PART FIVE: "Young Kumar" (pp. 199-270)
Color Keys: Theme & Character, Narration, Plot Event, Glossary

[NARRATION - Unnamed Narrator:]
[Exposition:] The history of Duleep Kumar, Hari Kumar’s father, as well as details of Duleep's sister & Hari's Aunt Shalini, is related (201-227).

Paul Scott on the Narrative "DEVICE" of the Raj Quartet:
"Use of The Writer - sometimes called The Stranger or The Traveller (according to circumstances.)  RARE APPEARANCES BUT ALLOWS FOR THE FLEXIBILITY NEEDED IN THIS FOUR VOLUME HISTORY OF AN AGE AND A PERIOD.
"Interviews, letters, extracts from works or accounts written or tape-recorded by THE CHARACTERS (who have been approached for information) PLUS THE WRITER'S OWN RECONSTRUCTIONS.
"THE WRITER NOT PRECISELY ME.  SO THAT I MANAGE TO ACHIEVE DETACHMENT AS WELL AS INVOLVEMENT."  (Scott, "Notes" 167).

"Young Kumar - straight-forward reconstruction" (Scott, "Notes" 167).

There are two third-person narratives - the story of Miss Crane, the missionary [Part One], and the story of poor ill-fated Hari Kumar [Part Five]" (Scott, "Method" 65).

ENG 103 Students: READ Jewel  Part 5: pp. 224-270 (see ENG 103 Course Plan)

[NARRATION: Free Indirect Narration shifts to Hari Kumar as center of consciousness; THEME &CHARACTER:]
Hari's first months in India are recounted, with excerpts from Colin Lindsay’s letters (227-229).  Hari never writes his friend the truth of “what it meant to find himself living on the wrong side of the river in a town like Mayapore” (229), but his true feelings about his new situation in India pour out in what such an imagined letter would say (229-233).  “’Somehow I must fight my way out of this impossible situation.  But fight my way to where?’  Indeed, to where?  It was not a question Colin could have helped him to answer because Hari never asked it of anyone but himself, and it was several months before he put it even to himself so directly . . .” (233).
“During this period he [Hari]  hung on to his Englishness as if it were some kind of protective armour” (233), and finally “crossed the river” determined to become “’exactly what my father wanted me to become . . . an Indian the English will welcome and recognize’” (234-235).  But his efforts are severely disappointing, and “the notion of his having become invisible to white people first entered his head” (242).  Although his correspondence with Colin Lindsay grew more distant as “the letters deviated further and further from the truth,” the association remains “precious” to Hari—necessary proof that “his English experience had not been imagined” (242).

[NARRATION: - Unnamed Narrator asks:] “Where does one draw the line under the story of Hari Kumar, Harry Coomer: the story of him prior to Bibighar?” (242).  Our historian narrator checks off what his informants can and cannot tell him about young Kumar—e.g. Srinivasan (243-244).  The unnamed Narrator reproduces a letter from Kumar to Colin Lindsay that should have given Colin "a clearer idea of what Hari Kumar was up against” (245) after another job application resulted in “the British-Indian Electrical debacle” (247).  And perhaps it did, for Kumar regrets writing the letter especially as weeks go by and he gets no reply from Colin (247).
[THEME:] One “painful step at a time,” Hari realizes that his father’s [Duleep Kumar] plans for him were “an illusion.  In India an Indian and an Englishman could never meet on equal terms” (248).  His tenuous sense that he still had some value—that he was not quite “nothing”—rested now upon Colin and his Aunt Shalini (248).  In 1939, Hari finally gets a job with the Mayapore Gazette, an English-language newspaper (249-253).  A week later, Hari got a letter from Colin (253-254), but he realizes they no longer speak the same language.
Some of this correspondence is quoted or summarized (255-263), but Hari cannot speak the truth to his former friend (254, 263). 

[NARRATION: These facts the unnamed Narrator has gained from Sister Ludmila, whom for some reason Hari treated as his mother confessor (263-266).]
Sister Ludmila reports  that it was primarily on the “second occasion I saw him drunk that he talked so, about Colin. . . . After he had been to the temple, with her, with the girl [Daphne Manners]” (266).  Sister Ludmila briefly returns to her last visit with Daphne, when she was pregnant, recalling that she asked Daphne if she knew “of the man Lindsay?” (266-267).  Then Sister Ludmila returns to the second drunken occasion of Hari Kumar’s confession about meeting Colin Lindsay on the maidan in Mayapore (267-269):  “Lindsay 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” (268-269).
[THEME & CHARACTER:]   “I am invisible, Kumar said, not only to white people because they are white and I am black but invisible to my white friend because he can no longer distinguish me in a crowd.  He thinks—yes, this is what Lindsay thinks: ‘They all look alike.’ He makes me disappear.  I am nothing.” (269)