An Epic of India
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing AN EPIC OF INDIA BY PEARL K. BELL WHEN IT IS remembered that the British presence in India persisted for some 300 years, beginning with the 17th-century toehold of the East...
...However many solutions are found, people are still always dying of starvation or killing one another senselessly...
...Forster and Rud-yard Kipling spring to mind as first-rank imaginative writers about the British raj...
...For both are social mutants peculiar to the raj...
...Yet the crushing political imponderables and blunders that convulsed India during this fateful five-year period are merely the historical skeleton of Scott's labyrinthine structure...
...India was more commonly an arena of experiment for British social theorists, including Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Fitzjames Stephen...
...Colonel Layton, a long-time Indian Army man, reminds his dutiful but troubled daughter Sarah: "Isn't it India that's given us whatever distinction we have...
...Yet clearly, Scott is saying, it is his ruthless ambition and contemptuous prejudice, no less than his official power, that makes Merrick evil...
...Hari Kumar sinks into impoverished torpor in a malodorous Ranpur slum and never learns that Merrick was mysteriously murdered years after the Bibighar rape, in supposed revenge for his arbitrary mistreatment of Kumar and the five other wrongly accused Indians...
...Merrick, on the other hand, born into a lower English class, was denied the upper-class advantages of Hari at home...
...The younger son, Ahmed, a close friend of Sarah Layton's (to the distress of many an Anglo-Indian), is a pleasure-loving dilettante, connoisseur of whiskey and falcons, languidly indifferent to political conflicts ("They don't seem to me to have anything to do with ordinary problems...
...Guy Perron, a scholar of Indian history assigned to Army intelligence, who is Scott's spokesman in A Division of the Spoils, describes Merrick as a hollow man...
...But Paul Scott's knowledgeable and expansive Raj Quartet, brought to a brilliant close now with A Division of the Spoils (Morrow, 598 pp., $10.95), does much to redress the balance...
...Nevertheless, he seems to the country born in depicting the smells and landscape, the houses and servants, the diction and tone of his Indian characters...
...The elder, a rabid advocate of partition who had fought in the renegade Indian National Army against the British, detests his father's political moderation, for it allows the Moslem former functionary to remain in the Hindu-dominated Congress party rather than support the fanatical Moslem League...
...Nor does Scott indulge in any convenient finales that attempt to "sort out" the raj...
...One feels by the final page as if one has reached the end of a long, miserable, beautiful, passionately instructive journey...
...The kind which Ahmed tried to shut himself off from, the mess the raj had never been able to sort out...
...When Miss Manners insists he has the wrong culprits, Merrick, a cold-blooded martinet who once thought himself attracted to her, jails the group for "political unreliability...
...he came to know it during World War II, as a British Army officer...
...Soon the train is captured by a Hindu mob that systematically slaughters the Moslems in the third-class carriages...
...Although Sarah longs to remain loyal to her family's Anglo-Indian tradition, she is too intelligent and morally responsive to ignore the social and political changes spawned by the War...
...Scott was not raised in India...
...Not until the British are finally deprived of "their" India do the more thoughtful of them, like Perron and Sarah, acknowledge "how little any of us knew or cared about a country whose history had been that of our own for more than three hundred years and which had contributed more than any other to our wealth, our well-being...
...Yet in the harrowing climactic scene toward the end of the closing book, it is the trivial-minded Ahmed who proves his mettle...
...Hari's ironic fate took him to England as an infant, educated him in a leading public school, and at 18, as one of Macaulay's "brown-skinned Englishmen," cast him like driftwood back in his native country after his father's bankruptcy and suicide...
...In the Raj Quartet, he has succeeded in tracing the outline of history through the powerful and contradictory immediacies of personal character, and this is what distinguishes him from a novelist like John Masters, whose many books about India are primarily adventures of history...
...WHAT drives Scott's epic with eloquent urgency is not merely his cunning manipulation of narrative suspense as he artfully peels away layer upon layer of gossip, misunderstanding, stupidity, and malice, but the impeccable authenticity of the heterogeneous Indian lives and places and customs woven into the substance of the Raj Quartet...
...Typically, Scott concentrates in this episode not on the nauseating details of the slaughter, but on the confused irritability of the English who owe their lives to Ahmed...
...Only E.M...
...Like a tongue probing compulsively at a sore tooth, Scott keeps returning throughout the quartet to a central incident in Ranpur, in 1942, that directly or vicariously involves every person of importance in his story...
...Without India, I wonder what we'd have been...
...Sadly, she realizes they will render the India she has been part of since childhood not merely inhospitable to her kind but irreversibly alien...
...What obsesses him at every point, though never at the expense of lucidity and dramatic intensity, is the intimate psychological consequences of these cataclysmic changes: the desperate clutching at obsolete moralities, ancient prejudices, deceptive ambitions, and distorted good will within each of his principal characters as colonial domination comes to a bloody end...
...And one still cannot understand the barbarous eruption of hate and murder among Hindus and Moslems that followed the precipitate granting of independence, by an exhausted Britain, two years after the end of World War II...
...To save his fellow-passengers from the assassins, Ahmed slips quietly out of the compartment and is immediately hacked to pieces...
...Writers & Writing AN EPIC OF INDIA BY PEARL K. BELL WHEN IT IS remembered that the British presence in India persisted for some 300 years, beginning with the 17th-century toehold of the East India Company, it seems curious that so few indisputably great English novels have come out of the colonial experience...
...As were the three earlier novels—The Jewel in the Crown (the boastful synonym for India in Victoria's reign), The Day of the Scorpion and The Towers of Silence—A Division of the Spoils is concerned on the manifest level with the collapse of British rule in India between 1942 and 1947...
...If in the long run Scott lacks the wit and subtle imaginative economy of A Passage to India, if his reluctance to prune prolix and didactic conversations is sometimes to his severe discredit, the breadth of psychological insight and the generous intelligence he confers on his individual portraits still raise the Raj Quartet to high, perhaps even transcendent, literary stature...
...An English officer in the Indian Police, Ronald Merrick, arrests Kumar and five of his friends for the rape...
...Ignorant of India's languages and customs, he is the invisible man, acceptable neither to the English nor to the Indians...
...Since his courageous sacrifice was carried out with such unobtrusive modesty, and the train windows are closely shuttered, his English companions scarcely take in what he has done for them or what has so horribly been done to him...
...The lives of these unequal opponents are inextricably bound, over the four volumes, to some dozen English and Indian characters whom Scott defines through their attitude toward the fading raj as they prepare to leave what, for some of them, has been the one home they have ever known...
...Kumar and his racist English persecutor, however, are not quite what they seem...
...To read through the entire tetralogy—some 2,000 pages—as I have recently done, is to be hypnotically drawn into the ordinary texture of both English and Indian life in the dismayingly complex Asian country...
...Amid the accelerating violence between Hindus and Moslems over the issue of Pakistan, Ahmed leaves a northern hill-station by train, sharing a first-class compartment with a group of Britons...
...But in fact no one is entirely sure why he was killed...
...Even to Sarah Layton his suicidal gallantry appears "such a damned bloody senseless mess...
...One evening in the dilapidated Bibighar Gardens, a young Englishwoman, Diana Manners, and her Indian lover, Hari Kumar, are set upon during their lovemak-ing by six drunken Indian thugs who beat him, tie him up and rape the girl...
...Only in India could he invent a personality in the upper-class image of a pukka-sahib...
...The ends of this ambitious undertaking remain as ragged as the historical events it explores...
...Scott's subject has been the disorderly and ignominious conclusion of British imperial supremacy in India, and all the wrenching dislocations it caused for English and Indians alike as the long shadow of Victorian progress vanished into permanent darkness...
...This confident authority is particularly impressive in the long and troubled conversation, in A Division of the Spoils, between a provincial ex-minister, Mohammed Ali Kasim, and his two strikingly different sons...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
