"The Jewel in the Crown" by Paul Scott

When I went to India in Seventh Grade my grandmother and my parents bought me a whole load of books about India, all of them classics - Passage to India, Prince of Tides, a few others, and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. All of them have sat on my shelves unread for some time. The Raj Quartet books have been on top of my reading list for a while, but due mostly to the fact that there are four of them and they are large and heavy and therefore do not travel well, I did not have much occasion to read them. I finally decided, however, to hunker down and do it. And having finished The Jewel in the Crown, I am extremely, extremely glad I did so.


I had been under the impression that the Raj Quartet books, being historical fiction, would be written a kind of clumsy, dry style reminiscent of the great late-19th century historical novels, things like Quo Vadis. On the contrary, Scott's writing is superb. The story focuses on the events of a few weeks in the fictional city of Mayapore in the early 1940s, and specifically, the rape of an English girl by a gang of Indians in a public garden. The book is told through the eyes of a nameless, barely-present narrator who appears to be researching the event - but mostly it progresses through the testimonies, letters and other writings of a wide range of fascinating characters, looping back again and again over the same events, each time filling in more details and painting a more complete picture. The writing style changes as appropriate to each character, and it is all done very gracefully and the final effect is impressive.

The thing I wanted to pull out about it, though, is a section in the middle of the book devoted to the story of a character named Hari Kumar. Born to an Indian family, his father took him to England when he was a young child and had him educated at a prestigious Public School (where he was known by the Anglicized name Harry Coomer), only to die penniless before Hari could make it to university. Forced to return to India to live with his aunt, Hari finds himself caught in the gap between the two cultures.  He speaks only English and has English tastes, meaning he attracts the hostility of other Indians, but his blackness makes it impossible for him to interact with the English community. His poshness works against him, too, as the English at best take him for an uppity Indian who pretends to be English, and at worst the working-class English soldiers and policeman simply layer their class resentment on top of their racism.

I appreciate the feeling of displacement - I have spoken often of my own feeling of not-belonging in America, and Hari's yearning for England remins me of my own. For this reason, Hari's sense of being trapped in India - the slow, inexorable closing of any way back to England - was particularly melancholic for me. Scott writes:

It was at this period, after the visit to the pharmacy, that the notion of having become invisible to white people first entered his head, although it took some time for the notion to be formulate quite in this way. When he had become used to crossing the river from the bazaar to the railway warehouse and used to the way English people seemed to look right through him if their eyes chanced to meet his own, the concept of invisibility fell readily enough into its place, but still more time was needed for that concept to produce its natural corollary in his mind: that his father had succeeded in making him nothing, nothing in the black town, nothing in the cantonment, nothing even in England because in England he was not just a memory, a familiar but possibly unreal signature at the end of meaningless letters to Colin Lindsey[.]

Colin is Hari's best friend from school. They keep up a correspondence, but as time goes on grow steadily apart. The climax of the chapter comes after Colin, having been stationed in Mayapore, shows up at a party that Hari has been assigned to cover for the newspaper he writes for. I include this next passage to show the heights that Scott's prose can occasionally reach: this paragraph feels like a stab in the heart to me - the moment, effectively, when the way back to England is closed off for good. It is told from the perspective of Hari's acquaintance Sister Ludmila:

"And he sees Lindsey. Ah well, as boys, what secrets of mind and body did they share? He told me of autumn in England. This too I see and feel. And am aware of young Kumar and young Lindsey as boys, running home across chill fields to come and toast their hands at a warm grate, just as I remember the blessing of gloves in a cold winter, and the way the breath could transform a window and fill the heart with a different kind of warmth. Ah, such safety. Such microcosmic power. To translate, to reduce, to cause to vanish with the breath alone the sugary fruits in their nest of lace-edged paper. To know that they are there, and yet are not there. This is a magic of the soul. But it was a magic Kumar could not conjure, on the maidan that hot evening, to make Lindsey disappear. Lindsey looked at him, and then away, without recognition, not understanding that in those babu clothes, under the bazaar topee, there was one black face he ought to have seen as being different from the rest."

I greatly admire this kind of poetic, impressionistic prose. I have taken a break in between this book and the next in the series, The Day of the Scorpion. But I am very keen to get to it soon.