'The Jewel in the Crown'

 

    '....the spectacle of two nations in violent opposition, not for the first time nor as yet for the last because they were then still locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies....' 

 

       In 1977 Barbara Pym, after years of critical neglect, was shortlisted for the Booker prize for her late novel 'Quartet in Autumn'.  The prize however was in the end awarded to Paul Scott for 'Staying on', a novel set in post-independence India.  Being a Pym fan I've often regretted that she lost that November evening in 1977, as she never seemed quite to have received the acclaim due to her in her own lifetime.¹ 
     However reading 'Jewel in the Crown' - the first novel of the 'Raj Quartet' - I have modified my opinion.  Scott was obviously a profoundly talented writer, well deserving of such public recognition, which seems particularly poignant when one considers that he was too ill to attend the award ceremony - cancer and alcoholism.  He died the following March.

 

      'This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it, and of the place in which it happened.'

 

     'The Jewel in the Crown' is set in those turbulent years at the end of the British Raj. In particular it focuses on the events in the fictional north Indian city of Mayapore in the midst of World War II when in the wake of the Viceroy's declaration of war against the Axis Powers and the successful Japanese assault on Burma the Indian National Congress mounted the 'Quit India Campaign'.  In the resultant violence two English women resident in Mayapore are assaulted, one sexually.  And it is this period in the history of India that Scott experienced first-hand as an officer in the British Army in the subcontinent and Burma.

     'The Jewel in the Crown', which has no single linear narrative as such, pieces together from various witnesses the story of these two women.  There are letters, diary entries and records of conversations; the result is more like a dossier.  However, the compiler of this dossier, whether journalist or academic, remains unknown, though we can surmise that this research is undertaken some years after independence.  The result is utterly compelling, a dazzling piece of literature.

 

     Mayapore consists of two areas; the original city and the cantonment which housed the British military and civilians.  I think I should add here that these cantonments were constructed all over sub-continent in the wake of the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857.  In the case of Mayapore this segregation of communities is further enforced by the presence of a river and a railway line between them.  The characters and therefore the plot, however, inhabit a third, intermediate, space between those two sometimes harsh realities.  I do not mean these characters are necessarily outsiders; Lady Chatterjee for instance is certainly no outsider, being very well connected socially in both communities; but others such as the perceptive Sister Ludmilla, who is rather like an Orthodox yurodivy (a fool-in-Christ), most certainly are.  She is rather like a piece of driftwood that the tides of life and fate have left stranded in the city.  

     It is through her eyes that we first encounter Hari Kumar, oddly Nehru-like² and adrift between cultures, and Ronald Merrick, the local police superintendent, on what is their first meeting; and through her observations of that inauspicious event, we learn that Merrick is homosexual:

     'It was so with the policeman.  The policeman saw him too.  I always suspected the policeman.  Blond, also good looking, he also had sinews [like Kumar], his arms were red and covered with fine blond hairs; and his eyes were blue, the pale blue of a child's doll; he looked right but didn't smell right.  To me, who had been about in the world, he smelt all wrong.  "And who is that?" he said.  "Also one of your helpers?  The boy there?  The boy washing at the pump?"

      I would argue that from this passage (with its sly, 'under-the-radar' homo-eroticism) in which sister Ludmilla stresses the similarities between the two men, and from what is said later in the novel, that Kumar too is homosexual.  As I was working on this post, and in particular on this scene, I began to wonder about Scott's own sexuality; it turns out that although he was married (unsuccessfully) he was himself homosexual.  I cannot help but feel that somehow that knowledge, for me at least, changes the dynamic of the relationship between Kumar and Merrick, and between the characters and the author. Perhaps not in a comfortable way.  

     Both men, however, regardless, or because of their sexuality, attempt to pursue a relationship with clumsy, awkward Daphne Manners, and it is this fierce little tragedy played out against the vast flow of history that forms the core this novel.

     There is something of the French and Russian nineteenth century novel about 'The Jewel in the Crown' in its scope.  A vast, sprawling sort of book echoing a vast and complex setting. In a sense it is an attempt (perhaps in the manner of Dostoevsky) to understand, or even define India, which is as much a creation of the British administration and British and European political thought as much as anything else.  It is a hybrid polity.  This attempt to reach such a definition (if such a thing is possible) is something that also occupied the mind of another British writer of the 20th century, E M Forster in 'A Passage to India' - it must be either audacity or hubris that made Forster think he reduce India to 'God si Love', but then he was one for the apophthegm. One gets a sense, particularly towards the end of the novel, not only that 'India' is something that the British could not, or would not, understand but that the leaders of the independence movement were little different.  But then the struggle for Independence was at some level a conflict of elites. India was, like Post-War Britain to be a seed-bed for elite-driven utopian planning. For Nehru, schooled in late nineteenth century British socialism of the Fabian variety, India was to be transformed into the image of the nation whose rule he rejected.  Indeed the whole process of independence was fraught with paradox. That isn't meant as a criticism.  We all exist in some sort of paradox; it's all part of the human condition.

 

 

1 There is a marvellous, gently melancholic drama of that day, 'Miss Pym's Day Out', written by James Runcie for the BBC series 'Bookmark', and starring Patricia Routledge.  It's quite easy to find on YouTube.

 2 Hari Kumar was educated in England at the fictional public school Chillingborough, before the death of his father caused him to return to India. Jawaharlal Nehru was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.  He jokingly referred to himself as 'the last Englishman to rule India'.