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Jewel in the Crown
TIMELINE
- Study Guide
(4) PRINT VERSION
Annotated Plot Events in CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Late 18th
Century: Brief history of
the MacGregor House (67-68): An Indian prince in love with a beautiful
singer of classical Hindu music builds a house for her in Mayapore, and there
she sings for the prince morning
and evening. Her voice is the only part of herself she will give to him.
When she dies, the house falls into ruin.
The prince’s son, despising his father’s unconsummated attachment to
the singer,
builds the Bibighar, meaning “house of women" (Part 3: p.
138)--where he keeps his own private
brothel, a mile away. The selfish,
dissipated son is a bad ruler and comes to a bad end.
Learn more from Sister Ludmila's account: "They [the Bibighar
and MacGregor House] are only one mile distant.
Not far, but far enough for a girl running at
night” (Part 3: p. 138). She
alludes to Daphne Manners' rape:
“…after that day in August 1942, the
names Bibighar and MacGregor become special ones.
They passed into our language with new meanings” (139).
Early - Mid 19th
century: The decayed house of
the singer is rebuilt by a Scottish merchant called MacGregor, said to fear God,
favor Muslims, and fear Indian temples. The house becomes known as the MacGregor House--a house of
the white. MacGregor burned the Bibighar to the ground,
according to British versions of the story, because it had been an abomination.
The Indian version maintains that MacGregor fell in love with one of the Indian
girls in the Bibighar, but he retrieves a young white woman from England to
become his bride and has the MacGregor House built for her: Janet MacGregor.
Meanwhile, the Indian woman spurned MacGregor for a "black" Indian
lover, so MacGregor kills them both and destroys the Bibighar by fire.
Learn more: Sister Ludmila discusses the history of the Bibighar and the MacGregor
House (Part 3: 138, 140-142);
Later, MacGregor, his young bride Janet, and their newly born child are murdered
by mutinous Indian Sepoys (members of the British Indian army)--and the
MacGregor's Muslim servant Akbar Hossain dies defending his mistress (Part 2: p.
68).
[Historical Notes: Raj = Hindi for "rule,"
refers to British colonial rule over India.
The British deliberately followed a policy of “divide and rule” in
India, which exploited and increased internal conflicts such as those between
Hindus and Muslims (as well as Sikhs in the Punjab). The British favored the Muslims and the Islam religion, over
the Hindus and Hinduism (which the British considered “weaker”).
Learn more about the history of British-Indian relations from Cora's Hum 210
Asian Timelines of India:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/IndiaTML/indiatml3.htm
India Timeline 4: Independence of India and
Pakistan (20th c.)
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/IndiaTML/indiatml4.htm
The ghost of Janet MacGregor is believed to haunt the MacGregor House, and, after 1943, another ghost seems to have joined her-- according to the unnamed Narrator: MacGregor House echoes with unaccountable sounds of the clumsy young Daphne Manners breaking glass, clumping about in her sensible boots, violating flower beds, nervously chattering, and singing pre-WWII popular songs.
Sister Ludmila also speaks of the
“special
connection between the house of the singer [MacGregor House] and the house of
the courtesans [Bibighar]”:
between then “have flowed the dark currents of a human conflict, even
after the Bibighar was destroyed, a current whose direction might be traced by
following the route taken by the girl running in the darkness from one to the
other. A current.
The flow of an invisible river. No
bridge was ever thrown across it and stood.
You understand what I am telling you?
That MacGregor and Bibighar are the place of the white and the place of
the black? To get from one to the
other you could not cross by a bridge but had to take your courage in
your hands and enter the flood and let yourself be taken with it, lead where
it may. This is a courage Miss
Manners had” (Part 3: p. 142).
1885: Edwina Crane is born in London “of moderately well-to-do
middle-class parents” (7).
1888: Duleep Kumar
(Hari Kumar’s father) is born, “the
youngest of a family of four boys and three girls,” the baby and last born son
(Part 5: p. 203). In India, he
completes Government Higher School; at age 16 [in 1904?], he enters Government
College, which he family considered “as waste of time” (Part 5; p. 204). Duleep develops three goals: “to break away from a
landlocked family tradition,” to become a man who granted rather than received
favors, “and to save Shalini [his younger sister] from the ignorance and
domestic tyranny” typically forced upon Indian women (Part 5; p. 204).
He also appreciates the importance of learning to speak proper English
(205-206).
1899 (?):
Shalini Kumar, younger sister of Duleep Kumar and aunt of Hari
Kumar, is born (Part 5; p. 204).
1906 or 1907 (?):
Edwina Crane comes out to India employed by the
Nesbitt-Smiths as nanny to their children (7, 8).
1907 (?):
At age 19,
Duleep Kumar wants to go to England—“passage across the black water”—to
take his Indian Civil Service examinations (206-207).
But before his family allows him to go, they arrange his marriage to
Kamala Prasad (Part 5; pp. 207-209). He
marries, then goes to England, but his first experience there as a foreigner, is depressing. He
returns to India, “a half-man—unclean by traditional Hindu standards and
custom because I had crossed the black water” (217) and laboring “under the
weight of many burdens” (215).
1909 (?): Edwina Crane
decides to stay on India after she learns that
Major Nesbitt-Smith’s regiment has been recalled to England (Part 1: pp.
10-13).
She is employed as a teacher in the School of the Church of England
Mission in Muzzafirabad (18).
[Miss Edwina Crane will
become supervisor of
Mayapore district Church of England mission schools, self-described [in indirect
narration] as "a teacher without real qualifications, a missionary worker
who did not believe in God," who had "never been wholly accepted by
Indians and had tended to reject the generality of the English"
(4-5). She is "an intelligent and perceptive woman" with
pro-Indian sympathies, in India for 35 years (7).
1913-1916: Duleep Kumar’s wife
Kamala bears three daughters, none of
whom survive past the age of one (219). Their
marriage deteriorates. During this
time, Duleep’s father becomes sannyasi (221-223).
1914: In the riots of
Muzzafirabad, Edwina Crane turns away a
threatening crowd at the door of the mission school.
Afterwards she asks for transfer, uncomfortable with expectations that
she will perform further acts of magic and bravery.
Upon leaving she is given the painting, “The Jewel in Her Crown”
(Part 1: pp. 18-20, 22, 24). Crane is
transferred to Ranpur.
"The
Jewel in Her Crown" [Title
Allusion] is a painting depicting Queen Victoria on a throne, having
just accepted the title "Empress of India," attended by Prime Minister
Disraeli, with a map of India, as well as other Indian figures, in 1877, twenty
years after the "Sepoy Mutiny" when rule of India was passed from the
British East India Company to the British Crown. "In this imaginary
picture an Indian prince is offering the old queen a fine gem, the jewel of the
title is meant to be India" itself (Brann 182). Missionaries Edwina
Crane (and later in
v. 3, Towers of Silence, Barbie Batchelor) used this painting to teach English
to Indian children.
1917: Shalini Kumar
(Duleep’s sister and Hari’s aunt) marries Prakash Gupta Sen at age 15 or 16
(219).
1919: British General Dyer slaughters hundreds of unarmed Indian men, women, and children at Jallianwallah Bagh, Amritsar, in the Punjab (northern India). This massacre provokes a crisis rivaling the “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857, in British-Indian history. Miss Crane’s references to the “troubles of 1919” (Part 1; p. 49) connect them to the Mayapore situation as handled by Brigadier Reid in 1942-- “almost as bad as in the days of General Dyer in Amritsar in 1919” (61).
1920: Hari Kumar is born (223), and two days later his
mother
Kamala dies.
1921 - Oct:
Duleep
Kumar’s mother dies, shortly after his father dies (223-224).
1922: Duleep Kumar
leaves India, taking his two-year-old son Hari
to England. He told Hari sometime
later: “To learn the secret of the Englishness of the English
. . . you had to grow up among them.
For him, it was too late. But
it was not too late for his son” (Part 5; p. 215). Duleep tries to persuade his sister Shalini to go with him,
but she refuses because she feels her duty is in India. Yet she loves Hari, “my English Nephew” (220).
1934(?): “Sister" Ludmila Smith comes to
Mayapore and begins
her charity work at the Sanctuary.
1935: Edwina Crane is made superintendent of Anglican schools
in Mayapore district, with responsibility for the Anglican mission schools in
the civil lines, in Chillianwallah bazaar, and in Dibrapur, 75 miles from
Mayapore (28, 33)
1936-1938:
Duleep Kumar’s luck in investments and enterprises in
England “began to go down hill” (224-225).
Too Indian, a source of shame, Duleep had kept himself separated from his
son Hari in “his son’s best interests” (225), and when Duleep became bankrupt
in 1938, he committed suicide unable to “face what he knew those consequences
would mean to that boy of his. Back
home to India, in other words, with his tail between his legs” (225).
This Mr. Lindsay [Colin Lindsay's father] hears from his lawyer.
Although initially, the Lindsays urged “Harry” At this juncture, the
family of Colin Lindsay refuses to aid his best friend “Harry Coomer”
[Hari Kumar] (227).
1938:
Ronald Merrick, born of a poor, working-class family in England—an intelligent “grammar school” boy--comes out to India, where opportunities he could never have had at home open up to him. Here, by virtue of white skin, Merrick can claim superiority (to millions of “black” Indians) for the first time in his life, and socialize with upper class whites who would have had nothing to do with him in England. He is an adamant guardian of the British cantonment’s privilege and physical isolation, and the white man’s biological purity and superiority.
Hari Kumar—known in England as Harry Coomer, a carefree, attractive Indian athlete who had lived in England since the age of two and been educated Chillingborough, a prestigious British “public school’ [i.e. private school]-- is forced to return to India (and becomes Hari Kumar), after his father Duleep Kumar [who called himself David Coomer in England, p. 202] loses his fortune and commits suicide in England during Easter holidays, 1938 (Part Five: p. 201). Hari is taken in by his Aunt Shalini in Chillianwallah Bagh, Mayapore; he finds “black” Indian life hateful and foreign. His upper class British manners, accent and education will work insidiously against him with whites like Ronald Merrick of socially inferior educations and accents.
Robin White becomes
Deputy Commissioner of Mayapore (33).
Mayapore (first introduced Part 1: p. 3) A
fictionalized Indian city, its layout described in much detail by various
narrators in the novel —particularly the details of the British cantonment,
the Indian “native” town, Bibighar gardens and MacGregor House.
See the opening of Part 4, pp. 161-164 for details of the British
cantonment, the maidan, the Gymkhana club.
Cantonment
- civil and military (Part 1: p. 3) = The white quarters, exclusive,
privileged, “safe” sites of physical, cultural, psychological isolation from
the “black” natives. British
life in India was carried on by most, in carefully segregated, jealously guarded
all-white enclaves that sought to duplicate, mirror, as closely as possible,
the
cultural environment of “home” while in exile.
1939, May: Deputy
Commissioner Robin White sticks
his neck out and tries to get the Indian Minister for Education, Indian lawyer
Srinivasan, and another Indian Desai admitted to the white-only Gymkhana club for a drink
(Part 4: pp. 185-189, 191-192)
1940: Ronald Merrick becomes
District Superintendent of Police in
Mayapore (33).
1941 (?): Daphne Manners joins her
aunt and only living relative,
Mrs. Henry
[Ethel] Manners, in Rawalpindi [abbreviated ‘Pindi], India.
Henry Manners had been a just and benevolent provincial governor in India
some years, and Henry and Ethel became good friends with Sir Nello and Lili
Chatterjee during that time. Daphne’s
father and her brother David Manners were recently killed in the war (her mother had
died of cancer shortly before WWII began).
Daphne had driven an ambulance during the London Blitz, but a doctor
warned her to quit because of her heart. Daphne,
like Hari Kumar, was born in India but moved to England when she was very young.
Daphne’s father loved India but left it for her mother’s sake, and
Daphne feels a responsibility to love India, where her father had been happy as
he had never been in England
Learn More: In her journals, Daphne speaks of her mother, who hated
India, and her father, who loved India (Part 7: p. 377).
1942:
Feb.: After living with her aunt for several months in
Rawalpindi, Daphne
Manners comes to Mayapore to live with her “aunt” Lili Chatterjee
in
MacGregor House. Here, Ronald
Merrick first meets Daphne Manners.
After her first weeks in Mayapore, Daphne went through a period of
hating everything about India, and felt the need to break "my vow, never
to go to the [white-only Gymkhana] club because Lili [being an Indian, however
well born] couldn't go with me" (Part 7: pp. 370-371).
But Daphne’s initial fear and repulsion toward a very foreign-seeming
India eventually dissolve, and she develops an attraction that turns to love for
India. Somewhat
shamefully, she still will occasionally frequent the white-only cantonment “club,” despite
her distaste for its self-righteous racial prejudice, because of her need at
times to “be with her own kind.”
Mar: Hari Kumar, reporting on a cricket match for the
Mayapore Gazette,
has a chance encounter with his former English school friend Colin Lindsay
on the Mayapore maidan--but Colin does not “see” Hari, who has become
just another “invisible” Indian. This
rejection drives home Hari's conviction that white and black can never meet on
equal terms in India. Learn more from Sister Ludmila's narrative (Part
3: pp. 152-153).
That night
Hari gets drunk and passes out in the waste land.
Sister Ludmila finds him and takes him back to the Sanctuary.
The next day, Sister Ludmila witnesses the first meeting of the
cultured, well-educated “black Englishman” Hari Kumar and District
Commissioner of Police Ronald
Merrick, who arrests Kumar and takes him in for questioning. Hari is
released shortly thereafter through the efforts of the lawyer of his uncle, a
rich Indian bania (merchant).
[The
unnamed Narrator learns more about the history of Hari Kumar and his
Indian relatives from an interview with Mr. Srinivasan, the family lawyer
in 1942, whom Hari’s rich bania (merchant) uncle
Romesh
Chand sent for when Ronald
Merrick arrested first arrested Hari at
the Sanctuary (Part 4: pp. 174-177).
Learn more: Sister Ludmila's
narrative of the day of Hari’s
arrest (Part 3: pp. 146-148), in which she reveals her interpretation of the
relationship between
Hari Kumar and Ronald
Merrick, begun the day of Hari's arrest: Merrick “had long ago chosen Hari Kumar, chosen him as a victim,
having stood and watched him washing at the pump, and afterwards taken him
away for questioning, to observe more closely the
darkness that attracted darkness in himself.
A different darkness, but still a darkness.
On Kumar’s part a darkness of the soul.
On Merrick’s a darkness of the mind and heart and flesh.
And again, but in an unnatural context, the attraction of white to
black, the attraction of an opposite, of someone this time who had perhaps
never even leapt into the depths of his own private compulsion, let alone into
those of life or of the world at large, but had stood high and dry on the
sterile banks, thicketed around with his own secrecy and also with the
prejudice he had learned because he was one of the white men in control of a
black man’s country” (Part 3: p. 150).
Mar: Daphne Manners meets Hari Kumar at a cocktail party given by Lili Chatterjee at the MacGregor House. Daphne discusses her first impressions of Hari at Lili's cocktail party: "horribly prickly," "except for the colour of his skin he wasn't an Indian at all," "a terribly sad man" (Part 7: pp. 367-370).
Sister Ludmila observes the irony that white women were
attracted to Hari Kumar—though he called himself “invisible to white
people,” he had “not noticed the way the white women eyed him,” but only
the way “they pushed past him, or turned their backs…” (Part 3: p. 152). Sister Ludmila intuits that Hari Kumar still had “a
terrible longing to . . . become again part of them [the British in India], because of their
Englishness, because England was the only world he knew, and he hated the
black town on this side of the river as much as any white man fresh out of
England would hate it. Hated it
more, because for him the black town was the place where he had to live . .
.” (152).
Late
Apr. War Week Exhibition on the maidan in the British cantonment, Mayapore.
Ronald Merrick sees Daphne Manners talking to Hari
Kumar and inviting
him back to MacGregor House; this is Daphne’s second meeting with Hari.
Sister Ludmila believes that "It was
Kumar that Merrick wanted. Not
Miss Manners. And it was probably her association with Kumar that first
caused Merrick to look in her direction.
This is the way I see it” (Part 3: p. 155).
Daphne Manners recalls the Saturday she
went to the War Week Exhibition, met Deputy
Commissioner Robin White and Brigadier Reed, saw Hari Kumar again on the
maidan, and went up and talked to him, and then ran into Ronald Merrick at the
club that evening (Part 7: pp. 372-376). In retrospect, Daphne believes Ronald first took an interest in her because he
saw her speak to Hari Kumar that day on the maidan during War Week Exhibition,
to head her off from “getting mixed up with the ‘wrong’ type of
Indian,” but perhaps afterwards found himself unexpectedly attracted to
Daphne (Part 7: pp. 391-392).
Meanwhile, Hari
is skeptical of Daphne’s gestures of friendship; he has learned to view such
white overtures as calculating and hypocritical, or condescending and
pitying--and to doubt his own value. Their
friendship develops haltingly in the Raj atmosphere of white disapproval and
hostility for mixed racial relationships.
May/
Summer: Gandhi demands that the British “Quit India” and leave her “‘to God, or to anarchy’” (35). Edwina Crane takes down Gandhi's portrait and the Indian ladies stop coming to tea (36).
Daphne
invites Hari to dinner at MacGregor House, explaining that she knew he would
never just "drop by"; they spend a pleasurable evening together (Part
7: pp. 380-384).
The following
Saturday, Daphne is invited by Mrs. Gupta Sen [Hari's Aunt Shalini] to dinner at her home in
Chillianwallah Bagh; Hari is late picking
her up, the tonga-wallah gives him trouble because of his pidgin Hindi, but
gracious Aunt Shalini sets all to rights, and they have a lovely evening
(385-389).
Different worlds open to Daphne through Hari Kumar, meeting
his Aunt
Shalini and getting involved with Sister Ludmila’s work at the
Sanctuary. After dinner at
Aunt Shalini's, "Mayapore seemed to change for me," expanded
from the narrow confines of MacGregor house and the British cantonment out
"to the other side of the river" [the native town] (Part 7: p. 390).
Daphne feels her life has "split...into three parts": her white life at the hospital and the club,
her home life at MacGregor House with Lili, mixing with Indians and English
trying to "work together," and her relationship with Hari . .
." (390).
In her journal to her aunt, Daphne Manners discusses "Bibighar"
as "the one place in Mayapore where we [Daphne and Hari] could be
together and be utterly natural with each other," and Daphne explains how
difficult it was for them to meet anywhere else, even though they did nothing
more that sit "side by side on the edge of the mosaic 'platform' with our
feet dangling, like two kids sitting on a wall" (Part 7: pp. 378-379).
Sister
Ludmila’s interpretation of the relationship between the white English girl Daphne
Manners and Hari Kumar unfolds (Part 3: pp. 142 &
following). Daphne’s initial
“powerful compulsion” mixed with “horror” of mixing white and black,
grew into love: “And then she rejected the notion of horror entirely,
realizing that it was no good waiting for a bridge to be built, but a question
of entering the floor, and meeting there, letting the current take them both.
It is as if she said to herself: Well, life is not just a business of
standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet.
It is merely an illusion that some of stand on one bank and some on the
opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but
dreaming. So jump, jump in, and
let the shock wake us up. Even if
we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and
alive” (142; & see Part 7)
June Ronald Merrick
and Daphne Manners share an intimate dinner—which Merrick
has planned carefully to lead up to his proposal of marriage to her.
Daphne later accuses herself on contributing to a kind of
"conspiracy" of silence--"rooted in love as well as
fear"--surrounding her "association" with Hari Kumar
that Daphne herself contributed to by never telling Lili Chatterjee of
Ronald Merrick's marriage proposal (Part 7: pp. 365-367). A "fundamental law"
seemed to be in operation: "that although a white man could make love to
a black girl, the black man and white girl association was still taboo"
(367).
Summer [World War II is raging]: The British are run out of Burma and Malaysia by the invading Japanese, another of the so-called inferior races of the earth in the British imperial view. British losses of men and pride deflated their claims to white superiority. “What sort of white Imperial power was it that could be chased out of Malaya and up through Burma by an army of yellow men? It was a question the Indians asked openly. The British only asked it in the unaccustomed stillness of their own hearts” (Part III, p. 158). At this crucial moment, Gandhi attempts to mobilize India in a civil disobedience campaign against the British—Indians are enjoined to “Quit India”—through Gandhi’s tactics of non-violent non-cooperation. It is at this point that Edwina Crane takes down Gandhi’s picture.
The
rains finally came that year [1942]: Daphne explains how she
came to know Sister Ludmila (Part 7: pp. 394-395). Daphne describes
Sister Ludmila’s image of the dancing S[h]iva, and the Biblical text framing
it (395)—connecting Hindu and Christian. The
smiling “winged” god made Daphne think “you could leap into the dark with
him and come to no harm” (396).
“What an extraordinary woman she was,” Daphne says of
Sister Ludmila, and they “took to each other” (396).
Daphne reflects on
how “I’d “divided my life up into these watertight compartments” and
describes everything she did in 1942 as “adventures” because they were done
“in defiance of others.
I was breaking every rule there was” (397). The people in each compartment of Daphne’s lives were “hedged
about” by a different set of rules, so they could never be certain “which
rule I was breaking in what way” because “they could only follow me far
enough to see that I’d broken it and gone away, and become temporarily
invisible” (397). That Daphne
could not be pinned down into one of these compartments and live by one set of
rules—“To be neither one thing nor the other is probably unforgivable”
(397), she sees in retrospect.
And she genuinely liked the girls and boys at the club, and Ronald
Merrick, she loved Lili Chatterjee and Hari Kumar—even as she could see many
of their failings—but she tells Auntie Ethel might sound like Daphne is “a
paragon of broad-mindedness, until you remember the horrible mess I made of
everything” (398).
After Hari takes Daphne to Sanctuary the first, Daphne visits several times by herself: Sister Ludmila views Daphne as having a kind of “wholeness I never had” (Part 3: p. 143). She describes her impressions of Daphne and Daphne’s reaction to the “dancing S[h]iva” (Part 3: p. 143).
July:
Ronald Merrick starts sending his car for Daphne
Manners and warns her against her
association with Hari Kumar.
On a Saturday afternoon,
Daphne and Hari pick up her birthday photographs for
Auntie Ethel [Lady Manners], and then shelter from the rain in the Bibighar.
Daphne leaves feeling as if she and Hari had had a “lover’s quarrel.
But we weren’t lovers and there’d been no quarrel” (Part 7: pp.
399-400).
Daphne writes a note to Hari asking if he could take her to visit the
Tirupati Temple, and a day or two later, Hari responds, a bit coolly, that he will try
to arrange it for the following Saturday (Part 7: pp. 400-401).
The following Saturday, Daphne has dinner with Ronald Merrick
at the club. Afterwards he warns
her against her “against this association with Mr. Kumar” (401), Daphne
gets angry saying she doesn’t “care what colour people are” (402), and
Merrick bursts out with: “That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say
colour doesn’t matter. It does
matter. It’s basic. It matters
like hell” (402). He then adds
he “put it badly. But I can’t
help it. The whole idea revolts
me” (402). Daphne feels sorry
for Ronald: his honesty is that of a self-centered child, but also
“ignorance and cruelty” (402).
Hari confirms the Temple visit by note on Friday evening (Part
7: p. 402).
July 18:
Daphne
and Hari visit the Tirupati Temple. Until
this excursion, Hari distrusted Daphne, believing she knew all along that Ronald
Merrick was the officer that had arrested him earlier in March.
Hari tries to offend her. In Part
7, Daphne recounts how she and
Lili Chatterjee first came to hear of Hari Kumar, and then meet him at Lili's
cocktail party, but she didn't know the "full story" of Hari's
arrest by Ronald Merrick until Hari told her later after their visit to the
Tirupati Temple (364-365).
Daphne feels angry and foolish when she finally
discovers that Ronald and Hari had been
“what?—enemies—since that day in the Sanctuary” when Ronald arrested
Hari (392). Daphne analyzes
examples that made her growing relationship with Hari Kumar so
difficult—“these repeated experiences of finding myself emotionally out on
a limb” (Part 7: pp. 393-394).
Weeks go by without Daphne hearing from Hari, and when Daphne next sees Ronald she feels hatred for him
(410-411).
July [some time after the visit at the Tirupati Temple:] Hari Kumar, drunk on a second occasion, visits Sister Ludmila at the Sanctuary at night and tells her why she had found him drunk on the waste land earlier in March, 1942: he had met Colin Lindsay (152), his best friend in England, on the maidan that day, but Colin had passed Hari by without seeming to recognize him: Hari, an “Englishman with black skin who in Mayapore became what he called invisible to white people” (152)—though not invisible to white women, or Daphne Manners, or to Ronald Merrick (153).
Daphne can’t take Hari’s waiting: “In the end I couldn’t bear
the silence, the inaction, the separation, the artificiality of my position.
I wrote to him [Hari].
I
had no talent for self-denial. It
is an Anglo-Saxon failing, I suppose” (412).
She asks Hari to meet her on Saturday evening at the Sanctuary” (Part
7: p. 413).
Aug. 8: All-India Congress votes in favor of Gandhi’s “Quit India” resolution. The British government arrests Congress members. Country-wide riots and arrests will ensue. Not heeding warnings of unrest, Edwina Crane drives to Dibrapur for her weekly inspection of the mission school, and stays the night.
Aug. 9: Edwina Crane insists on driving back to Mayapore, and the Dibrapur mission school teacher Mr. Chaudhuri accompanies her because he fears serious trouble. They are attacked on the road from Dibrapur, and Mr. Chaudhuri is killed. Holding the dead teacher’s hand, Miss Crane begs forgiveness for herself and her country, but none is forthcoming: “There was nothing I could do.” Her illusions and hopes for India are dead.
Aug 9:
That day, August 9, 1942,
after Gandhi
and his Congress colleagues were locked up, the British began to get
scared because of the riots breaking out (Part 7: p. 413). Edwina
Crane is taken to the Mayapore General Hospital, and Daphne
Manners, on duty at hospital that day, attends Miss Crane (143).
After work, Daphne bicycles to the Sanctuary,
hoping to see Hari Kumar. He is not there. She talks with
Sister Ludmila for a while (Part
7: p. 414). Then
Daphne leaves on her bicycle at dusk, and Sister Ludmila "felt that she was going beyond
my help,” just as Sister Ludmila had felt about Hari Kumar when Ronald
Merrick had taken him away that day in March 1942, months before (144).
Daphne
crosses the Bibighar bridge on her way home (Part 7: p. 415), then stops in
at the Bibighar because “I’d had a strong impression of Hari in the
Bibighar, sitting in the pavilion alone, not expecting me, but thinking of me,
wondering whether I would turn up” (416).
Early that same evening, Ronald Merrick checks first
at the British Gymkhana Club looking for Daphne Manners, then with
Lili Chatterjee at MacGregor House to see if Daphne has
arrived home from work safely, but she has not yet come home.
Daphne finds Hari
at the Bibighar. When
Daphne takes hold of Hari’s hand to light a cigarette, Hari asks her what
she is trying to prove—“That you don’t mind our touching?” Daphne says, “I thought we’d got beyond that,” but Hari
retorts no, “we can never get beyond it.”
But Daphne asserts, “But we have.
I have. It was never an
obstacle anyway. At least not for
me” (Part 7: p. 416). Hari then insists
she see her home, but Daphne “couldn’t bear it, having him so near,
knowing I was about to lose him.” Then
somehow they are kissing, touching, and “we were both lost.
There was nothing gentle in the way he took me” (417).
Afterwards, they
cannot find Daphne's bicycle, Hari carries her down the path, and then Daphne takes charge.
She won't let Hari see her home and states: “I’ve got to go home alone. We’ve
not been together. I’ve not
seen you” (419). She is
deaf to Hari’s plea: “I’ve
got to be with you. I love you.
Please let me be with you” (419). Daphne
panics thinking of what “they might to do to him if he said
to them, ‘I love her. We love each other’” (419).
Daphne beats at Hari, “trying to beat sense and reason and cunning
into him. I kept saying,
‘We’ve never seen each other. You’ve
been at home. You say nothing. You know nothing. Promise
me’” (419).
”I said, ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,’ and wondered
where I’d heard those words before” (420) [they are Edwina Crane’s words:
see Part One].
Daphne begins running, the girl running in the darkness . . . (420).
Daphne tells her story of these events and their aftermath
in her journal to Lady Ethel Manners, Part 7.
Meanwhile that
night, Ronald Merrick continues his search for Daphne Manners at the Sanctuary.
Sister Ludmila responds to his questions by suggesting that " Perhaps she
[Daphne]
has called in a Mrs. Gupta Sen’s [Hari’s Aunt Shalini whom he lives in
Chillianwallah Bagh]” (Part 3: p. 155).
In retrospect
Sister Ludmila believes that her responses to Merrick’s questions were a
“betrayal of the boy” [Hari Kumar] and contributed to setting “a tragic
course of action” in motion (Part 3: p. 149). Sister
Ludmila later regrets mentioning Hari's Aunt because, however unintentionally,
she put Hari Kumar in Merrick’s mind and opened up a way for Merrick to punish Kumar, “whom he had already
chosen, chosen as a victim. For
Merrick was a man unable to love. Only
he was able to punish. In my
heart I feel this is true. It was
Kumar that Merrick wanted. Not
Miss Manners. And it was probably her association with Kumar that first
caused Merrick to look in her direction.
This is the way I see it" (Part 3: p. 155).
Later that night, Merrick and his policemen go to the
Bibighar gardens, find Daphne's abandoned bicycle - which Merrick will
"plant" as false evidence against Hari Kumar outside his Aunt
Shalini's home in Chillanwallah Bagh; there Merrick will arrest Hari Kumar
for the rape of Daphne Manners, as well as other Hindu young men he finds
drinking hooch in a hut near the Bibighar bridge. Testimony regarding
their interrogation, torture, and abuse at Merrick's hands is offered in Part 6,
“THREE: (Appendix to 'Civil
and Military') A Deposition by S. V.
Vidyasagar” (pp. 343-357).
Mid - Late Aug: For days afterwards,
rioting continues and the British Raj community initially views Edwina
Crane and Daphne Manners as innocent victims and martyrs.
But neither woman will deliver up to the Raj the Indian assailants
demanded, both are found at fault for being too sympathetic and cultivating personal associations with the
“blacks,” and both come to viewed as traitors to the white cause.
Learn more: Sister Ludmila recounts the version of Daphne's rape that was
adopted by the British Mayapore community (Part 3: pp. 156-157), in contrast to the version
remembered and retold by the Indian community (Part 3: pp. 157-158).
Hari Kumar and the other young men that Ronald Merrick
arrested for Daphne Manners' alleged rape are imprisoned, interrogated,
humiliated and tortured. See Part 4: "Civil and Military:
Three: (Appendix to 'Civil
and Military') A Deposition by S. V.
Vidyasagar” (pp. 343-357).
Oct. Edwina Crane, dressed in white mourning garments, commits suttee (or sati), enacting her own version of the Hindu ritual of the exemplary wife, who enters a state of grace by throwing herself on the funeral pyre of the dead husband—an ultimate act of renunciation for Hindus. For Edwina Crane, it is a final expression of loss, defeat, and despair—a victim of her own and the British Raj's illusions and failed promises to the Indian people.
Also Oct [?] Sister Ludmila's last visit with Daphne Manners,
after the rape, when Daphne comes to say goodbye: “She was pregnant,"
Sister Ludmila observes and is struck that Daphne has “the
calmness of a beautiful woman” (150). Sister Ludmila tells the unnamed
Narrator that she believes Daphne had made love with Kumar (if not on the night of
the Bibighar affair then some other time), that Daphne believed she carried
Hari's child, and that Daphne seems in a state of grace during her pregnancy
(Part 3: p. 155).
Daphne
does not know where they have taken Hari Kumar, who was “arrested, that night of
Bibighar, with some other boys” (150-151).
Daphne “will go through” with the pregnancy, refuses to abort her
baby though for the European community, especially other white women “To get
rid. . . . To tear the disgusting embryo out of the womb and throw it to the
pi-dogs,” as Sister Ludmila heard a white woman say, seems an
“obligation” (151). To such
people, Daphne had become “’that Manners girl’” (151).
To Daphne during this last visit, Sister Ludmila confesses that her response to
Ronald Merrick
the night of the rape has “been on my conscience” (Part 3: p. 153) and she tries to
“unburden” (p. 154), but Daphne cannot help Sister Ludmila “unburden”
herself “Of blame, of guilt, of treacherously saying to Merrick: Perhaps she
has called in a Mrs. Gupta Sen’s [Hari’s Aunt Shalini which whom he lives in
Chillianwallah Bagh]” (155).
1943, May: Parvati Manners is born and
Daphne dies in childbirth.
Though sensing this will be her fate, Daphne had refused an abortion,
defying white prejudice and remaining faithful to her forbidden love.
After Daphne's death, Lady Manners reads Daphne's journal
addressed to her aunt posthumously (see Part 7). In the journals,
Daphne asks her aunt to provide for her child even if
"you can't bear to have it near you" and gives directions about what
to name the child (Part 7: pp. 376-377). Daphne
recounts key events in her life in Mayapore, 1942; then speaks of the “awful
weight on my mind about Ronald” [Merrick], like a “dark shadow, just on
the edge of my life” (391). She
suspects “things about Ronald that no one is prepared to discuss in front of
me,” that he has “hurt Hari [Kumar] in some special horrible way” (391).
She refers to her talk with Sister Ludmila [see Part Three], that
“Ronald Merrick was on Sister Ludmila’s conscience too” (391). ”Before I tell you what actually happened in the
Bibighar, I must say
something about Ronald, and . . . about Sister Ludmila” (391 & see what
follows).
1944, May: [Later in the Raj Quartet] Nigel Rowan interviews Hari Kumar in Kandipat Prison, where he has been locked up since 1942.
1947, Aug. [Later in the
Raj Quartet]
Guy Perron [who may be the unnamed Narrator] returns to India; the British officially withdraw from India,
the country is partitioned into two nations: predominantly Hindu India and
predominantly Muslim Pakistan, amid monumental human migrations and slaughter.
1964 & Notes on Narrative Method
An inquisitive “stranger” or “traveller” comes to Mayapore, India, with an interest in the [Daphne] Manners case of 1942—at a crisis in the history of British-Indian racially-charged relations, recalling the Sepoy Mutiny and the Amritar massacre of 1919. Author Paul Scott has stated that he is “Nearly,” but “not quite” this stranger-narrator. “Basically, this writer/traveller/stranger is a mechanism for achieving both detachment and involvement” (quoted in Moore 171). The unnamed Narrator's interest in Mayapore of 1942, has been aroused by his coming upon the unpublished memoir of Brigadier Reid [reproduced in Part 6: "Civil and Military: One: Military," pp. 273-319). In Mayapore, the stranger collects oral and written testimony, interviewing people-- witnesses who are still alive--about events and people of the past, in order to examine and understand the final phases of British / Indian history.
Interviews with Lili Chatterjee: See Part 2.
Interview #1 with " Sister
Ludmila" [AKA: Mrs. Ludmila Smith] (Part 3: pp. 121-137): Sister Ludmila is now blind and mostly
bedridden, allowed a room in what was formerly the Sanctuary (124).
She occasionally addresses the unnamed
Narrator directly: e.g. “It is not for this you have come”
(121). Mrs. Ludmila Smith speaks of
the name "Sister Ludmila" that the Indians called her, and the
nun-style habit she designed and wore in Mayapore, ca. 1942. She has had a close
relationship with God, who speaks directly to her (121-125).
Interview #2 with " Sister Ludmila" (Part 3: pp. 137-158): her interpretations of the character of Daphne Manners and her relationship with Hari Kumar (142-143, 153); her meeting with Daphne at the Sanctuary earlier on the evening of her rape, just after Daphne had met Edwina Crane at the Mayapore General Hospital (143-144); her recollections of retrieving Hari Kumar from the waste land and his arrest the next day by Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick, and her interpretation of the relationship between Kumar and Merrick (146-150); her last meeting with pregnant Daphne Manners before she leaves Mayapore (150-151); her insights into Hari Kumar's character (152) gained from the second occasion when she saw Hari drunk--when he talks of Colin Lindsay (152-153); the connection she sees between Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners (155-156); and she recounts the version of Daphne's rape that was adopted by the British Mayapore community (156-157), in contrast to the version remembered and retold by the Indian community (157-158).
Interview with Srinivasan at the Club and
on the car tour of Mayapore in a Studebaker afterwards: See Part 4.
When the unnamed Narrator asks, “And young Kumar? Where
is he now? Srinivasan shrugs. Dead perhaps” (Part 4: p. 197). As the group drives back, they pass the
Bibighar
in silence, “but the silence is commentary enough.
Bibighar. After a time
even the most tragic name acquires a kind of beauty” (198). Part IV ends with
unnamed Narrator's reflections on the thematic image of “the girl who ran
in the darkness” (198).
See Study Guides 1, 2 and 3 for Notes on Jewel in the Crown, Parts One - Seven.
At the end of Jewel in the Crown (Part 7, Appendix), the Stranger-narrator flies to Calcutta to review documents held by the Bishop Barnard Mission, including Miss Crane’s effects.
Notes on Scott's NARRATIVE METHOD:
This unnamed narrator functions as an impartial chronicler/historian, an observer-character. The “Interview Style,” reporting in detail conversations with informed witnesses, enables Scott to present numerous versions and perspectives of, for example, the Bibighar incident: ultimately we hear first-hand accounts from almost all the characters involved (even Daphne Manners through her letters), except Hari Kumar, who is lost, and Ronald Merrick, who is dead. . Piecing these accounts together, ideally an historian (and his reader) can reconstruct a truth (the truth?).
“The method of the narrator of the [Raj] Quartet is that of historical inquiry . . . . The concern is with what happened to those involved in the Manners case, its ripple effect on their subsequent lives, and its utility as a mirror of the long British-Indian affair” (Morgan 172). Paul Scott states that the characters and events of the Raj Quartet were imaginary, but that “[t]he framework was as historically accurate as I could make it” (quoted in Morgan 173).
Panoramic historical events and historical forces are humanized, particularized, telescoped, enacted in resurrecting individual (fictionalized but historically plausible) places, events, and characters—especially characters’ internal moral dramas and fateful choices. The disembodied narrative voice of Jewel in the Crown also speaks from inside the (imagined) viewpoints of characters long dead—consider the opening voice of Part I revealing Edwina Crane in indirect third-person point of view. The narrative voice, however, much it can recede into the background, mediates and colors our access to the story--and is therefore positioned to interpret it, even if such interpretation is subtle.
The story is not told in chronological order. In the process of confusing and disrupting linear time, returning again and again to the same key events from multiple perspectives, Scott presents a cyclical theory of human history that keeps folding and tracing outcomes back to their beginnings, and revealing the larger patterns of parallel and repetition dramatized more intimately in individual human lives and particular events. The narrative structure, based largely on participant-witnesses’ reminiscences about the past, unfolds the subject as if it were taking place in the present. At times the narrator and/or his informants disclose outcomes (e.g. Edwina Crane’s suicide) before we readers have learned how they came about.
But this achronological narrative of interviewees’ testimonies should not be condemned as purposeless or without structure. For one thing, the “Interview Style,” paralleling scholarly methods of reconstructing and writing history, serves to authenticate the stories.
In Part II,
interviewee Lili Chatterjee presents apparently random thoughts and
digressions, the focus of her talk shifting with associations, moving in and
out, toward and away from Edwina Crane and her niece Daphne Manners.
This narrative method, however, reveals that, in Lili’s mind, the lives
and fates of Edwina and Daphne are inseparable, intertwined—and thus in the
reader’s consciousness, too, should be thematically connected. [Lady Lili Chatterjee, widow of Sir Nello Chatterjee, lives in
MacGregor House and is a leader of Indian society in Mayapore in 1942 (Part 1:
p. 33).]
In Part III, interviewee Sister
Ludmila begins with apparently unrelated descriptions of her weekly trips to
the bank, but soon enough broaches the scene of Daphne Manners waiting for Hari
Kumar to meet her in the Sanctuary the night of August 9, 1942.
Amid her deceptively “free” associations and digressions, Sr. Ludmila
returns again and again the same key points in the past— her “free”
associations thematically and causally connect the fateful night of August 9 to
the earlier events stemming from finding Hari Kumar drunk in the wasteland.
By Part V when yet another account of Sister Ludmila finding Hari drunk
in the waste ground is presented, readers’ appreciation of its significance has
deepened fivefold, one might say.
["Sister
Ludmila" Smith
(roughly patterned after Mother Teresa) ran the Sanctuary, in Mayapore's
native town, ministering to the sick with kindness and compassion, and
providing Indians some
measure of dignity in death. Few
members of the white community in Mayapore sympathized with her work. It
was Indians who called her "Sister Ludmila."]
1984/5: FILM ADAPTATION
The 16-hour Granada television
adaptation Jewel in the Crown tells the interlocked stories of the Raj
Quartet in chronological order and achieves a fascinating dramatization by
focusing on key “characters, the tensions between them and their developing
situations. The historical context
is brilliantly conveyed by newsreel clips so patently pro-British that they
serve as a parodic commentary . . .” (Morgan 211). But it is well to
emphasize what is “largely lost in the process of adaptation”: “the texture of testimony,
its intimation of character, the doubts about the truth and reality of
observations” (Morgan 211)--all central to the experience of reading
first-hand Paul Scott’s Raj novels.
Of related interest: Brant, George W., ed. British
Television Drama in the 1980s. Cambridge, UK & New York:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.
[ORBIS - PN1992.65
.B682 1993. Includes Hugh Herbert on Jewel
in the Crown (Paul Scott - Ken Taylor): "The Literary Serial; or the
Art of Adaptation."]
WORKS CITED
Brann, Eva. "Tapestry with Images: Paul Scott's Raj Novels." [Critical Discussions.] Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 181-196.
Moore, Robin. Paul Scott's Raj. London: Heinemann, 1990. [ORBIS PR6069.C596 R3435 1990 ]
Parts and page numbers from the novel
refer to: Scott,
Paul. The Jewel in the Crown. [1966.]
Vol. 1 of the Raj Quartet. Rpt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
(REV.) URL of this webpage: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/drafttimeline.htm