[NARRATION: delivered in third person point of view, by disembodied voice of unnamed Narrator]

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).

"There are 200,000 words or more in The Jewel in the Crown.  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].  There are three characters who speak their recollections to a narrator who is really myself - Lili Chatterjee, whom Daphne Manners was staying with [Part Two]; Sister Ludmila, a now blind old woman who ran a refuge for the homeless and dying at the time of the riots [Part Three]; and Robin White, who was the Deputy Commissioner for the district [Part Five].  There is one statement in the form of a deposition taken from a young Indian arrested for subversive activities [Part Five], and there is an extract from the soldierly memoirs of Brigadier Reed whose job it was to control the riots when the civil authorities could no longer control them [Part Five].  There is a description by a narrator of an evening spent in the club twenty years after the events [p. 65 / p. 66] which once filled it with the chatter of the British colony [Part Four].  Finally there is the journal kept by poor Miss Manners [Part Seven] after Hari has been wrongfully arrested for the criminal assault on her, and imprisoned under the Defence of India rule as a political undesirable - a journal in which she records the truth of the events of that particular night that ended with her running along all those deserted, ill-lit roads" (Scott, "Method" 65-66).

[THEME: Recurring Image; connection suggested between the "girl running" (later identified as Daphne Manners) & Edwina Crane - Opening Paragraph:]
"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 and the idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss [Edwina] Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began” (3).

Paul Scott on the image of the girl running and his conception of Jewel in the Crown:

"Constructing a novel - telling a tale, for me at any rate - is not a business of thinking of a story, arranging it in a certain order and then finding images to fit it.  The images come first . . . . The situation, somehow, must be made to rise out of the image.
    "You need, to begin with, a strong central image that yields a strong situation, or series of situations" (Scott, "Method" 54).

  "My image came - as images always do, apparently by chance, unexpectedly - in the dark of a restless, sleepless night.  Vaguely one can trace the antecedents: the trauma of the Indian village experience [that Scott had in 1964], the desire to get away, to run, the knowledge of the dangers that exist when you attempt to cross bridges, the whole feeling of the British in India, and the feeling of India itself - a vast, flat territory, strangely forbidding, somehow incalculable, ugly, beautiful.  And there she was, my prime mystery, a girl, in the dark, running, exhausted, hurt in some way, yet strangely of good heart - tough, resilient, her face and figure a sense rather than an observed condition.  But she runs.
    "From what? To where?
    "If you turn to the first page of The Jewel in the Crown you will find this image conveyed as exactly as it was possible to convey it" (Scott, "Method" 60).

"Clearly the girl running and Miss Crane are not the same person. . . . Images do not have exact time schedules.  Names, locations, time schedules, plot references- these are what the images create.  In the original image are the seeds of all your novel.  See your image, feel it, work it out in all its complexity to the best of your ability, and then try to put it all on the page. There is a different kind of mystery here.  If you see [p. 60/p. 61] clearly.  I mean really see - if you feel strongly, I mean really feel, then however poor your mechanical ability, however sparse your technique it will come through.  Writing is not observation - it is feeling. You can observe accurately until kingdom come and transfer your observation into the acutest prose, and unless you feel what you observe it can still be as dead as a doornail.
    "As a creative writer you are not in the world to go round recording facts that everyone is perfectly capable of seeing or finding out for himself.  You are in it to convey your individual response to the world we collectively inhabit and to facts we collectively know or are capable of knowing.
    "The images are your response.  That it why I work from them, and from them alone.  If you don't know in your bones what I mean by an image, you are not a creative writer.
    "Well, again I go back, to the image of the girl running.  Once I got it, . . . I could treat it as a mine whose veins could be explored and exploited. . . .
    "The image of the girl running didn't peter out - the veins of possible exploration became intensely complex.  When you feel this happening you are at the heart of your mystery" (Scott, "Method" 60-61).

Paul Scott on first paragraph of Jewel in the Crown:
"Throwing the image at the reader.  But already you can see that another character MISS CRANE has been created and given some significance" (Scott, "Notes" 167). 

[THEME, Scott's Theory of History, & Foreshadowing:]
    "This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened. There are the action, the people, and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs" (3).

    "In the Bibighar gardens case there were several arrests and an investigation.  There was no trial in the judicial sense....In fact, such people say, the affair that began on the evening of August 9th, 1942, in Mayapore, ended with the spectacle of two nations in violent opposition, not for the first time nor as yet for the last because they were then still locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their two destinies" (3).

"This passage [i.e. the two opening paragraphs quoted above] suggests that an organizing key to The Raj Quartet is its sense of totality and complexity and hints at a connection between the rape and the relationship of England and India.  These two levels of meaning, the personal and the historical will be extended through the four novels" (Weinbaum 93).

Paul Scott on the British in India and "the moral continuum of human affairs":
    "India, to me, was the scene of a remarkable and far-reaching event.  I see it as the place where the British came to an end of themselves as they were.  It was, even more than England was, the scene of the victory of Liberal Humanism over dying paternal imperialism.
    "This was a fact of History - 1947 to be precise - but as Emerson said, All the Facts of History pre-exist in the mind as Laws.  And by the time the facts occur, the laws--that is to say the moral laws--which create the historical events, are already old and tired, conscious of their failings, their own built-in weaknesses and defects.
    "The special fascination that India has for me is the almost tragic atmosphere that I see as attaching to it then - and indeed still - as the mausoleum containing the remains of the last two great senses of public duty we had as a people.  I mean of course the sense of duty that was part and parcel of having an empire, and the sense of duty so many of us felt, that to get rid of it was the liberal human thing to do.
    "Getting rid of India involved the lives, then, of 400 million people.  They say 2 million of them died at each other's hands.  Returning to the scene in fiction isn't due to nostalgia, or to guilt.  I return to it because to me the death and internment of liberal humanism is still a living issue in the terms meant by my sort of novelist and my sort of reader.
    "By Liberal Humanism I mean, broadly, the human consciousness of human dignity that began with the Renaissance and came to an end in the form we knew it in the Second World War and its aftermath.  Our imperialism was as much an expression of it as our reforming zeal. . . . The dignity would be human dignity, and our notions of that have faded.  We're no longer certain of what a human being is.  Perhaps in our recognition of that fact is the seed of a new dignity being developed - The acts of future history exist now in our mind as laws.  On the first page of The Jewel in the Crown I spoke of what I call the moral continuum of human affairs.  Perhaps consciousness of its existence is also a kind of dignity.  I hope so.  Above all I hope that I've been able to portray it - in some small way - in the stories I've written about things that never happened, and yet are happening all the time"  (Scott, "Meet the Author" 48-49).

Shelley Reece on Paul Scott's theory of history:
In his letters, essays, and fiction, Scott gave prominence to Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "History" - particularly Emerson's statement that "'Man is explicable by no less than all his history'" (qtd. in Reece 9).  "Scott has Barbie Batchelor [in The Towers of Silence, vol. 3 of the Raj Quartet] discover this sentence in a book of Emerson's essays" and uses Batchelor's trunk of relics to symbolize the weight and continuity of "personal and universal" history each person must carry.  "In this way, each person is implicated in what Scott calls 'the moral drift of history': each person contributes to that history day-by-day in each action.  The background of history and the foreground of fiction are intertwined in an inseparable way for Scott. . . . Each civilian and soldier, English or Indian, contributes to the history of the raj.  The relationship between each person's work and life becomes paramount, for in that way, each human being in Scott's work contributes to that moral drift and Scott's history becomes part of the history it records.  If fiction can become an agent of humanity's moral imagination in a period of political flux, then possibly Scott's fiction is the closest a reader might come to engaging in moral dialogue during a time of uncertainty, that time in whi8ch Scott believed the English people have lived since 1945 . . ." (Reece 9-10). 

1942: "...the year the Japanese defeated the British in Burma [during World War II] and Mr. Gandhi began preaching sedition in India" (30 [Quit India resolution/movement]

Paul Scott on the historical situation in 1942 British India, the image of the girl running, & the character of Daphne Manners:
    "The last great confrontation between East and West in India was in 1942.  At the end of 1941, and the beginning of 1942, the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Burma had brought the war [World War II] right to India's doorstep.  No one could blame the British for dismissing as highly irrelevant the claims f the Indian nationalists for self-government.  No one could blame the Indians for thinking, 'well here we go again, the British ask us to co-operate and promise all kinds of things for when the war is won.  But what happened last time?   The Rowlatt Acts, the massacre in the Jillianwallah Bagh.  So why should we believe that after this war things will be any different?'  There was, too, in the minds of many of Gandhi's followers, this rather curious and to us naive idea that [p. 62 / p. 63] if the British left India the Japanese wouldn't invade her.  Were they not all orientals?  Men like Nehru saw the absurdity of this reasoning, but such men were unable to stand against the wave of deep anti-British feeling which swept India in 1942.
    "In March of that year Stafford Cripps went out to discuss the situation with Indian leaders.  The Cripps Mission was bound to fail.  He had nothing to offer except a plan for measure of self-government after the way.  The plan was thrown out," and the British tightened control of war-time India (Scott, "Method" 62-63).  In response, the Gandhi-led Indian Congress declared "war on the British - non-violent war - an ultimatum that unless self-government was granted immediately the Congress would lead the nation in a mass civil disobedience that would make India untenable as a military base.  The railways would stop, the docks would close, the war factories would come to a standstill. That was the resolution.  On 8 august the All India Congress Committee adopted the resolution in Bombay.  And at four a.m. on the morning of 9 August the British began to arrest every leading Congressman in the country - quietly, without fuss.  They just locked them all up in the belief that if the leaders were in jail the people would continue docile.  They didn't.  On 10 August, almost throughout the whole country, the people rose in an attempt to put into operation the plans their now jailed leaders had intended.  It was a massive, dangerous enterprise, and it was in effect the last confrontation in British-Indian history.  Among the British colony there was a belief that something on the lines of a new Indian Mutiny was about to take place.  It was stamped out with . . . determination . . . . Well, against such a background, yes, there might be a girl, a white girl, running in the darkness.  I had my time and place and circumstance. I had bombarded my image with these historical facts, and they had stuck.
    "What I still did not know exactly was why she was running, and it seemed likely that she had been attacked, hurt in some way. But there was, more so than ever, something about this girl that had not been changed by a bitter experience.  She had a great capacity for love, a quality of [p. 63 / p. 64] stubbornness that came through in the way she kept going, in spite of physical exhaustion.  She would not be affected by hysteria. She represented something admirable in the human spirit"  (Scott, "Method" 62-64).

[NARRATION represents various points of view  - e.g.:]  British white “Mayapore had to admit . . . (3)

Miss Crane takes down Gandhi's picture, Indian ladies stop coming to tea on Tuesdays.

Paul Scott on the character of Edwina Crane, title allusion to Crane's picture The Jewel in her Crown, Crane's connection to Daphne Manners, the riots of August 1942, & the narrative structure:
Miss Crane "didn't come alive for me until I first saw her performing an unexplained act I might regard as typical.  I saw her taking down from the wall of her bungalow a portrait of her old hero, Mr Gandhi.  That would have been about April 1942.  Well, there she was, a half-baked elderly English liberal making a half-baked gesture.  And the image of the picture being removed created another of a picture that stayed up - an old engraving showing Queen Victoria receiving tribute from representatives of her Indian empire.  The title of the picture was The Jewel in her Crown.  The whole history of my missionary was suddenly revealed by her possession of these pictures, her history, and her attitudes, her good intentions, her liberal instincts, her failure emotionally to cross the bridge between East and West.  The book suddenly could begin behind the image of the girl who had crossed the bridge between East and West.  As for the girl, so for Miss Crane, my missionary, the climax comes at the outset of the riots in August 1942.  Hearing that the riots have broken out she returns the 75 miles from an outlying school she's responsible for, accompanied by an Indian teacher who insists on protecting her.  They are stopped at a lonely spot by a gang of hooligans.  The Indian is dragged from the car and murdered.  Miss [p. 64 / p. 65] Crane is knocked into a ditch.  when she recovers consciousness her little car is burnt out, the rioters have gone, Mr Chaudhuri is lying dead in the road.  it is beginning to rain.  Hurt, frightened, but courageous, Miss Crane begins to walk to find help, thinking, 'There's nothing I can do.'  Walk, you see, not run.  And it is daylight, not dark.  But suddenly she knows there is something she can do, even though it is too late.  She walks back to Mr. Chaudhuri, sits on the roadside and holds his hand - one human being making contact with another.  One is black, one is white.  One is dead, the other alive.  It is negative, useless, stupid, but - in its context, right - the novel is away.  Going in through the back of the original image [of a girl running] has begun to unlock its mysteries, and in this particularly case . . . by leading up to the climax of the riots it has suggested that the form the novel will take is that of approach, through different eyes, through different histories, from different vantage points of time - to a central point of reference, which is exemplified by the original image - the action of that image and the implicit emotional content of that image"  (Scott, "Method" 64-65).

[NARRATION: Part One frequently adopts Free Indirect Narration, in third person point of view,  with Edwina Crane as the center of consciousness]

Miss Crane begins entertaining at tea "young English soldiers" (4) the British Other Rank (5). She is particularly fond of Clancy (6).

[Exposition of EDWINA CRANE's History:]  Comes out to India with Nesbitt-Smiths (7-10); unrequited love for Lieutenant Orme (9-10); visits native town & temple once, fear of India’s “open spaces” (11), attitude toward god/God (11-12), takes a teaching position in the Church of England mission schools (12-14), meets the Eurasian teacher Miss Williams (15-17). 

[THEME:] “And it came to Miss Crane then that the only excuse she or anyone of her kind had to be there [in India] . . . was if they sat there conscious of a duty to promote the cause of human dignity and happiness” (17).
[Title allusion:] presentation of painting for Crane’s “courage” first introduced p.18;
1914 incident in Muzzafirabad described (18-19) & the painting of “The Jewel in Her Crown” (19-20, 22, 23, 24; see also p. 63). 
Miss Crane asks for transfer, is promoted and sent to Ranpur, accompanied by young Indian servant Joseph (22)

[NARRATION] Return to Clancy & Barrett - Miss Crane’s young soldiers (23-26)

[Exposition] Miss Crane’s life & current position in Mayapore (26-30); Joseph now “old” (32)
[She is superintendent of the Church of England mission schools in Mayapore District, p. 36, with three schools under her charge, including the one in Dibrapur, 75 miles from Mayapore, p. 28]

British views of Miss Crane (30-33) - [British class and race prejudices unfold]
DC (civil Deputy Commissioner) Robin White & his wife Mrs. [Connie] White (31)

Summer 1942:  Ronald Merrick, District Superintendent of Police (33) & Lady Chatterjee are introduced—from Edwina Crane’s perspective (33-35).

Miss Crane’s loneliness—friendless since the death of Miss Mary de Silva, teacher in Dibrapur (35).

[NARRATION] Return to the taking down of Gandhi’s picture, why she now chooses to entertain the young soldiers, why she takes down Gandhi’s picture, & the other picture ["Jewel in Her Crown"] which still hangs on her wall (35-38).

August 1942, First Week p. 38

[Exposition:]  Mission school in Dibrapur described – current school master Mr. Chaudhuri, who had replaced former teacher Miss Mary de Silva after her death; (38-43)

August 8, 1942, Morning p. 43
Miss Crane sets out in her Ford for weekly 75-mile journey to school in Dibrapur despite rumors of dangerous unrest, [after Congress vote to adopt Gandhi’s Quit India resolution: see p. 43, 46.]

August 8, 1942, Night
Miss Crane feels it is a “special night, one of crisis,” and longs to break through Mr. Chaudhuri’s reserve and really talk (45-46).

August 9, 1942, Morning:  Telephone line cut, Mr. Chaudhuri fears for Miss Crane’s safety because she is white, they collect the children to take them to safety back to their village of Kotali (46-49).  Mr. Chaudhuri urges Miss Crane to stay in Kotali, where “everyone is your friend because of the children.  It is dangerous to drive to Mayapore” with bad people on the road (51).  But Miss Crane refuses to stay (51-52) [she has taken charge with the authority of British Raj in her voice: see p. 49]  At Tanpur, Mr. Chaudhuri again urges her to stop:  “You are mad.  And I am mad to let you go, let alone go with you.  All I ask is that if we see a crowd of people on the road, you put your foot hard on the accelerator” (55).  But this she cannot do when they do meet such a mob on the road shouting “Quit India! Quit India!” (56-57).  They kill Mr. Chaudhuri as a “traitor” and attack Miss Crane (57-59).  She revives, discovers Mr. Chaudhuri’s body, and despairs:  “’There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing’” (59); then decides “But there is,” takes his lifeless hand.  “’It’s taken me a long time, she said, meaning not only Mr. Chaudhuri.  ‘I’m sorry it was too late.’” (59). 

[THEME - RECURRING IMAGE:] Miss Crane is found “sitting in the pouring rain by the roadside holding the hand of a dead Indian” (59-60).
This incident signals the beginning of serious troubles in Mayapore that take until the end of August to “put down” (60).

[NARRATION:]  “Everyone in Mayapore at that time would have a different story to tell, although there were stories of which each individual had common knowledge.  There was, to begin with, the story of Miss Crane, although that was almost immediately lost sight of following the rape of the English girl in the Bibighar gardens on the night of August the 9^th, at an hour when Miss Crane was lying in the first delirium of pneumonia in a bed at the Mayapore General Hospital” (60)  
[THEME:] Two key incidents linked: Miss Crane & Daphne Manners, and like Daphne,] Miss Crane will “find it impossible to identify any of the men arrested that day” as her assailants.  “People wonder…whether she is being obstinate, overzealous in the business of being fair at all costs to the bloody blacks” (60).
     “But the Bibighar gardens affair was not lost sight of.  It seemed to the European population to be the key to the whole situation they presently found themselves in . . . “ (60).  
[NARRATION] Differing points of view on what ensues are summarized (60-61).

September 1942:  Miss Crane released from hospital and returns home. (61).

Late September 1942:  Miss Crane again opens her home to barracks soldiers  for Tuesday afternoon tea (61)

[NARRATION] The various rumors that Miss Crane hears (or tries not to hear) of events that followed the “Bibighar gardens affair” are related (61-62).  
[THEME: RETURN TO OPENING]  In Miss Crane’s view, there is something “compulsive” in the centuries-old association between Britain and India, “a kind of love with hate on the obverse side, as in a coin,” though she is too tired and “weighed down by the sheer pressure of the climate and the late and the hordes of brown faces and the sprinkling of stiff-lipped white ones” to puzzle it all out (62).

[THEME:] Edwina Crane wishes that she had spoken of the “promise” to young soldiers like Clancy who do not understand that history:   “For years we have been promising and for years finding means of putting the fulfillment of the promise off until the promise stopped looking like a promise and started looking only like a sinister prevarication, even to me, let alone to Indians who think and feel and know the same as me.  And the tragedy is that between us there is this little matter of the colour of the skin, which gets in the way of our seeing through each other’s failings and seeing into each other’s hearts.”  (63).   But when Clancy and the others come, they wound old Joseph’s pride and self-respect [by treating him as if he were invisible?], and Miss Crane takes down “the picture of the old Queen” ["The Jewel in Her Crown"] and locks it away (63).

Reece, Shelley C.  Introduction. My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75.  By Paul Scott.  London: Heinemann, 1986.  1-10.

Scott, Paul.  The Jewel in the Crown. [First published 1966.] The Raj Quartet  Vol. 1.  Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998.  [Page numbers given above, unless indicated otherwise, refer to this edition of Jewel in the Crown.]

Scott, Paul.  "Meet the Author: Manchester (1967)."  My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75.  Ed. Shelley C. Reece.  London: Heinemann, 1986.  39-49.

Scott, Paul.   "Method: The Mystery and the Mechanics (1967)."   My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75.  Ed. Shelley C. Reece.  London: Heinemann, 1986.  51-69. 

Scott, Paul.  "Notes for Talk and Reading at Stamford Grammar School (1975)."  My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75.  Ed. Shelley C. Reece.  London: Heinemann, 1986.  165-170.

Weinbaum, Francine S.  Paul Scott: A Critical Study.  Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992.