The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott

Having finally finished all four of the books making up the Quartet, I have a new understanding of Paul Scott’s final take on the British dominion of India. The action of the four books takes place between 1942 and 1947. In 1942 the Indian Congress first issued a motion for the British to leave, and in 1947 the British did just that. Scott tells his story through interweaving personal accounts, diaries, letters and reports of people playing major or minor roles in India –British commanders and their families, proprietors of shops, factories and newspapers, Indian soldiers in the British army, spies, police and ambassadors – the list goes on. Scott knew his India, having been posted to India for three years as a supply officer, and was able to visit India again in 1964, before writing the Raj Quartet. He wrote the four books over a roughly ten year period, with the last published in 1975, just three years before his death at the age of 57.

There is direct action within the accounts as well. Scott’s technique of providing us with documents written by characters in the story can make for slow reading, but faithful attention to details and nuance is amply rewarded by the outcome of a story with depth and resonance. Some critics have complained that they feel lectured to at times with Scott’s detailed elucidation of history. The characters are fictitious, of course, but they exist on a canvas of real events. Indian national figures like Gandhi, Nehru and Pakistan’s Jinnah are seen in the background, through the characters’ perceptions.

The characters themselves are alive and multi-dimensional. Unlike E.M. Forster’s novel “A Passage to India”, the British who are in India are presented sympathetically, even when their presumptions about India and Indians are derogatory and unfeeling. Somehow you see how they got there – most particularly in the character of Ronald Merrick, a villain who sees the bottom line of race that is Empire, and uses this perception for self-advancement. But was the British Empire – the Raj, as it was called in India, really based on racism? There are British commanders who inspire loyalty in their Indian recruits, with their Memsahib British wives going out to visit the Indian soldiers’ families in a gesture of underlying solidarity. There are Indian servants who have lived with an English family their whole lives, and have a closeness that is genuine. Does the closeness, where it exists, come simply from the spirituality and depth of the Indian?

Throughout the books Scott shows how the Indian landscape pervades everywhere - the vastness of the plains, the wildness of the hill country. It is this landscape that the children of Britain came to, and took it as their own, so that hereafter English vistas seemed too constricted, not answering to their increased appetite for scope and richness in their daily lives. Reading the Raj Quartet gave me a picture of how the Empire grasped India, tried to form it, and then let go – so that the disparity of India’s peoples – particularly the Hindus and the Muslims – could only express itself in disarray, with helpless violence. That violence and enmity continues today, in the legacy of Pakistan, an exterior solution to an interior dilemma.

The Jewel in the Crown, TV mini-series by Granada Television Ltd.

This British 1984 series, based on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, made a big splash when it aired, first in England, and then in the United States on Masterpiece Theater. While Scott’s four novels about English rule ending in India are each written as a series of flashbacks, the TV production moves forward chronologically. The first novel takes as its focus two star-crossed lovers, an English woman and an Indian man recently returned to India, who was educated in a top public school but finds in India that his race takes precedence over his gentleman’s upbringing.

The girl, Daphne, is intent on making her own way in India, and is impatient and disdainful towards the racism inherent in the British “Raj” system of government. While the British have a paternal interest in educating the Indians to be soldiers and legislators, they want the Indians to follow their agenda, letting them share privileges only as they feel they have earned them. Many of the British administrators are fair and humane, but many are not, and these see the Indians as being untrustworthy and childlike.

The books and the series start with Daphne’s involvement with the Indian man Hari Kumar, and their subsequent tragedy becomes the foundation of the next three books. Scott does this by keeping those events alive through having their story retold, so what they suffered is like a continuing thread in the midst of new events and new characters. Scott only spent a short time in India, but admirably captures the tone and detail of his characters, whatever their walk of life and however short their role in the series. A jailed Indian Congressman, a coldly efficient and sadistic English policeman, a young girl finding nothing of meaning in her role of debutante amidst English soldiers - all of these Scott allows us to know and to appreciate, but only in making his final point – that the play is “played out”. It’s interesting that the series was so popular on British TV, when the outcome is so depressing. Evidently there was no such thing as “for God and country”… it was all a terrible mistake. While the acting and setting in the series is excellent, the absence of any hopeful outcome, however guarded, left me feeling sadder for having watched it.