas
betueen and Hari. But the spoilers are aluays
there. *'(434)
It uas so bece the English in India and the Indians
were separaterom each other both emotionally and
physically. Trngiish in India were not living with
reality, they*a living, as Sarah Layton said, in a
mansion uithoioors and windows with no way in and
no way out. DiS realised that her heart uas filled
with a certaif/, a certain sense of spaciousness,
when she thoug>p her love for Hari Kumar. She
U4
suddenly felt that the world had grown much bigger and
had made her smaller.(I, 378-79). Actually, it was not
Mayapore or the world that had grown bigger but her vision
of India and the Indians that had undergone a subtle change.
The Daphne-Hari Kumar factor is an important link in the
Indo-'British relations in so far as the novel under review
is concerned. Scott has drawn the full picture of their
relationship together with its inherent vicissitudes and
moral triumphs. He means to say that it is quite possible
to have inter-racial relationships based on an individual's
ability to circumvent the various hazards. Unless some
individuals take the sort of plunge that Daphne end Hari
Kumar took, there could be no possible advance in IndoBritish relationship. The love that existed between Daphne
and Hari Kumar stands as a monument to Indo-British
relations at the individual level.
As against those who sincerely believed in a
closer and better understanding between the Indians and
the English, and did whatever they could towards that
end, there were those like Brigadier Reid and Ronald
Merrick, officers of the Raj, who refused to believe
in Indo-British relations based on mutual love and
respect. They believed that ruthless subjugation of the
ruled was a pre-requisite to keep the empire going.
They sincerely believed that segration was good for both
the parties, especially for the English. Of these prota­
gonists of the Raj, Ronald Merrick merits elaborate
consideration. Like Kipling, Merrick believed that the
-iZb'
East uas East end the West was Uast and that there was
no communion between these two. To him colour mattered a
great deal.
He told Daphne who resisted his suggestion
not to meet Hari Kumar:
,,T h a t ,s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour
d o e s n ’t matter. It does matter. I t ’s basic. It
matters like hell." (I, 391)
Ronald Merrick and others like him start off from here.
Uhile talking about Daphne, Merrick told Sarah:
"She w a s n ’t able to draw the distinction. She didn't
see why a line had to be drawn - has to be drawn.
But it's essential, i s n ’t it? you have to draw a
line. Uell, i t ’s arbitrary. Wine times out of ten
perhaps you draw it in the wrong place. But you
need it there, you need to be able to say: There's
the line. This side of it is right. That side is
wrong." (II, 214-15)
But the fact is, in the case of Merrick and people of
his type, colour was a protective armour beneath which
they felt secure.
They could keep themselves away from
the local people and call themselves sahibs.
He did all
that was possible and within his power to keep the Indians
at the lowest possible rung of the social ladder.
He would
not believe that there could be mutual love and respect
between an Indian man and a white girl:
"I didn't like the idea of a g i r ’ of Miss M a n n e r s 5
kind - well, any kind of decent English girl I
suppose - gettinc mixed up with Master Kumar."
(II, 191)
He echoes faintly several characters in earlier *-,nnloIndian novels.
In many of them,
with English girls is resented,
the intimacy of Indians
because,
"privileges
IZfc
of this kind fills the Indians with pride and make them
bumptious"^ He ues auspicious of Ahmed Kasim, too. He told
firs Layton to keep him at arm's length, because though
Ahmed was well-educated and spoke first rate English, it
would be unnatural if he did not resent the English a
bit (II, 146). Merrick would not tolerate the idea that
there could be well-educated Indians or that they should
be able to speak 'first rate English' because that would
be allowing them to come up to his own level. Ha conceded
that there were Englishmen who had esteem and regard for
Indians. But he did not feel that those feelings of
admiration and sympathy emanated from a sense of equality
or mutual respect. He had a peculiar theory to explain
his stand on Indo-British relations:
"Underneath the admiration and sympathy there was
the contempt a people feel for a people who have
learned things from them. The liberal intellec­
tual Englishman was just as contemptuous of the
Westernised educated Indian as the arrogant upperclass reactionary Englishman was of the fellow who
blacks his boots and earns his praise."(II, 299)
What Merrick meant to say was that the feeling of racial
superiority was in-built in so|far as the English middle
class in India was concerned because that way alone they
could keep India in their grip. Indeed, as Sarah said,
he was 'the dark side, the arcane side* of Indo-British
relations. He stood for the negation of all that people
like Sir Henry Manners or Robin White or Daphne Manners
espoused. Between himself and Reid, they were able to
force the Indians start a rebellion and thus demolish
Indo-British relations. Merrick is indeed the foremost
of the tuo protagonists of the British Empire portrayed
by Scott in The Raj Quartet.
Brigadier Reid shared with Merrick the belief
that the Indiana were for ewer creating trouble for the
English and so they deserved severe treatment. As Robin
White commented* in so far as Reid uea concerned* the
Indiana were mere blots on the landscape. His ettitude
towards his duties vis-a-vis the people shows that he
could not see eye to eye with Robin White, to whom
'policies were people1(I* 316), When the situation
looked somewhat bad in Mayapore, Reid became impatient
\.o crack down on the people* but White held him back
with soma difficulty. At one point he told Reid:
"Your fellows are armed. My fellows have a feu
delaying weapons like explosives but otherwise
their bare hands and their passions." (I, 301)
What shocked Reid and what interests the reader is that
White, the administrator, could consider the people of
hia district as 'his fellows' when there was every
possibility of imminent riots. This shows the kind of
relationship that originally existed between the ruler
and the ruled; the ruler felt responsible for the people
of his district even when the people ware on the path of
riot. As Daphne observed, there was love but there have
been spoilers, too, in the form of zealots like Reid
and jealous men like Merrick. Even Reid, who never liked
Robin White, observed:
"I came away with e deep and abiding impression of
the Deputy Commissioner's total involvement with
the welfare of the people as a whole, irrespective
of race or crsed or colour." (I, 302)
1.2 «
Paul
jcott deals with this aspect of the
Indo-British relations in some detail.
Possibly,
in the
earlier stages of the British oc cu pa ti on of InH io, there
uas much more of social intercourse betueen the Indians
and the English.
And it is also likely that tho u n d e r ­
standing and amity that existed were u e ’l uorth emulating,
but, as times changed,
the relationship soured and the
attitude stiffened on both sides.
There uas a gradual
receding of mutual respect and appreciation,
doubt,
caused,
no
by the avaricious and the power-hungry men who
came to India.
The relationship of
'man-bap' was not
conceived in any bad taste or with any selfish motive;
it was conceived and executed in genuine sympathy and
understanding.
gone sour'.
But the moral thing
'had gone sour, has
Merrick called this attitude
mother-father relationship.
'man-bap*,
Paul Scott elaborates this
attitude thus:
"I am your father and your mother. Yes, the picture
had been an illustration of this aspect of tho
imperial attachment." (Ill, 269)
But Merrick sneered at it. An Indian prisoner of war
turned INA soldier was produced before Teddie Bi n g h a m
who, earlier,
man's.
belonged to the same regiment as the
The man broke down.
There is a scene of
'man-bap*:
"It was a ridiculous scene in its way. It seemed
to me to have nothing to do with the reality of
what was actually happening. He knelt down and
put his head on Teddie's boots and that didn't
embarrass Teddie either. I think it moved him."
(II, 3 B 7 )
Merrick called it an amateurish act; he termed it rather
a romantic attitude. In fact, he made fun of Teddie, and,
later, obliquely, of Col Layton uho had the same attach­
ment for his men and regiment. On hia arrival at Bombay
from the prison camp in Germany with his men, Col Layton
shoued no impatience to proceed to Pankot to meet his
family; he stayed back to get his sick soldiers treated
and then uent to Pankot along uith them. He could have
gone much earlier^ but for him the welfare of his men
uas more important. This sense of responsibility was
uhat brought the conqueror and the conquered closer,
building up, in the process, an atmosphere of amity and
understanding Merrick sneered at Teddie Bingham and
the 'man-bap* relationship uith his men because he uas
not trained to these finer feelings in life. He uas an
outsider to these feelings and so he uas not aware of
the intimate intricacies of these traditions. He uas a
first generation soldier, an opportunist, for whom the
aspect of the work that he uas doing assumed importance
above everything else. To him everything became necessery
only as a step towards his own success. He uas incapa­
citated by this inadequacy in him to appreciate the
sentiments of the traditional Rsj officers, Sarah, uho
had already seen through him, commented thus upon him:
"It's interesting about Ronald Merrick. He'd like
to be able to sneer at 'man-bap' but he can't
quite menage it because actually he'd prefer to
believe in it, like Teddie did.“(Ill, 269)
l !’ 0
Uhat Teddi8 did uas something for his regiment. He kept
himself and everything slse belou the regiment. H'1
believed in the tradition of the regiment which treated
its Indian soldiers as its children, looked after them,
and took care of them. The men always felt happy and
secure in the service of these officers; the example of
Moti Ram Sahib and Dan Mohammed of Captain Brown's
Section in Johnnie Sahib proves the point.
In Indo-British relations, unfortunately, it
uas the suspicious and the arrogant who counted because
the men who called the tune were almost always either
myopic or careless. They came to India not with any love
in their heart for this country but with the hope of easy
success and comfort which they could not expect at home.
Uhile explaining why he was too eager to crack down on
the rioters in Mayapore, Raid identified the prime
motive: "There was of course the question of her /India's/
wealth and resources" (I, 284). Leonard Purvis, a product
of the London School of Economics, confirmed this view:
"Reactionary, uncoocerative bloody well expendable
buggers from the upper and middle-classes who can't
and won't pull their weight at home but prefer to
throw it about in countries like this which they've
always made sure would remoin fit places for them
to live in. They've succeeded only too well. "(IV, 31)
In the matter of Indo-British relations, Scott
does not take sides.
His is an attitude
befitting
on
historian.
He is quite convinced that the English cannot,
but admit the responsibility for the killing of two lakhs
and thirty thousand Indians - Hindus and Muslims - at the
time of handing over power.
stop the disaster.
They did precious little to
There is symbolism in the train journey
and the ma ssacre at Premanager. When Ahmed was asked to
go out,
the English could have interfered.
offered to be killed themselves
But no one thought of that.
smile:
They could have
first to save an Indian.
Ahmed left them saying with a
"It seems to be me they want"
(IV, 582).
Jhat
Ahmed said just before his exit to his doom echoes what
another character said almost at the beginning of the
Q u a r t e t . Then it was an English woman, Miss Crane, who
was forced to stop her car by the rioters.
it's me they want," she said.
"Not you. Go that's it.
If this is where it ends for me,
But it did not end there for her.
Indian, Mr Chaudhuri.
"After all,
let it end"
(I, 55).
The end was for an
He gave up his life to protect
an English lady.
He did not leave her to her fate.
uhen the Indian,
Ahmad, was dragged out by his execu­
tioners, he got no protection from the British.
words of Paul icott himself,
But
In the
"a feeling of terrible
relief swept over Perron" (IV, 582),
and possibly others.
There is a comment by Sarah seme time later.
"I'm sure (Sarah has written) that he did say
'It
seems to be me they want*. It's what Guy heard, what
I heard, what ue heard at the time, and it mode
sense. And the fact that he smiled encouraged me
to think that if he went out to the people who
called out to him everything would be all right."
(IV, 591)
152
.
This is Scott's indictment of the Raj. There uere people
like Perron and Sarah who meant well. There were the
Peabodys who codld not care less. The small group of the
departing English represented the departing Raj. It could
not care less because in the English mirror there was no
Indian reflection any more. Scott seems to hold that the
English could not wash their hands off, Pilate fashion,
the wide-spread killings that took place at the time of
partition. In fact, he seems to be pointing his accusing
finger at them for having failed to check the tragedy
in time. It seems the English wanted to get rid of
India in a hurry. Possibly, India was no more an asset
to Britain. Purvis, the economist, though rather a
seedy one, has observed:
"It's taken ms no mors than three months to write
it off as a wasted asset, a place irrevocably ruined
by the interaction of a conservative and traditionbound population'and an indolent, bone-headed and
utterly uneducated administration; an elitist
bureaucracy so out of touch with the social and
economic thinking of even just the past hundred
years that you honestly wonder where they've come
from." (II/, 31)
The English, to take another view expressed by the
missionary, Miss Barbie Batchelor, had to leave India
because "ws are only visitors. That has been our mistake.
That is why God has not followed’us here" (III, 376).
Pandit Baba of Mayapore, on the other hand, has someting
interesting to comment with regard to Indo-British
relations at personal level;
"But we are Indians and they are English. True
13 3
intimacy is not possible. It is not even desirable.
... Ue can never be friends uith the English, or they
uith us, but ue need not be enemies." (II, 108-9)
But the fact is that there are people who have
the courage to bridge this river of misunderstanding
because they possessed friendship and understanding.
Sarah Layton, Plabel Layton, Lady Planners, Lady Chatterji
and, above all, Daphne and Hari Kumar did try to cross
into this area of light, and prove to the East and the
West the possibility of friendship and love in spite of
their colours of skin and their occupations and situations.
But, as Daphne said, the detractors, the spoilers, uere
always there. Yet, in retrospect, which spans so much
misunderstanding, conflict and disaster, a kind of
promise radiates; ue can see that dignity and integrity
survived assaults calculated to reduce and degrade.
Bridges, even if they uere to be destroyed, uere thrown
across the chasm of race by the friendship of Sarah
Layton 8nd Ahmed Kasim, by the love between Daphne
Planners and Hari Kumar. Paul Scott was able to create
this sense nf balanced understanding end appreciation
through the delineation of his characters and the
narration of several incidents. He has tried to prove
that in spite of so many pitfalls, certain things lasting
end peaceful could yet be salvaged. Uhat Scott has been
able to achieve in the matter of mutual understanding
of these two peoples becomes more clear and deserving
of our appreciation in the context of the constant
confrontation between philosophical systems, ethical
1 34
-
doctrines, and styles of Ilfs uhich were sufficiently
different to impair mutual understanding between the
members of the two races.
Another constraint in Indo-BrttCsh relations
was the uncertainty of the future of the British in
India after the country would have won independence.
As Mrs Poulton of The Bender said, 'East had its
attractions'. She told George Spruce:
"Our Eastern Empire, I mean. It was, you know what
made the English middle class. It taught us the
hitherto upper class secrets of the Government and
civil administration. Now we must largely be
content with commerce and science. It is almost
mediaeval, is it not? Merchants and apothecaries."b
Quite naturally, the English in India had vssted interest
uhich they liked to perpetuate. Even as Lord Mountbatten
was making arrangements to hand over power to Indians,
Cynthia Mapleton of The Alien Sky liked to convince
herself that "all this business in Delhi is just window
dressing and we're not leaving India at all". But for
India, Merrick would not be a sahib. The man on the
street in London would not have been what he was without
India. Looking at the new arrivals of soldiers in Bombay,
Sergeant Perron commented:
"Uhat could such a face know of India? Yet India
was there, in the skull, and the bones of the body.
Its possession had helped nourish the flesh, warm
the blood of every man in the room, sleeping and
waking." <IV/, 103)
India had relevance to the average Englishman as it had
for the English residents in India. India had been a
part of England. Perron, the historian, observed:
135
'
"For at least a hundred years, India has fcrrrod a
part of England's idea about herself and for the
same period India has been forced into a position
of being a reflection of that idea." (IV/, 105)
The trouble with people like Merrick uas that they did
not accept this position. They uere drunk uith their
own power and were aware of only their privileges.
in the English mirror
But
(in England) there was no more
the reflection of India and, therefore,
as Perron
observed further,
"Gettinr rid of India will cause us at home no
qualm of conscience because it will be like g e t ­
ting rid of what is no longer reflected in otr
mirror of ourselves." (111, 105)
Unfortunately,
the English were still living in tho
dark holes and crevices.
Sarah,
the
'outsider'
in many
r e s p e c t s , could truthfully observe that the trouble
with the English was that they had closed themselves
in India which could neither warm them nor could be
warmed by them.
But once this exigency of independence
became a reality,
the English found themselves no longer
sheltered by the carapace of their history
(II,
398).
One of the ramifications of the theme of
Indo-British relations is a sense of rootless n e s s . The
di lemma of Hari Kumar is not simply that he has no
identity as an Englishman.
He has no root anywhere.
He was of India but was transplanted,
in England,
soil.
and he grew up
inheriting the properties of the English
Unfortunately,
before ha could strike roots in
136
that soil ha was pulled out rather roughly by the hands
of Time. Back in India, he felt like an alien in a world
with no roots of his. This theme of rootlessness is
often treated in Scott's works. The problem of the
Eurasians is, in essence, the problem of rootlessness,
though in their case the circumstances are somewhat
different. The case of Hari Kumar is peculiar and
pathetic. He was taken to England so that he could become
an Englishman with all the advantages of a native English.
So, when he woks up one morning in a room at 12 Chillianwallah Reclamations, his aunt Shalini's place, the smell
of cooking in ghee turned his tummy over. He realised
that he was without roots. It was, he appreciated, a
tragic situation. Such a predicament is not peculiar
to Hari Kumar alone. This sense of rootlessness haunted
most of the English in India. "Well, home is here” could
very uell be said by Col Layton on his arrival from
Germany at Pankot. But it was only a temporary home;
they could never have a sense of belonging to India
even though it had been their home for generations
except for short vacations between long intervals
and for the duration of their education 'at home' in
the home of an aunt or an uncle. Uhen Indian indepen­
dence became imminent, the English in India felt rather
shaky. They felt like strangers here suddenly; a sense of
alienation became their constant companion. This feeling
of rootlessness forms the background of Scott's last
novel, Staving On where he has made the old couple,
Col (Tuskar) Smalley and Mrs Lucy Smalley the living
15 \
examples of this kind of English. Considering that they
uould be misfits in England, they decided to stay on in
Indie but a permanent sense of insecurity haunted them.
In spite of the fact that Lucy's financial position uas
quite satisfactory compared tocher Indian counterparts,
and that there were friends uho were kind and considerate
to her, she felt totally lost when her husband died. In
fact, uhat uould happen to her after her husband's death
is a question that Scott has left unanswered. Uhat hap­
pened to Hari Kumar when he uas released from prisonl
"And young Kumar? Uhere is ha now? Srinivasan shrugs.
Dead perhaps" (I, 191).
Everyone likes to cling to his paradise even
though he knows that it is only an illusion. For Hari
Kumar, his paradise was his
'home', that is England;
for the Laytons, a prolonged life at Pankot; for Miss
Barbie Batchelor, her life uith. Mabel at the Rose
Cottage. If anything, the English realised that their
India uas impermanent. Scott has drawn the picture of
this illusory world of the Anglo-Indian. As Patrick
Swinden says, "Paul Scott's paradise has never been
other than illusory"-^. Starting uith Johnnie Sahib ,
he is preoccupied with this theme. It has been of
abiding interest in all his novels; The Raj Quartet
’emanded fuller attention. The worlds of Merrick,
Kiss Crane and Barbie had been illusory. They felt
the loss of their paradise, but when the time cama
to leave India, Merrick forced himself to adjust
138
to the changed circumstances; Miss Crane and Miss Batchelor
were mercifully no more to face a most disagreeable situa­
tion. Persons like Guy Perron and Sarah Layton did not
feel any loss of their paradise when the time came
to
leave India because they did not entertain the illusion
of living in India for ever. However,'the persons who
lost their paradise totally, and therefore, their lives,
were Daphne and Hari Kumar uho, recognising the smallness
of this world, tried to transgress its limits and live
in the illusion that the world grew larger when they
transgressed the boundaries of race and colour and crossed
into each other's boundary. This quality of seeing one's
horizon widened, the paradise taking on earthly shape,
is as illusory as a mirage, as the incidents later
proved. Daphne slipped out of that illusion to live
with the roughness of life. Hari languished in jail for
the sole crime of loving a white girl. For Merrick, of
course, the world he built for himself had always been
India and when independence was imminent, he found he had
come to terms with reality. He then met his young men of
'random destiny' and through them bowed out of the novel.
But it is noted that even on the night he was hacked to
pieces, he tried to live in his world of fantastic makebelieve. He had his Pathan make-up on when he was found
quartered and killed. Till the very end, he liked to live
in a world of illusions.
Uhen the novel starts of August 9, 1942, the
process of the end of the Raj begins. The Quit India
Resolution was not the culmination of a political
movement of a few idle Congressmen, but was the beginning
of the shattering of*, personal paradise of the English
in India, and that is why they took to coercive methods
vehemently. In a way, The Ra 1 Quartet can be said to
be a complete history of this process of the falling
apart of the .paradise of the English in India.
Notes and reference?
1. Mannoni, 0., Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of
Colonization. 1956, p.23.
2. R.R. Dames uno was an officer in the Indian Army
narrates his experience of meeting uitn such
a missionary lady in Oehradoon during 1242
in his article, ’In the Steps of Paul Scott',
‘Listener*, 8 ilarch 1979.
3. Uoolf, 5.H., Ordeal On The Frontier. 1928, p.51.
4. Beloff, flax, 'The End of the Raj: Paul Scott's
Novels as History', Encounter*, May 1976,
5. Penny, F.E., One of the Best. 1923, p.62.
6. Scott, Paul, Ths Eandar. Panther edition,
1975, p.31.
7. Suinden, Patrick, Paul Scott: Images of India. 190P,
p. 2.