THE FOLIO SOCIETY

The definitive literary portrait of the final years of British India

India, August 1942. A young British woman, Daphne Manners, is raped in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore. The investigation is led by Ronald Merrick, an unscrupulous officer whose distaste for the Indian population is matched only by his disdain for the British governing class. With the Japanese threatening invasion and Gandhi demanding independence, British rule has never seemed more precarious, and the tensions that explode at Mayapore reflect the seething political turmoil of India itself. One of the great achievements of 20th-century fiction, ‘The Raj Quartet’ is published in a stunning new Folio edition, available now at a special saving.

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began...

The Jewel in the Crown was originally published over 40 years ago. Through the following decade, Paul Scott completed his tetralogy with A Division of the Spoils, published in 1975, and since then ‘The Raj Quartet’ has come to be recognised as the most powerful and evocative portrait of a tumultuous chapter in British and Indian history. A celebrated version of ‘The Raj Quartet’ was adapted for British television in 1984 under the title The Jewel in the Crown. This award-winning 14-part series is considered to be one of the greatest dramatisations for television, yet even such a celebrated adaptation can only hint at the complexity and depth of characterisation in Scott’s books. This new Folio edition of ‘The Raj Quartet’, beautifully illustrated by Finn Campbell-Notman, is a fitting tribute to one of the most celebrated works of post-war British fiction.

Paul Scott

Born in North London in 1920, Paul Scott was stationed in India and Malaya from1943 to 1946, roughly the period covered by ‘The Raj Quartet’. His first novel, Johnny Sahib, was published in 1952. He wrote ‘The Raj Quartet’ mostly in isolation, conjuring up his extraordinary vision of India from his office in an upstairs room of his London home. A follow-up novel, Staying On, which includes references to several characters from the ‘Quartet’, won the 1977 Booker Prize. Paul Scott died in 1978.

Finn Campbell-Notman

Currently based in Barcelona, British-born award-winning artist Finn Campbell-Notman has previously produced illustrations for Folio Society editions of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Remains of the Day, the latter winning particular praise from author Kazuo Ishiguro. 

A peerless study of human relationships and racial conflict

‘The Raj Quartet’, written between 1965 and 1975, explores the final years of British rule in India, from Ghandi’s ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942 to independence and partition in 1947. From the opening volume, The Jewel in the Crown, where the fates of two individuals mirror the chaos and tragedy of the dying days of the Raj, the compelling narrative and rich sense of atmosphere draw a brilliant portrait of the seismic shifts in the political, racial and social landscapes of the period. Scott peoples his epic with a fascinating cast of characters and it is they, the first-hand witnesses and casualties of history, that most hold our attention. At the outset we meet elderly, liberal-minded missionary Edwina Crane, who has lost faith in both the empire and in Gandhi, with devastating consequences; and Daphne Manners, standing by her British educated lover, Hari Kumar, when he is accused of her rape. At the other end of the moral compass is Ronald Merrick, Mayapore’s Superintendant of Police, who persecutes Kumar with a determination that borders on obsession. Such characters illustrate Scott’s assertion that here were two nations, Britain and India, ‘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.’

As the narrative rolls on, so the focus shifts to the wealthy Layton family and Merrick’s gradual insinuation into their ranks. Daughters Sarah and Susan, and Barbie Batchelor, the gentle missionary who now acts as companion to the matriarch of the family, are left behind in the hill station of Pankot as the war nears its end. These female representatives of empire suddenly find themselves bereft of the old social certainties. Merrick is one of the few figures of masculine authority left and his prejudices, ambitions and social inadequacies as a ‘grammar school boy’ in a class-ridden society prove the catalyst for many subsequent events. Scott’s epic closes with A Division of the Spoils, where Sergeant Guy Perron, once a public school classmate of Hari, is enlisted as Merrick’s aide de camp and embarks on a relationship with Sarah Layton. While the fates of those around him are played out, Perron bears witness to the violence and bloodshed that accompany Britain’s hasty retreat from Indian shores.

Brilliant prose with echoes of Tolstoy and Forster

Scott himself acknowledged that in ‘The Raj Quartet’ he was revisiting the territory explored by E. M. Forster in A Passage to India, but Scott’s magnum opus has even been described as an Anglo-Indian War and Peace thanks to its epic sweep and complex narrative. A masterpiece that stands apart as one of the greatest literary explorations of the end of the British Empire, ‘The Raj Quartet’ addresses far more than a fading imperial dream, or even the impossibility of achieving what Daphne’s great-aunt memorably calls a ‘civilised divorce’ between ruler and ruled. Unsparing in its depictions of personal drama and conflict, but often punctuated with humour and wonderful evocations of the immense Indian landscape, it is a study of human relationships, of the ramifications of action and the consequences of inaction, indifference, misunderstanding or simple ignorance.

Troubled Empire

JOHN SUTHERLAND

Academic and critic John Sutherland considers the uneasy relationships of ruler and ruled within Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’. ‘India’, linguists tell us, originally indicated every far-off country. It was only in the Elizabethan period that the term attached itself to the gigantic colonial possession we now know by that name.

‘Raj’ is a word of Sanskrit origin, whose alternative modern form is the German ‘Reich’. Britain’s bloody conflict with the Third Reich in the early 1940s, and its scarcely less bloody struggle to preserve the four-hundred-year-old Raj, is the background to Paul Scott’s ‘Quartet’. Those few years are, historically, the moment of truth when things fall apart to reveal what has always been at the centre.

Some novelists excel in resonant titles. None more so than Paul Scott. The opening volume’s title, The Jewel in the Crown (1966), for example, alludes to the lithograph on good Miss Crane’s classroom wall, in 1942. The picture, sadly stained, depicts the young Duleep Singh (the last Sikh emperor) presenting the Koh-i-noor (‘Mountain of Light’) diamond, on a velvet cushion, to the Empress-Queen Victoria, in 1851. The gem would be the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace, that other Mountain of Light. It is, as someone says later in the narrative, ‘allegorical’. India is on that cushion.

But is India a ‘possession’? Or something much more vital? Scott’s massive narrative argues, forcefully, that India defines what it is to be English. India, as the éminence brune Pandit Baba says, owns its owners.

England can no more take India out of itself than Westminster (despite frequent requests) can pluck the Koh-i-noor out of the crown that traditionally graces the Queen Consort’s brow on state occasions. A diamond, as the advertisement tells us, is for ever. And so, Scott intimates, is the bond between Britain and India. Often broken; never severed.

Other members of The Folio Society will, like me, have a threefold experience of ‘The Raj Quartet’. They will have read the novels as they came out, fitfully, between 1966 and 1975, and have reread them as a single entity (though probably not in quite as handsome a format as that the Society is producing). And they will have viewed the twelve-part 1984 Granada TV adaptation.

That serial was adapted from the books by Ken Taylor (Scott had died in 1978 – of cirrhosis of the liver, exacerbated by alcoholism). The television narrative was dominated, as is the quartet, by the Heathcliffian Ronald Merrick, played by Tim Pigott-Smith. Merrick is a corrupt and brutal police superintendent when we first encounter him; a highly decorated colonel, and ostensibly happily married, as we (and India) take our leave of him (bloodily) in the final instalment.

It is fiendishly difficult to establish any moral line on Merrick. He is no simple villain. His background is perplexingly close to that of his creator. Of lower-class origins, young Ronald was obliged to leave school at fourteen, as was the young Paul Scott. An intelligent lad, Merrick had just enough education to scrape into the Indian Police Service. But not, of course, to hold the King’s Commission: until, that is, the Japanese victories of 1942, when the armed forces were only too happy to use men of his calibre. So with Scott, who entered the army as a private and was later commissioned in the Indian Army Service Corps (a very un-smart branch of the military). He could never have aspired to the promotion in peacetime. Merrick is said, behind his back in the ‘mess’ and the ‘club’, not to be ‘one of us’. White, that is, but not ‘pukka’. He did not go to Chillingborough, that public school which sums up for Paul Scott everything about the ruling caste in the Raj.

The vacuum of his personal history means Merrick can never give the right answer to that officer-class question, ‘And where were you at school, Ronnie?’ But by way of compensation, it gives him a clarity of vision denied his class-blinkered colleagues. ‘Amateurs’, as he calls them. He sees India for what it really is, and becomes ever more articulate on the subject as the narrative progresses. He’s prejudiced, of course. But prejudice is to the Raj what honey is to bees. They live to produce it.

It is this uneasy background which breeds Merrick’s murderous hatred for Harry Coomer, or Hari Kumar. One of Macaulay’s ‘brown-skinned Englishmen’, Harry was ‘the first Indian Chillingborough ever took’, and starred on the cricket pitch. But when family disaster returns him to India, he discovers himself ‘invisible’. One of the most poignant scenes in the quartet is when Harry approaches his closest school friend, Colin, at a match on the maidan, and is not recognised. Brown on brown, he is merely a shape in the faceless native crowd. Not Harry, but Hari.

These two insider / outsiders, Merrick and Kumar, are the principal adversaries over the long course of the quartet. Mysteriously, sex is somewhere there in the mix. But where, precisely, we never quite know. Certainly the presumed narrator, Guy Perron, does not know. Like Heathcliff, Merrick is finally incomprehensible. But fascinating.

Paul Scott knew that he had his own literary adversary when he conceived the quartet – the author of A Passage to India, of course. ‘Forster’, Scott said, ‘loomed over literary India like a train terminus beyond which no other novelist could be permitted to travel.’ Scott ignored the ban. He was singularly immune to the ‘glamour’ of India which had so gripped Forster. His view was decidedly more Merrickian. And he defiantly opposes that other novel with unmistakable parallelisms. The Jewel in the Crown opens with the declaration: ‘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.’

Scott’s bleak description could as well refer to Adela Quested in the Marabar Caves as to Helen Manners in the Bibighar Gardens. A Passage to India ends with the quasihomosexual encounter of Fielding and Aziz. The near (or is it consummated?) encounter between Merrick and Kumar, trussed naked over the whipping trestle in the Civil Lines, is inexpressibly uglier, although clearly allusive.

Scott experienced India at a more complex moment than did Forster. Yet the creator of ‘The Raj Quartet’ believed that of all the instruments we have for dealing with complexities as vast and subtle as India, the novel serves best. Quoted more than once in the quartet is Emerson’s observation that ‘there is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time’. In awarding the Booker Prize in 1977 to the dying Scott, Philip Larkin paraphrased Emerson, ‘Staying On covers only a few months, but it carries the emotional impact of a lifetime, even a civilisation.’ Change ‘months’ to ‘years’ and it is an apt verdict on ‘The Raj Quartet’.