Paul
Scott
(1920
- 1978)
&
Jewel in the Crown (1966)
Vol. 1 of the Raj Quartet. Rpt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
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Short Cuts:
1.
SYNOPSES
of the 4 novels in the Raj Quartet & Staying On
2. Historical Fact vs. Historical Fiction
3. RESOURCES
for FURTHER STUDY: WWW Links & Print Sources
4. STUDY GUIDES for Jewel in the Crown
My thanks to Dr. John Lennard for
his corrections, suggestions, and recommended sources;
and to Prof. Eva Braun for sharing her articles on the Raj Quartet. These
additional resources
will be incorporated in Spring 2003. (-C.A. Sept., 2002).
Revised URL: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/scott.htm
1. SYNOPSES
of the 4 novels in Scott's Raj Quartet
& of his 5th novel Staying On
The four novels of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet present mostly imaginary characters in mostly real places against the backdrop of actual historical events. While each novel (arguably) stands alone, the four novels taken together are "thick with connected people and interwoven events," transpiring in different places--fictional but realistic "places like Pankot and Mirat" and "really real places like New Delhi and Bombay" (Brann 183, 185). An unnamed narrator (variously referred to as the "traveler" or "stranger") "has objective oversight" of various characters' "retellings that scramble time and multiply perspectival accounts" (Brann 185). Eva Brann likens the structure of the Raj Quartet to the fractal, a concept from mathematics and physics: "A fractal is a geometric pattern whose smaller parts . . . mirror the whole, so that the large picture descends into all its detail, while each part repeats the whole on an ever-increasing scale. Thus the 'imperial embrace' of England and India recurs in the strained intercourse between Mayapore's British cantonment and Indian native quarter, and again in Daphne [Manners]'s and Hari [Kumar]'s impediment-ridden love, and, at its basest, reappears in [Ronald] Merrick's attempt at an intimate domination of his prisoner [Hari Kumar]. These configurations in the Jewel [in the Crown] repeat themselves in the subsequent novels [of the Raj Quartet], the historical situation and the people reflecting each other . . ." (185). Eva Brann maintains that the "Raj novels are among the greatest prose fictions of this and of the nineteenth century" known for its "many fine realistic novels" (187).
The 15-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 . . .” (Moore 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” (Moore 211) central to the experience of reading Paul Scott’s novels.
See The Making of The Jewel in the Crown
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htm
Vol. 1: Jewel in the Crown (1966)
focuses on "an interracial love affair between Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar [AKA: Harry Coomer], and the repercussions of the rape of Daphne in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore [fictional city in India] on August 9, 1942. It is a moment when the [British] Raj feels (once again) threatened by the disturbances consequent on Gandhi's 'Quit India' campaign. Hari Kumar is arrested . . . and interrogated by a personage who will haunt the [Raj] Quartet, District Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick. The 'imperial embrace' in which Britain and India are locked has become personal" (Brann 182).Vol. 2: The Day of the Scorpion (1968): "In
this novel an old Raj family comes newly on the scene, the Laytons of Pankot, an imaginary hill station [in India]. Now an army captain, [Ronald] Merrick, a self-made man of the lower middle class, begins to insinuate himself subtly and fatally into the [Layton] family. We learn in a searing session with the incarcerated Hari [Kumar] what [the Laytons] do not know, that Merrick has tortured and molested him. Susan, the younger Layton sister, driven by a sense of her own nothingness, marries one Teddie Bingham, a colorless and conventional officer in the prestigious Pankot Rifles. Merrick, though he loses . . . [his left arm above the elbow] in trying, unsuccessfully, to save Teddie's life, is indirectly the cause of Teddie's death in the jungle. Sarah Layton, the older sister, comes to the fore as the morally fine-tuned mainstay of the family" (Brann 182).Vol. 3: The Towers of Silence (1971) "takes
its name from the Parsee towers where the bodies of the dead are left to be picked clean by vultures. . . . These towers are in Ranpur, [India,] where Barbie Batchelor is confined to a sanitarium in her final madness. This torrentially loquacious, inwardly silent, awkwardly illumined old missionary is the principal figure of the third book. She is locked in grotesque and unequal battle with the local Anglo-Indian society which is growing brittle under the firestorm of troubles, the absence of its men [fighting in World War II], the danger of Japanese invasion [of India], the indifference of the home island [England], and above all the withdrawal of the spirit of the 'time-expired' Raj they are doomed always to represent. At the end of the book, Barbie and [Ronald] Merrick meet, and Barbie goes mad" (Brann 182-183). Barbie dies in August 1945, as the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.Vol. 4: A Division of the Spoils (1975) derives
its title from Isaiah 53.12 and Proverbs 16. 18-19. "A Division is by far the longest book because in it, as the Raj winds down, all the pending affairs, personal and political, are wound up. It recounts in personal terms the humbling and hasty decamping of the British: the precipitant demission of power to a country fiercely bent on division; the travails of an honorable Muslim Congressman, Mohammed Ali Kasim, and his sons, one of whom has deserted to the Berlin-directed Indian National Army; the quandary of the Nawab of the small fictive princely state of Mirat, left in the lurch by the lapse of British Paramountcy; the suicide of a dysentery-debilitated and maladapted British officer; the prowling of the haunted [Ronald] Merrick . . . . The new man on the scene is Sergeant [Guy] Perron, an alumnus of a posh public school called Chillingborough [which Hari Kumar--as Harry Coomer--also attended when he lived in England] . . . . it was he who returned in 1945 . . . to be an observer of India on the eve of Independence; this assignment soon turns into a personal inquiry into the truth behind the hushed-up story of Lieutenant-Colonel [Ronald] Merrick's death in Mirat" (Brann 183). The tragic consequences of India-Pakistan Partition are dramatized in a horrific train massacre.Post-Raj Quartet: Staying On (1978), featuring "Tusker" and Lucy Smalley (minor characters in the Raj Quartet), won the prestigious Booker Prize. This "melancholy comedy . . . . takes place exactly a quarter century after Independence and the end of A Division [of the Spoils]" as "both a complement and a sort of comic culmination. Raj arrogance has now been replaced with Indian corruption in the shape of Mrs. Bhoolaboy, the man-mountain of peccancy, manager-proprietor of the old Smith's Hotel in Pankot" (Brann 186). The Smalleys, "unpromising nobodies" in the Raj Quartet, "'stay on,' hang on, in Pankot and as their circumstances decline, they themselves gain in human poignancy. "The afterlife of the Laytons," including Guy Perron and Sarah Layton, is also told (Brann 186).
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.
2
. HISTORICAL FACT VS. FICTION in Jewel in the CrownPaul Scott on History vs. Fiction:
"On the face of it, The Jewel in the Crown is about an English girl called Daphne Manners who falls in love with an Anglicized Indian called Hari Kumar. In the opening stages of the Indian rebellion of 1942, Miss Manners is criminally assaulted by a gang of hooligans. The district superintendent of police [Ronald Merrick] promptly arrests Hari Kumar and five other boys of a similar type whom he finds drinking illicit liquor in a hut not far from the scene of the crime. They are, as a matter of fact, innocent, and the Indians are convinced of that. Rumours of their torture and defilement add fuel to the fire of the riots that bring the Indian population and the British raj into a violent confrontation. These riots are widespread throughout the country. Their cause is political.
"Here is a blend of fact and fiction. The riots are real. The historical and political scene are factual. The dramatic situation of the criminal [p. 55 / p. 56] assault, the arrests, the treatment of the prisoners, is imaginary. But it is based very broadly on fact. [Cora's emphasis added.]
"In 1919 in Amritsar, at the onset of some earlier troubles, in the Punjab, an Englishwoman, a Mission School Superintendent, was dragged off her bicycle by a gang of hooligans, and beaten up. Six men were arrested at random. The lane in which the assault took place was sealed off by orders of one Brigadier-General Dyer, a triangle was erected in the lane and the six men who had been arrested were brought there from jail, and whipped, for what was called an infringement of prison regulations. Thereafter, any Indian who lived in the lane was made to crawl on his hands and knees along it to get to his front door. Presently there occurred the affair of the shooting by the Gurkha troops, led by General Dyer, of a crowd of unarmed Indian civilians in an enclosed space called the Jallianwallah Bagh. The crowd had collected there in defiance of Dyer's orders prohibiting public meetings. They were not, however, warned to disperse but simply fired on. Women and children were among those killed. There was no way out of Jallianwallah Bagh except over the walls. The troops were blocking the only exit.
"This revolting episode has, as you may imagine, never been forgotten by India. The riots in the Punjab in 1919 were sparked off by the passing of what was called the Rowlatt Acts - a measure taken by the British to extend into peacetime certain wartime measures taken to protect the realm. They included the right to imprison without trial. It as an extraordinary thing to do, considering the aid given the British by Indians of all kinds during the Great War [i.e. World War I]. In 1917, Dominion status for Indian had been formally declared by the British as their intention. It seemed like a reward for Indian co-operation during the war effort [World War I]. At this period, Mr Gandhi was urging young Indians in London to support the war effort. The [Indian] Congress Party was lined up in co-operation too. But the behaviour of the British Government after the war, in taking these further repressive measures, which the Indians saw as a crude ruse to prohibit free speech, alienated Gandhi, the Congress Party, and Indians in general. Hence the riots of the Punjab [of 1919]. Hence General Dyer and Jallianwallah Bagh.
"At the time, he British in India hailed Dyer as a saviour, a man who had nipped the revolution in the bud with a military version of gun-boat diplomacy. At home [in the United Kingdom], however - when all was said and done, India was ruled by us, over here, through the House of Commons - we were alarmed at this mid-Victorian attitude persisting on into the post [p. 56 / p. 57] Great-War decade. Dyer was eventually had up on the carpet, and, quite properly, retired. He was ill from a disease of the brain which later killed him. The memsahibs of India collected L 26,000 to help keep the wolf from the old general's door. Here we have an interesting human and political situation. History is often made by ill people. But mostly the story illustrates the fact that human action is subject to the pressures exerted by the collective conscience. It is this collective conscience that gives history its forward impetus, what I call its [history's] moral drift.
"Now all these things were in my mind before I began to formulate the images that go to make up the work I called The Jewel in the Crown. . . . fictional images are a combination of the writer's experience, imagination, knowledge and creative impulse. Those things I have just outlined come under the heading of knowledge. By knowledge I don't just mean the assimilation of facts, but that assimilation plus one's attitude to them. The facts I have outlined exist in a state of reality. They happened. I interpret them one way, you may interpret them in another way. You knowledge, as a writer, therefore, is probably quite different from mine. But my knowledge is part of my tone of voice. I must be aware of this. I must be constantly on the alert for the weaknesses in my interpretation of facts, which means I must try to see things - in this case, from Dyer's point of view - from the point of view of the ladies who collected L 26,000, and from the point of the view of the unfortunate men and women and children whose sufferings roused them emotionally, perhaps, to take an intensely narrow and persoanl view which in urn led them to take unjust or unworthy actions, themselves. And when I've done all that, I must still come out with a firm opinion. Northing is worse for a novel than for the novelist to see all sides of a question and fail to support one. You must commit yourself. Submit yourself to an inquisition, but, at its close, commit yourself. Stick your neck out. Your novel will then say something" (Scott, "Method" 55-57).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).
Criticism "Defence of India" War-time Law
"The Raj Quartet embodies a criticism of the repressive Defense of India law, which could imprison on suspicion of sedition, and takes as its historical starting point the arrest of Congress Party leade4rs on August 9, 1942, for voting support of Mohandas Gandhi's exhortation to the British, in the midst of war with Japan to 'Quit India, and leave her to God or to anarchy.' The rioting which followed the arrests leads in The jewel in the Crown to the roadside attack on the devoted Edwina Crane, supervisor of Protestant schools in the Mayapore district, the murder of her companion, Mr. Chaudhuri, resident teacher at the school in Dibrapur, and the gang rape of Daphne Manners, the unconventional English niece of Lady Ethel Manners, in the Bibighar Gardens immediately after she and Hari Kumar (former Harry Coomer), an English public-school-bred Indian, have made love. Hari is arrested as a suspect, and although Daphne refuses to cooperate with the authorities, the Defense of India laws provide District Superintendent of Polic Ronald Merrick with a handy device for incarcerating indefinitely his rival for her affection" (Weinbaum 90). This law's injustice is dramatized again in The Day of the Scorpion (vol. 2 of the Raj Quartet), when "the arrest and imprisonment of Congress Party leader Mohammed Ali Kasim, a man of uncompromising principles who favors Indian independence," is depicted (Weinbaum 90).Works Cited
Reece, Shelley C. Introduction. My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75. By Paul Scott. London: Heinemann, 1986. 1-10.
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.
Weinbaum, Francine S. Paul Scott: A Critical Study. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992.
3. RESOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
WWW Links
Masterpiece Theatre (PBS Online): The Jewel in the Crown
Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet; 14 episodes originally broadcast in 1983 (Granada Television, 1984).
"Episode 1: The Jewel in the Crown" (introduced by Alistair Cooke).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/76/76.htmlEditorial Reviews of The Jewel in the Crown (v. 1 of the Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott)
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/
Search: Books; Keywords: Paul Scott, Jewel in the CrownIndia Timeline 3: The British Raj (late 17th - early 20th c.)
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/IndiaTML/indiatml3.htm
India Timeline 4: Independence of India & Pakistan (20th c) & India Timeline Sources
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/IndiaTML/indiatml4.htm
part of Cora Agatucci's HUM 210 Asian Timelines of Literary & Cultural History
Table of Contents: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/asianTML.htmPrint & Database Sources
Ackerman, Karl. Rev. of Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet, by Hilary Spurling. Smithsonian 23.11 (Feb. 1993): 133 (2pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article No. 9302020222. [COCC Library: Full Text]
Brandt, George W. "The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott - Ken Taylor): The Literary Serial; or the Art of Adaptation." British Television Drama in the 1980s. Ed. George W. Brandt. Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. 196-213. [ORBIS - PN1992.65 .B682 1993 ]
Brann, Eva. "Tapestry with Images: Paul Scott's Raj Novels." [Critical Discussions.] Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 181-196.
Childs, Peter. Paul Scott's Raj Quartet: History and Division. ELS Monograph Series No. 77. Victoria, B.C., Canada: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1998. [ORBIS PR6069.C596 R343 1998 ]
Fisher, Marlene. Rev. of Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet, by Hilary Spurling. World Literature in Review 65.4 (Autumn 1991): 713 (2pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article No. 9610180404. [COCC Library: Full Text]
Gorra, Michael Edward. After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997. [ORBIS PR888.I6 G67 1997]
---. "Writing On." Rev. of Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet, by Hilary Spurling. New Republic 20 May 1991: 47(4pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article No. 9105202860. [COCC Library: Full Text]
Liebregts, P. T. M. G. "'Mingling on the Lawn': The Impossibility of Contact in the Work of Paul Scott." [Conference: Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures, Eds. C. C. Barfoot and T. D'haen; Oct 1990, Leiden, The Netherlands.] DQR Studies in Literature 11 (1993): 35-50. OCLC FirstSearch 1992-2001, PapersFirst CN002924948.
Mahoney, Blair. Rev. of The Raj Quartet: The Jewel in the Crown, by Paul Scott. Contemporary South Asia 8.2 (July 1999): 261 (2pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite Article No. 2642347. [COCC Library: Full Text]
The Making of The Jewel in the Crown: The Masterpiece Theatre Series based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Granada Television. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. [ORBIS PN1992.77.J38M35 1984]
See also ENGL 339 Online Course Pack: The Making of The Jewel in the Crown
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htmMoore, Robin. Paul Scott's Raj. London: Heinemann, 1990. [ORBIS PR6069.C596 R3435 1990 ]
"The world, to a large extent, learns its history of the [British] Raj [in India] from the works of Paul Scott. It is necessary [therefore] to discover his sources and examine the conclusions that he drew from them" (Moore 6).
Parini, Jay, ed. World Writers in English. New York: Scribners (forthcoming in 2003? - check again!)
Paterson, Martin. Imperialism, Insularity and Identity: The Novels of Paul Scott. Ph.D. Thesis: Univ. of York, U.K., 1993. [ ORBIS ]
Rao, K[anatur]. Bhaskara. Paul Scott. Twayne's English Author Series No. 285. Boston: Twayne-G. K. Hall, 1980. [ORBIS PR 6069 .C596 Z85 ]
Rubin, David. After the Raj: British Novels of India Since 1947. Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1986.
Scanlon, Margaret. Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990. [ PR888 .H5 S3 1990 ]
Scott, Paul. My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75. Ed. Shelley C. Reece. London: Heinemann, 1986. [ORBIS PR6069.C596 A16 1986 ]
[Contents essentially the same as given below for On Writing and the Novel]
---. On Writing and the Novel: Essays. Ed. Shelley C. Reece. New York: Morrow, 1987. [ ORBIS PR6069.C596Z466 1987 ]
[Content Description: "Imagination in the novel -- Aspects of writing -- Meet the author : Manchester -- Method : the mystery and the mechanics -- The architecture of the arts : the novel -- Enoch Sahib : a slight case of cultural shock -- The Yorkshire post fiction award -- After Marabar : Britain and India, a post-Forsterian view -- Literature and the social conscience : the novel -- A writer takes stock -- Notes for talk and reading at Stamford Grammar School."]
Spurling, Hillary. Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet. London: Hutchinson, 1990; New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. COCC Library PR6069.C596 Z857 1991 or PR6069.C596Z ]
---. "Paul Scott: Novelist and Historian." Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain. Ed. William Roger Louis. London: I. B. Tauris; and Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1995. 25-39. [ORBIS DA 16 .A3 1995]
Strobl, Gerwin. The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Interpretation in the Anglo-Indian Novel: The Raj Revisited. Salzburg English & American Studies, V. 3. Lewiston, NY: Lampeter, Mellen, 1995. [ORBIS PR830.I6 S8 1995]
Swindon, Patrick. Paul Scott. Writers & Their Work, No. 278. Windsor, Berkshire: Profile Books, 1982. [ORBIS PR6069.C596Z858 ]
---. Paul Scott: Images of India. New York: St. Martin's, 1980. [ORBIS PR6069.C596 Z86 1980]
Tedesco, Janis, and Janet Popham. Introduction to the Raj Quartet. Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1985. [ORBIS PR6069.C596R3437 1985]
Weinbaum, Francine S. Paul Scott: A Critical Study. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992. [ORBIS PR6069.C596 Z94 1992 ]
4. STUDY GUIDES for Jewel in the Crown
Paul Scott & Jewel in the Crown
URL of this webpage: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/scott.htmPart One: "Miss Crane" - online Jewel Study Guide 1:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg1.htmPart Two: "The MacGregor House" - online Jewel Study Guide 2:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg2.htmPart Three: "Sister Ludmila" - online Jewel Study Guide 3:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg3.htmPart Four: "An Evening at the Club" - online Jewel Study Guide 4:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg4.htmPart Five: "Young Kumar" - online Jewel Study Guide 5:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg5.htmPart Six: "Civil and Military" - online Jewel Study Guide 6:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg6.htmPart Seven: "The Bibighar Gardens" - online Jewel Study Guide 7:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/JCsg7.htmDRAFT timeline: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/ScottPaul/scott/drafttimeline.htm
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© 1997-2007, Cora Agatucci, Professor of English
Humanities Department, Central Oregon
Community College