I come back, after posting last week for my birthday about books published over the year, to the main reason for reviving this blog at the time of Coronavirus – to celebrate in his centenary year the achievement of Paul Scott and his much underestimated, now largely forgotten Raj Quartet.
I had come to the third section of my analysis of the Quartet, the negative characters he etches so revealingly. The worst of them was Ronald Merrick, whom I have looked at in detail. I move now to the background in which he functioned, a background that allowed him to exercise so much destructive influence. And I start by looking at the Greek chorus of British wives who shut their eyes to abuse because of their commitment to British solidarity.
The pictures are of the actresses who portrayed Lucy Smalley and Nicky Paynton in the television series, though from other films.
The social milieu that fostered Merrick
Though it is poor consolation, there had in a sense been something positive in the death of Ahmed, Merrick’s last sacrificial victim. In his case, as Scott had earlier put it, ‘The victim chose neither the time nor the place of his death but in going to it as he did he must have seen that he contributed something of his own to its manner’ (113). In abiding by a code as Hari had done in remaining silent according to his promise and accepting his imprisonment, Ahmed exemplified a commitment freely entered into. It was the sort of commitment Scott had celebrated earlier in A Male Child when he talked about the voluntary entry for the sake of love into a prison, because ‘“that is where love is”’ (211). This was not the sort of commitment Merrick could have understood, which is why it is clear that the nameless victim referred to in the foreshadowing of the incident could not have been him. He would have insisted on remaining in control, on holding fast to the idea that he chose his fate, instead of self-deprecatingly giving himself up.
So that in the end it is perhaps Merrick’s death that is the sadder for, in juxtaposing the two as he does, Scott emphasizes the essential loneliness of his end, and the irony of his being transformed into a passive instrument of the intrigues he so affected to despise. Even in this bleak finale there is however a touch of kindliness in the hope Bronowsky finally expresses, that there might have been some compassion for Merrick and that he was granted a quick death. We may feel he did not deserve it, in the light of the tortures he inflicted upon the boys at Mayapore and the soldiers he interrogated and so many others. Yet in a sense such indulgence might have been the most suitable conclusion for the man Scott used to symbolize the farthest reaches of the relationship he had sketched at the very beginning of the Quartet, the relationship of two nations ‘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 separate destinies.’ (JC 1)[1]
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But though Merrick is clearly the grand villain of the Quartet, the brilliantly effective manner in which he is portrayed should not divert our attention from the other characters whose inadequacies Scott also presents. Indeed my argument is that his indictment of them is even more important, for while Merrick might have seemed an exception the fact that he could flourish was because those others granted him license. And they granted him license because their affinities were, despite their ideals, to their own dark side rather than to the aliens to whom they could never quite completely commit themselves[2].
I consider later the other officials who, despite what are presented as good intentions, in the end uphold Merrick against the world of the Indians. Here what I would like to look at are what might be termed the ordinary folk, those who without any powers of decision making contribute to the attitudes that flourished in British India. And my argument will be that in those very attitudes lay the seeds of those that Merrick developed so destructively. It was the very nature of a situation in which people exercised power by virtue of race that necessarily led to the abuses that are unfortunately sometimes seen as springing only from Merrick’s peculiar nature.
Perhaps the least innocuous in effect of these characters, but still sharply differentiated from the women such as Barbie or Daphne or Sarah who tried to give much more of themselves, are the military and other women who form a sort of Greek chorus in The Towers of Silence. Whereas those women were either very old or very young, these are middle-aged, and have active social roles to play. They are presented in state as it were in the first section of The Towers of Silence sitting as the ‘special Pankot women’s emergency committee’ to work out a course of action if the riots at Mayapore spread to Pankot too. They seem full of good intentions, especially with regard to the fate of Indian mothers and children too, but even while granting that they are keen to discharge what they see as their obligations Scott makes clear the ironies of the situation. There were no Indian women on the committee. Even if this might have seemed inevitable in that the emergency committee was made up of the heads of the various women’s committees of the club, which would have precluded Indians anyway, there was no attempt to consult the Indians even when the fate of Indians was in question. It was not a question of rank either, for the wife of Major Smalley was invited to serve as secretary to the committee, whereas the wife of an Indian major was left out though she ‘headed the small Indian section of military wives.’ That the omission was not accidental seems to be Scott’s implication when he writes about a speech her husband made that ‘People laughed at his jokes, which were not too clever. Had they been so the suspicion might have arisen that Chatty harboured bitter thoughts inside that neatly turbanned head.’ (47)
In effect we see, as with the malign Merrick, here in a military context that seems to be full of social goodwill, a basic distrust that prevents concerted action and thought. A consequence is that when the chips are down there is no question of where British sympathies will lie. Thus on that first occasion we find Nicky Paynton being quite contemptuous about Brigadier Reid, but later when questions arise about his excessive severity in Mayapore she thinks he ‘“did damned well”’ (73). He gets even more sympathy when it is found out that his wife had been terminally ill and that his son had been captured by the Japanese. The fact more relevant to his official role, that ‘a larger than average number of Indians was killed or wounded in Mayapore and Dibrapur’ is certainly not thought to be his fault, while any criticism even by military personnel from Mayapore of what had happened is treated with deep suspicion.
[1] Richard Cronin remarks that Merrick’s ‘homosexual encounters register his sense of his own kinship with Indians, but they can express that kinship only perversely, because it is what he spends all his daylight hours violently denying. His bisexuality is figurative, a mark of his ambivalent position in the social hierarchy’
[2] Benita Parry made the point in an early review that what was criticized in Merrick was in fact more general, though I think she fails to give Scott enough credit for making this clear in the work – ‘it is Merrick the outsider who is made the repository of racism’s obscenities and the corruptions with which some individuals who served imperialism were affected’ (363). She does however note that the situation itself created the problem, when she refers to ‘ the ultimately destructive psychological satisfactions of having power over subjugated peoples, which enslave the masters and paralyse their capacity for choice and the exercise of free will’ (366).