Some Kind of Edwardian Sunlight

When I was old enough to understand, my father used to show me snaps and photographs and tell me what I thought were wonderful tales of ‘the land where I was born’, so that when I first came back out here I was always looking for the India I thought I knew because I had seen it in my imagination, like a kind of mirage, shimmering on the horizon, with hot scented breezes blowing in from far hills . . .

This is Daphne Manners, the young woman who comes out to India in 1942 as a VAD nurse and falls in love with Hari Kumar, an Indian journalist educated at an English public school, brought up from babyhood to be entirely English, and finding himself, on his enforced return, belonging nowhere. Their doomed and tragic love affair, to which all else returns, over and over again, is at the heart of Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, though its drama is played out only in Volume One, The Jewel in the Crown (1966). I was not born in India, but I was conceived there, the daughter of an Indian Army officer and a member of the WAAF, who went out in 1946 ‘to cheer up the troops’, as my mother always put it. She and my father fell in love at first sight, were married within three weeks, and sailed home to England, expecting their first baby, in January 1947. On 15 August of that year, India, through Partition, became two countries. The British flag came down over Viceroy Mountbatten’s Residency in New Delhi, and the long struggle for independence from colonial rule – the overarching theme of The Raj Quartet – was finally over. I was born two weeks later and, like Daphne Manners, grew up with the background of a shimmering India, a country which had clearly given my parents the defining experience of their lives. My father had lived there since 1934, going out to work on a sugar plantation in northern Bihar, moving around the country as his responsibilities grew and serving with the Indian Army throughout the war. India – its people and wildlife, its beauty, his adventures as officer and sahib – never left him, and in his last illness he made endless tape-recordings of stories of his time there. He left them to me when he died early in 1983; that autumn, The Jewel in the Crown became one of the most successful television adaptations ever made. In 2009, I finally began transcribing those recordings, seeking a way to know my father better, and a way into the novel I am writing now – not about Staying On, the title of Paul Scott’s last great novel (1977), but Going Home. Needing much more background than those tapes could give me, I read voraciously, and last autumn I began Scott’s masterpiece. It is not often that one admires a publisher’s blurb enough to quote it, but the Everyman edition which became my daily companion (two handsome hardbacks, costing less than four paperbacks) cannot be bettered: ‘Tolstoyan in scope, Proustian in detail, completely individual in effect’. There is indeed nothing that Scott cannot do: no place he cannot evoke, no mind he does not understand. Amidst the epic sweep of the four novels – encompassing, through long, textured explorations of Indian, English and even Russian pasts, far more than the five years of turmoil leading up to Independence – he knows the smallest thing. He knows ‘the new jungle-green material . . . not yet on general issue’ of a General’s uniform in 1943, and the ‘missionary zeal which shone on the ruined parchment face’ of Barbie Batchelor, one of his finest creations. He sees ‘the breathtaking ascent, a great arc’ of a hawk in the mountains, ‘the horizon already blurred and violet with the day’s promise of heat’, and ‘the little scarlet velvet hood’ the falconer claps on her head when she returns. He knows the way dropped sandals clunk on a veranda; and all about the hatpin, and the pearl buttons on the pin-tucked blouse, worn by Lady Manners. Even a pot plant, standing on a balcony in Bombay, manages to look ‘both virile and belligerent’. Behind the Quartet, with its rape of an Englishwoman in India, stands the real incident in 1919 which sparked the Amritsar Massacre. Behind it, too, stands Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), a literary influence which Scott readily acknowledged. But the seeds of the Quartet, and particularly The Jewel in the Crown, were sown for him on a trip he made to India in 1964. This was the first time he had set foot in the country since his days as an officer cadet (and apprentice writer) in the Indian Army in 1943. Then, Hilary Spurling recounts in her introduction to the Everyman edition, he had been lonely, homesick and ill, revolted by the heat, dirt and poverty, and ‘so baffled and appalled by the arrogant complacency of the British in India that he would . . . spend the greater part of his adult life unravelling its implication’. By the time of this return trip in 1964, he was an established literary agent and well-published author – the trip was organized by his publishers – but he was also ill and unsettled and he knew that the journey was one ‘which would make or break him as a novelist’. As Spurling describes in her Life (1990), it brought him to the edge of physical and mental breakdown, but he returned with the foundations of his major characters, and within months had the vision, in a restless night in London, which would open The Jewel in the Crown.

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 . . .

Who speaks these lines, who instructs us to imagine? The voice, not unlike a barrister in court, is our first intimation of an authorial presence, as shadowy as that night-time landscape, which will haunt the whole quartet. This nameless figure, this stranger, revisiting India in the Sixties, as Scott himself had done, is the source of all we are to learn about Daphne Manners, as told to him twenty years later: in letters, conversations, interviews, memoirs and recollections. Daphne and Hari Kumar’s story, set in the year of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign and the Quit India riots, dominates the first volume, but as the Quartet develops we are introduced to characters only marginally touched by their tragedy – her rape, his persecution by District Superintendent Ronald Merrick, his false imprisonment as a political detainee, her death in childbirth. These events, through gossip and reports in The Times of India, become almost mythical in the minds of the Raj colonials, ‘preserved in some kind of Edwardian sunlight’, living in the province of Mirat, ‘with its mosques and minarets’; in the city of Ranpur, down on the baking plains; or in the ‘lovely peaceful old station’ of Pankot, up in the cooler hills. Like Mayapore, the city where the lovers meet, these places are fictional, but so perfectly realized and so convincingly within reach by train from Bombay, Delhi or Calcutta that we experience them wholly. And Scott’s characters in these succeeding volumes – The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and A Division of the Spoils (1975) – are every bit as full and engaging as those in Jewel: Lady Manners, Daphne’s aunt, living out the summers of her widowhood on a houseboat in Rawalpindi; her friend in Mayapore, Lady Chatterjee, another widow, who has Daphne as a house-guest; Sister Ludmilla, who gathers in the dying; the missionary Edwina Crane who kills herself in despair at the height of the riots; the sinister Ronald Merrick, a policeman who grows darker, more powerful, more manipulative and complex with every volume. Scott’s technique is remarkable. That beguiling authorial presence haunts the narrative, as Daphne Manners is to haunt it long after her death, through a prismatic structure in which central events are  continually revisited in a new light, layered through new characters. The Day of the Scorpion is opened by the shadowy narrator, who at the end of Jewel flew back to London from Mayapore. Now: ‘The writer encountered a Muslim woman once in a narrow street of a predominantly Hindu town, in the quarter inhabited by moneylenders. . . She wore the burkha . . .’ He speculates that she is in search of a moneylender; we note her and forget her. But nothing in the Quartet is there without a reason, and we find her later throwing herself imploringly at the feet of Ronald Merrick, and deduce that she is the aunt of Hari Kumar, desperate for his release from prison. Merrick, who has managed to get himself out of the police force and into a post as Intelligence officer in the army, is to play a huge role in this volume, dominated by the Layton family, ‘pillars of Anglo-Indian society’, as Everyman has it. Colonel Layton is a prisoner-of-war in Germany – we are still in 1942 – and his wife and daughters, Susan and Sarah, occupy cramped quarters in Pankot while his stepmother, Mabel Layton, lives in roomy Rose Cottage, with its lovely garden. It is here that the retired missionary Barbie Batchelor comes to live as elderly Mabel’s companion. Scorpion brilliantly uses the arrest and imprisonment of Ahmed Kasim, Muslim member of Congress and Chief Minister of Mirat, to open up the political events of the years 1942–4, which encompass the threat of a Japanese invasion and the formation of the Indian National Army, seen by Merrick as traitorous insurrectionists. One of Kasim’s sons has joined the INA; the other, Ahmed, is a friend of Sarah Layton, with whom he goes riding in the early mornings. Tragedy is to befall him. This volume includes an account of the dreadful war wounds sustained by Ronald Merrick, leaving him without an arm and with a face so burned on one side that he effectively has two faces, a striking metaphor for a character we never see alone. There is also an unforgettable scene in which Lady Manners is taken to observe from a hidden vantage point the ‘examination’ of Hari Kumar in prison. Scorpion then follows the breakdown of Susan Layton, seen by everyone as pretty and vibrant, but who has always seen herself, she weeps to Sarah, as ‘a drawing that anyone who wanted to could come along and rub out’. Her decline into madness, and the terrible act which almost results from this, conclude the domestic events. In June: ‘“We’ve gone in,” said Uncle Arthur. “We landed in Normandy this morning.”’ The Towers of Silence belongs to Barbie Batchelor. Here, Scott’s extraordinary understanding of elderly women alone – Lady Manners, Lady Chatterjee, Mabel Layton – reaches its apotheosis, in the account of a missionary from a ‘gloomy little house in Camberwell’ whose time of service in India is over, leaving her bereft; whose secret fear is that God no longer hears her ‘carrying school-room voice’; and who, for the first time in her life, sharing Rose Cottage, finds real companionship and affection. Her grief at Mabel’s death, her spirit in the face of social ostracism – ‘blessed are the insulted and the shat-upon’ – and her pitiful decline, are moving beyond measure. A Division of the Spoils, opening in Bombay in 1945 and ending in 1947 with the bloodbath of Partition, is the long goodbye of Empire. Narrated through the diaries of Guy Perron, ‘the historian in Scott’, as Spurling puts it, all the old characters are seen anew. The events of Mayapore are revisited once more, and Merrick’s dark, controlling presence – and extraordinary marriage – come to a terrible end. The volume concludes with the iconic image of a train journey – away, away – which has already been mysteriously prefigured. Realizing what Scott had been leading up to brought this reader out in goose-flesh. Finally, the prism turns for the last time. As Perron flies home, reading a poet whose work has been alluded to throughout The Raj Quartet, the images are of a darkening landscape and a girl, running. Scott’s quietly brilliant prose, his psychological insight and continuously turning presentation of events show a writer at the very height of his powers. His techniques show us, too, as he surely intended, how history is made.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Sue Gee 2011