The Glittering, Insufferable Raj

British India came to an end 60 years ago, on August 14, 1947, at the stroke of midnight. In one bittersweet moment India gained independence. On that same day, the country was partitioned, the Muslim state of Pakistan came into being, and a violent shift of populations began. The end of British rule was abrupt; instead of allowing for gradual transition, Viceroy Mountbatten scheduled a mere 10 weeks for the change. After ruling much of India for 250 years, the British couldn’t get out fast enough. Their hasty exit created as many problems as their long occupation. The repercussions of that single tick of the clock are with us still.Though British commercial and strategic interests in the subcontinent dated back to the 17th century, it was only in 1858 — the year after the Indian Mutiny — that the crown took direct control of the territory and the so-called Raj began. Raj is a Hindi word meaning “rule,” visible in such titles as maharajah, meaning “great ruler.” It is striking that British India identified itself by using a word from the language of one of its subject peoples; it suggests a certain symbiosis, more wishful than real. If the name still possesses a faded grandeur, it glosses over a colonial enterprise that was often as bitter for the conquerors as for the conquered.In “A Division of the Spoils,” the final novel of Paul Scott’s “The Raj Quartet” (Everyman, 2,050 pages in two volumes, $32.50 each), Guy Perron, a Cambridge historian posted to India, calls it “the glittering insufferable raj.” In each of the four novels which make up Scott’s masterpiece, the glitter and the insufferable squalor of British India in the final five years of its rule are unsparingly shown. In the new Everyman edition, volume one contains “The Jewel in the Crown” and “The Day of the Scorpion,” together with an excellent introduction by Hilary Spurling, a brief bibliography, and a detailed historical chronology; volume two contains “The Towers of Silence” and “A Division of the Spoils.” The 1984 Granada television series “The Jewel in the Crown” was a brilliant, and deservedly popular, adaptation of the quartet and yet it couldn’t fully convey the true force and depth of Scott’s great work.Scott (1920–1978) had written eight mildly successful novels when he embarked on “The Raj Quartet” in 1966. He had served for three years in the British army in India and though he disliked the country at first, it continued to obsess him. Though he wasn’t an “old India hand,” like many of his characters, he had an indelible sense of the land, down to its very smell, which he described as “a dry, nostril-smarting mixture of dust from the ground and of smoke from dung-fires.” This was “not only the smell of habitations,” but “of centuries of the land’s experience of its people.” The indefinable scent of the Indian earth both repels and attracts his English characters; for most of them, born in India, it is the smell of home and yet this birthplace of theirs has an impermanent feel. They are like ghosts haunting palaces they once called home.The quartet might be classed as a historical sequence. Certainly Scott was scrupulous in linking the lives of his personages to actual events, from the Amritsar massacre of 1919 to Operation Zipper, launched to repel the invading Japanese in Burma (and in which Scott himself took part). But in fact, these are novels of manners, in which the turbulent final years of the Raj cast otherwise inconspicuous human tragedies into terrible relief. Scott builds his swarming narrative, with its dozens of characters and rich succession of events, around two small but sordid episodes, and he returns to these obsessively, in each of the four novels, from every possible viewpoint. The first involves Miss Edwina Crane, a missionary schoolteacher, who is attacked in a riot and left on a roadside in the pouring rain next to the body of her murdered Indian colleague. The second is the gang rape of Daphne Manners in the sinister Bibighar Garden; Manners is a young English woman who has “crossed the line” by falling in love with an Indian man, the ill-fated Hari Kumar. The consequences of these events spread out like stubborn roots, twisting through the lives of all of Scott’s characters.Those characters prove unforgettable. The heart of the quartet lies in the parallel fates of Kumar, born in India but sent to England as an infant — and “English” in everything but the color of his skin — and his sadistic persecutor Ronald Merrick, the district superintendent of police, but it is Scott’s female characters, from snobbish memsahibs to despairing visionaries, who dominate all four novels. In particular, his portrait of Barbie Batchelor, in “The Towers of Silence,” takes an ungainly, bumbling spinster who “seldom stopped talking” and makes her, snubbed and despised as she is, a heroine of tragic proportions.Despite its epic sweep, “The Raj Quartet” is finely focused. Its true subject is bigotry and the circles of exclusion it creates. Merrick hates Kumar not only because of his love affair with Manners but because Kumar (who in England passed as “Harry Coomer”) speaks “in perfect English. Better accented than Merrick’s.” Merrick has only to open his mouth and his lower middle-class origins betray him; for the snobbish Layton family, into which he marries, he will never be “one of us.” The fine ripples of ostracism wash over everyone in the Raj — Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and strutting sahibs. In recreating this quaint and stifling milieu, Scott showed how the petty social cruelties of the Raj reflected a larger world where whole peoples would suffer the most brutal exclusions. In the final minutes before midnight, all, British and Indian alike, become baffled outcasts, exiles in their own skin.eormsby@nysun.com

The Glittering, Insufferable Raj

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