The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction)
Authors: Paul Scott
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Copyright © 1966, 1976 by Paul Scott
All rights reserved. Originally published 1966
University of Chicago Press Edition 1998
Printed in the United States of America
03 02 01 6 5 4 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Paul, 1920–78
The jewel in the crown / Paul Scott.
p. cm. — (Raj quartet ; 1)
ISBN 0-226-74340-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-226-02914-6 (e-book)
1. India—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Scott, Paul, 1920–78 Raj quartet ; 1.
PR6069.C596J4 1998
823’ .914—dc21
98-10568
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
The Jewel in the Crown
PAUL SCOTT * THE RAJ QUARTET: I
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Praise for THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
A major work, a glittering combination of brilliant craftsmanship, psychological perception and objective reporting.
—Orville Prescott in
The New York Times
For dramatic paradox and the clash of destinies on a personal and world scale, this particular period can hardly be equaled in contemporary history, because it encompassed World War II, the Japanese invasion of Burma and threat to India, the rise of Gandhi and the young Nehru. . . . The web of events in modern India is, in fact, not only so intricately interwoven but so extended in scope that one can but marvel at the controlled manner in which Mr. Scott handles the shifting focus of his wide-angle lens.
—Nancy Wilson Ross,
Saturday Review
Far more even than E. M. Forster, in whose long literary shadow he has to work, Paul Scott is successful in exploring the province of the human heart.
—Timothy Foote,
Life
Not many of E. M. Forster’s readers could have imagined then that his book’s theme—relations between Europeans and non-Europeans—would soon become an acute human and literary concern. The topic has recurred often enough in fiction since then, but never, to my knowledge, has it been treated as brilliantly as it is in Paul Scott’s new novel. . . .
Mr. Scott’s novel is as much a story of romantic love as it is of crime. And it is a political story as well. . . . Many of Mr. Scott’s wonderfully imagined characters . . . have opinions about current events, but not the two romantic lovers, Daphne and Hari Kumar. . . . The construction of “The Jewel in the Crown” is an artful triumph.
—Naomi Bliven,
The New Yorker
PHOENIX FICTION TITLES FROM CHICAGO
Ivo Andrić:
The Bridge on the Drina
Thomas Bernhard:
Concrete, Correction, Extinction, Gargoyles, The Lime Works, The Loser, Old Masters, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Woodcutters, Yes
Arthur A. Cohen:
Acts of Theft, A Hero in His Time, In the Days of Simon Stern
Jean Dutourd:
A Dog’s Head
Wayne Fields:
The Past Leads a Life of Its Own
Jack Fuller:
Convergence, Fragments
Randall Jarrell:
Pictures from an Institution
Margaret Laurence:
A Bird in the House, The Diviners, The Fire-Dwellers, A Jest of God, The Stone Angel
Dalene Matthee:
Fiela’s Child
André Malraux:
The Conquerors, The Walnut Trees of Altenberg
R. K. Narayan:
The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher; The Financial Expert, Mr. Sampath—The Printer of Malgudi, Swami and Friends, Waiting for Mahatma
Anthony Powell:
A Dance to the Music of Time
(in four
Movements
with three novels in each volume)
Paul Scott:
The Raj Quartet
(in four volumes:
The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils
)
Richard Stern:
A Father’s Words, Golk
Stephen Vizinczey:
An Innocent Millionaire, In Praise of Older Women
Anthony Winkler:
The Painted Canoe
Marguerite Yourcenar:
A Coin in Nine Hands, Fires, Two Lives and a Dream
NOVELS BY PAUL SCOTT
Johnnie Sahib
The Alien Sky
A Male Child
The Mark of the Warrior
The Chinese Love Pavilion
The Birds of Paradise
The Bender
The Corrida at San Felíu
The Raj Quartet:
The Jewel in the Crown
The Day of the Scorpion
The Towers of Silence
A Division of the Spoils
Staying On
To
Dorothy Ganapathy
With Love
CONTENTS
PART FOUR
AN EVENING AT THE CLUB
PART SEVEN
THE BIBIGHAR GARDENS
PART ONE
MISS CRANE
Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.
It is a landscape which a few hours ago, between the rainfall and the short twilight, extracted colour from the spectrum of the setting sun and dyed every one of its own surfaces that could absorb light: the ochre walls of the houses in the old town (which are stained too with their bloody past and uneasy present); the moving water of the river and the still water of the tanks; the shiny stubble, the ploughed earth, of distant fields; the metal of the Grand Trunk road. In this landscape trees are sparse, except among the white bungalows of the civil lines. On the horizon there is a violet smudge of hill country.
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. There are the action, the people, and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs.
In the Bibighar gardens case there were several arrests and an investigation. There was no trial in the judicial sense. Since then people have said there was a trial of sorts going on. In fact, such people say, the affair that began on the evening of August 9th, 1942, in Mayapore, ended with 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 1942, which was the year the Japanese defeated the British army in Burma and Mr. Gandhi began preaching sedition in India, the English then living in the civil and military cantonment of Mayapore had to admit that the future did not look propitious. They had faced bad times before, though, and felt that they could face them again, that now they knew where they stood and there could be no more heart-searching for quite a while yet about the rights and wrongs of their colonial-imperialist policy and administration.
As they were fond of putting it at the club, it was a question of first
things first, and when they heard that Miss Crane, the supervisor of the district’s Protestant mission schools, had taken Mr. Gandhi’s picture down from the walls of her study and no longer entertained Indian ladies to tea but young English soldiers instead, they were grateful to her as well as amused. In peacetime opinions could be as diverse and cranky as you wished. In war you had to close the ranks; and if it was to be a question of sides Miss Crane seemed to have shown at last which she was really on.
What few people knew was that the Indian ladies themselves had taken the initiative over the question of tea on Tuesdays at Edwina Crane’s bungalow. Miss Crane suspected that it was the ladies’ husbands who had dissuaded them from making the weekly appearance, not only because Mr. Gandhi’s picture had gone but in case such visits could have been thought of, in this explosive year, as a buttering-up of the raj. What hurt her most was that none of the ladies had bothered to discuss their reasons with her. They had one by one or two by two just stopped coming and made feeble excuses when she met any of them in the bazaar or on her way to the mission schoolrooms.
She was sorry about the ladies whom she had always encouraged to be frank with her, but not at all sorry about Mr. Gandhi’s portrait. The ladies had an excuse. Mr. Gandhi did not. She believed he was behaving abominably. She felt, in fact, let down. For years she had laughed at Europeans who said that he was not to be trusted, but now Mr. Gandhi had extended what looked like an open invitation to the Japanese to come and help him rid India of the British—and if he thought that they would be the better masters then she could only assume he was out of his senses or, which was worse, revealing that his philosophy of nonviolence had a dark side that added up to total invalidation of its every aspect. The Japanese, apparently, were to do his violence for him.
Reacting from her newly found distrust of the Mahatma and her disappointment in the behaviour of the ladies (the kind of disappointment she had actually become no stranger to), she wondered whether her life might not have been spent better among her own people, persuading them to appreciate the qualities of Indians, instead of among Indians, attempting to prove that at least one Englishwoman admired and respected them. She had to admit that a searching analysis of her work would show that in the main the people she had got on with best of all were those of mixed blood; which seemed, perhaps, to emphasize the fact that she was neither one thing nor the other herself—a teacher without real
qualifications, a missionary worker who did not believe in God. She had never been wholly accepted by Indians and had tended to reject the generality of the English. In this there was a certain irony. The Indians, she thought, might have taken her more seriously if she had not been a representative of the kind of organization they were glad enough to make use of but of which old suspicions died hard. By the same token, if she had not worked for the mission she would, she believed, never have acquired an admiration for the Indians through love and respect for their children, nor been led to such sharp criticism of her own race, in whose apparently neglectful and indifferent care the future of those children and the present well-being of their parents were held. She had never been slow to voice her criticism. And this, possibly, had been a mistake. The English always took such criticism so personally.
However, Miss Crane was of a generation that abided by (even if it did not wholly believe in) certain simple rules for positive action. It was, she told herself, never too late to mend, or try to mend. Thinking of the young British soldiers who were in Mayapore in ever-increasing numbers, and remembering that most of them looked fresh out from home, she wrote to the Station Staff officer, had an interview with him, and arranged to entertain a party of up to a dozen at a time at tea every Wednesday afternoon from five o’clock until six thirty. The SSO thanked her for her generosity and said he wished more people realized what it meant to an English lad to be in a home again, if only for an hour or two. For all their flag-wagging the ladies of the cantonment tended to have a prejudice against the British Other Rank. The SSO did not say this but the implication was there. Miss Crane guessed from his speech and manner that he had risen from the ranks himself. He said he hoped she would not have cause to regret her invitation. Young soldiers, although mostly maligned, were indeed apt to be clumsy and noisy. She had only to ring him up if things proved too much for her or if she had anything to complain about. She smiled and reminded him that the life she led had never been sheltered and she had often heard herself referred to in Mayapore as a tough old bird.