Introduction

Summary

Paul Scott's obituary in The Times of 3 March 1978 carried the heading ‘Author of “The Raj Quartet” ’, and that is how he continues to be known. The distinction, however, has had its disadvantages. The four hefty inter-related novels, issued in a one-volume edition in 1976, have tended to be seen as an account of times past in a distant country, coming at the tail-end of the Kipling/Forster tradition. This, moreover, was in an age when Indian writing in English was already flourishing. For example, before the Quartet was even completed, some of the historical events towards which it moves, such as the horrors of Partition and the decline of the princely states, had themselves already been the subject of such compelling Indian novels as Kushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) and Manohar Malgonkar 's The Princes (1963). Commonwealth Literature courses in the universities naturally focused on such works, and the recent replacement of those courses with the Postcolonial Literature speciality did not produce any immediate surge of interest in authors writing ‘from the outside’.

On the contrary, the new academic label, with its implication of a successful emergence from colonial oppression, particularly favoured radical texts which documented the progress towards such an emergence, and/or helped to establish a new reading of the ex-colonies’ history. This is easily understood in the light of the need to right old wrongs, and the even more urgent need to build confidence in the national and cultural identity of the newly liberated countries. As for the peoples who had for so long thwarted this process, there could be little interest in reexamining their roles, or in analysing the effects of the colonial past upon them.

Yet these were just the kind of issues with which Paul Scott was concerned. He felt strongly that ‘the ignorance of India of a vast majority of British living on their own island’ was something to be ‘taken account of’, something to be addressed. This was not a matter of introducing ‘Indian manners, customs, religious and domestic arrangements’ to them; it was a matter of making a new honest assessment of (for example) ‘the multiple and conflicting interests that were at stake’ during the last days of empire, and ‘the many-faceted response of individual Indians to individual Britons and vice-versa’ (MAM 121).