Paul Scott, the British author of thirteen novels, only began writing seriously in his forties, when he quit his job as a literary agent (he had represented such stars as Arthur C. Clark and Muriel Spark) and received a stipend to return to India (where he had served in the British army during the Second World War). From his experiences there, he conceived and composed a tetralogy of novels concerning the last days of the British Raj, known collectively as his “Raj Quartet.” These books finally made him a famous and respected novelist, so much so that his final novel, Staying On (1977), written as a kind of sequel to the Raj Quartet, finally won him the Booker Prize shortly before his death from cancer in 1978. It’s likely that the Booker Prize jury was influenced a good deal by the books that preceded Staying On, particularly by the first novel in the Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown, published in 1966. This novel is generally considered Scott’s masterpiece, and is named as book number 81 in the BBC’s 2015 list of the “100 Greatest British Novels.” And it appears here as book number 75 (alphabetically) on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
British readers will recognize that the title, “The Jewel in the Crown,” alludes to British India, long considered the most precious of all England’s colonial possessions. In the novel, “The Jewel in Her Crown” is also the title of a painting that hangs in a teacher’s bungalow, a painting that depicts a group of Indian princes presenting a diamond to Queen Victoria. This, the owner explains to a visitor, is an allegory. It never really happened.
Neither did the events of this novel. They are set chiefly in the fictional city of Mayapore, in an unnamed northern Indian province that bears a resemblance to Punjab. Certain aspects of the fictional plot bear a resemblance to E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India, but those events are set some 20 years later, under the significantly altered conditions of 1942—and are examined by the much-adjusted perspective of an author from 1966.
The background of the novel is this: Britain has been promising since the First World War to grant independence to India, but have kept putting it off. In 1942, in the wake of Japanese victory in Burma, the Indians can see that the British are far from omnipotent, and there is much pressure for the British to leave, though the British themselves believe if they did the Japanese would soon take India itself. Gandhi and members of the Indian Congress who support him are jailed, and both Hindus and Muslims are showing signs of rebellion. Political, racial and religious tensions are beginning to crumble the solid traditions of British rule.
Against this backdrop of civil unrest, the novel’s narrator is investigating the events that occurred in Mayapore and its environs, surrounding a notorious legal case involving the relationship between an English woman, an Indian man, and a perhaps overzealous British police officer, and the novel is presented as a kind of assemblage of the fragments of his research. It consists of his third person narration, his transcriptions of interviews he has done with people who knew something of the events, his recollections of conversations, the text of letters from people connected with the affair, an unpublished memoir, and diary or journal entries from some of the principal figures involved, not always in precise chronological order.
The novel actually begins with the story of a tangential character, Miss Edwina Crane, superintendent of the Anglican mission schools in the province. Coming to the end of her career, which she has spent educating Indian children, she loves India, but has been disappointed in Gandhi’s “non-violent non-cooperation” and has removed his photo from her home’s wall. On a day of widespread unrest in the province, she insists on driving back to Mayapore from a school she has visited in an outlying town. The Indian teacher undertakes to go with her, but they are stopped by a mob and the man is killed, and she is found later by authorities holding his dead body in the rain. She ends up hospitalized for some time for pneumonia. She is left to wonder whether her whole relationship with India has been a misunderstanding on her part. It’s difficult not to see her as a personification of the British Raj itself.
The main story, however focuses on Daphne Manners, a young English woman who has lost her family in the war and has come to India to live with her closest living relative, wife of a former provincial governor. This Lady Manners sends Daphne to live with her Brahmin friend Lady Chatterjee (whom Daphne calls “Aunt Lili”) who lives in Mayapore, where she finds that, despite her aristocratic status, Lady Chatterjee cannot join Daphne if she visits “the club,” where only Europeans may go. Indeed, all of Mayapore is segregated, with the British living in one section of the town, Indians on the other side of the river, and mixed ethnicity “Eurasians” somewhere else altogether.
Before long Daphne meets Hari Kumar, a young Indian man who was raised in England, educated like all upper-class Brits in British “public” schools , but who finds after his father’s suicide that the old man has left him nothing but a bankrupt company. Hari has found that despite his status in England, in India he is just another Wog. He is too English to get along well with native Indians, but too Indian to mix with the colonial British, and he gets on the bad side of police superintendent Ronald Merrick, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and failing to cooperate with the police by refusing to answer questions shouted at him in Hindu—a language he does not speak.
Daphne and Hari are drawn to each other from their first meeting. They often meet at the home of Lady Chatterjee, who is fairly sympathetic. Merrick, hearing rumors that Daphne has been seen with Hari, warns her off, saying he is a troublemaker. Aside from resenting Hari for his privileged British life and public school education, the working-class Merrick has designs on Daphne himself, and even shocks her by proposing to her.
Daphne and Hari meet after dark in a secluded part of a public park called the Bibighar Gardens, where they make love on the very day that the civil unrest alluded to earlier breaks out in Mayapore. They are attacked by a group of rioters who beat Hari and tie him up, and then gang-rape Daphne. Knowing that Merrick will try to implicate Hari in her attack, Daphne makes her lover swear never to reveal that he was in the Bibighar Gardens that night. But Merrick, convinced that the police must seem to be on top of the crimes committed during this civil unrest, immediately arrests Hari and charges him with the rape, along with a group of other educated young men whom the police find somewhere in the neighborhood of the gardens. All are subjected to brutal interrogation with the goal of forcing confessions—though Merrick ensures that Hari’s interrogation is particularly vicious and humiliating, and for reasons beyond forcing a confession.
Daphne refuses to cooperate with the prosecution of the men arrested, all Hindus, saying that though she was blindfolded and could not in any case recognize her attackers on sight, she is certain they were peasants and that at least one of them was a Muslim (which she knew by his circumcision). When she threatens to testify that as far as she knows, the attackers could have been English, the prosecution’s case falls apart. Hari, however, though he cannot be convicted of rape, is imprisoned as a “suspected revolutionary” according to wartime law. Meanwhile Daphne is scorned and disparaged throughout Marapore’s province and, indeed, all of British India, where the case has been closely followed in the news—and lumped together with Miss Crane’s attack as if there was a pattern among the rioters to target women.
I will say that the true story of what happened in the Bibighar Gardens is not clear until the end of the book. The conclusion of the novel proves to be something of a surprise, not only in Daphne’s case but in the secondary plot of Miss Crane, which I will not spoil, because I do think you would find this novel impressive and unforgettable.
One reason this novel can be categorized as “lovable” is the way that, through a series of concrete events, Scott deals with themes of race, class, religious and caste prejudice in India, and with the shadow of colonialism being shored up during perhaps the British Empire’s darkest hour as it faced existential challenges in Asia as well as Europe. The variety of points of view through which the story is told allow the reader to see the complexity of these issues in a way that, say, the single point of view of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India cannot.
The historical detail in the novel helps as well to depict these complexities, as the story’s plot takes place against Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign, in which the Mahatma sought to convince the British to “leave India to God or anarchy.” When the Indian National Congress approved Gandhi’s demand, the British imprisoned all members of congress (without trials) for the duration of the war. This is the action behind the civil unrest that roils in the novel’s background.
But for some readers the language and meticulously crafted style of Scott’s sentences may be the most lovable aspect of the novel. His sentences are often characterized by the use of parallelism and balanced phrases, and a climactic order that may actually surprise by ending in anti-climax, as in the following description of Miss Crane early in the novel:
She had devoted her life, in a practical and unimportant way, trying to prove that fear was evil because it promoted prejudice, that courage was good because it was a sign of selflessness, that ignorance was bad because fear sprang from it, that knowledge was good because the more you knew of the world’s complexity the more clearly you saw the insignificance of the part you played.
The balance and parallelism and climax are more complex in a later paragraph that includes a metaphor of the growing seed, all of which describes the chief conflict of the entire novel—the unfulfilled promise of Indian independence, with a complexity that reflects that of the novel as a whole in a nutshell:
For years, since the eighteenth century, and in each century since, we have said at home, in England, in Whitehall, that the day would come when our rule in India will end, not bloodily, but in peace, in—so we made it seem—a perfect gesture of equality and friendship and love. For years, for nearly a century, the books that Indians have read have been the books of our English radicals, our English liberals. There has been, you see, a seed. A seed planted in the Indian imagination and in the English imagination. …. For years we have been promising and for years finding means of putting the fulfilment of the promise off until the promise stopped looking like a promise and started looking only like a sinister prevarication, even to me, let alone to Indians who think and feel and know the same as me. And the tragedy is that between us there is this little matter of the colour of the skin, which gets in the way of our seeing through each other’s failings and seeing into each other’s hearts. Because if we saw through them, into them, then we should know. And what we should know is that the promise is a promise and will be fulfilled.
Now that’s damn good writing. What’s not to love?