Running parallel to the description of the head of the Civil Administration in Dibrapur is the brief account of the businessman who swiftly repudiated the initial affinity he had felt towards Hari Kumar on the grounds of their shared educational experience in England. He gave in swiftly to his less well educated manager who could not cope with an educated Indian.
This underlines the British commitment to their own darker side in preference to any Indian, contradicting the public assertion of commitment to Indians. And this is underlined in spades through the rejection of Hari by his former best friend at school, Colin Lindsey, who vanishes from the book after that betrayal. The efforts of another representative of the school to excuse him underlines the point Scott is making, that Merrick makes mockingly when he flings Hari Kumar’s public school background in his face.
It is interesting that critics did not seem to understand how harshly in effect Scott judges White, while always underlining the difference between him and the obvious bounders like Merrick and Reid. That of course was the great British myth, that by and large those who went to India were committed to the Indians, and brutality was exceptional. But Scott’s whole point is that such brutality flourished, and decisively so, because in the end the idealists gave in to it, racial solidarity taking precedence over decency.
The pictures emphasize the strange casting of ‘The Jewel in the Crown’. Art Malik who played Hari Kumar was nothing like the dark Indian Scott described. His British friend Colin Lindsey was played by an Indian, Karan Kapoor, son of Shashi.. But his mother was English and he looked too foreign to make it in Bollywood.
What price Chillingborough?
White of course is not alone in his mealymouthedness. We have been introduced before to Knight, the director of the British-Indian Electrical Company who had been to a public school and who got on very well with Hari when he first applied for a job and it turned out that he had been to the same sort of school; but who in the end went along with his Technical Training Manager who was unwilling to deal with an Indian who was not obsequious and spoke with a better accent than he did. Knight was described by the Indian editor of the paper for which Hari later worked as ‘a two-faced professional charmer whose liberal inclinations had long ago been suffocated by his mortal fear of the social consequences of sticking his neck out’ (243). And in Hari’s own description of the second interview, when he seems to have been looking for signs of subordination, we see the superficiality of any camaraderie Knight might have felt, his inclination to point out that ‘this wasn’t Chillingborough and that I should start learning how to behave in front of white men.’ (240)
An even more important example of the discrimination almost unavoidable even for those who might originally have thought their liberal inclinations stronger is provided by Hari’s old friend at school Colin Lindsey. When he sets off for India he assumes that he will see Hari, but when he gets to Mayapore he does not attempt to get in touch with him. It is in fact conceivable that he deliberately ignores Hari on the occasion after which Hari goes off and gets drunk and thus has his first unfortunate meeting with Merrick[1]; certainly it is clear that Lindsey applies for a transfer as soon as possible so that he might get away from a place where he might have found himself in an embarrassing position. His actual thinking on this point is never made clear, and it is interesting that the narrator of The Jewel in the Crown, though he is in touch with Lindsey later and has access to the letters Hari wrote him, never opens up the question there. What we are meant to understand however is I think made clear by Perron’s reflections later on Nigel Rowan’s suggestion that Lindsey had been lacking in confidence –
Assuming mutual recognition, over-compensation for lack of confidence seems to me a curious way of describing Lindsey’s behaviour… if there was mutual recognition, one has to assume that Lindsey saw nothing so clearly as the embarrassment that would follow any attempt to renew an old acquaintance in such very different circumstances… Little to do with over-compensation for lack of confidence, but a lot to do with straightforward self-protection from the consequences of having a friend who was no longer socially acceptable and who might turn out to be a pest, the sort of Indian who as the rai so often said would try to take advantage. (DivS 300-1)
The point is that it was just plain callousness that led to such a belittling attitude towards Indians. Overriding any obligations to them was the obligation of racial solidarity, and in the preservation of one’s relations with one’s peers Indians could always be reduced to ‘dots on the landscape’. In the cases of Lindsey and Knight this basic affinity with Reid is clear despite what might have been liberal inclinations; Scott’s more important insight is that the same is true even of Robin White. In spite of his theoretical understanding of the situation, in spite of his real affection for certain aspects of India, in the last resort his allegiance was to his position within the rai rather than to the people whose welfare was by his lights the only justification of that position[2].
[1] Though this is never clearly established, I think Tedesco is right to assert categorically that (19) ‘Colin Lindsey chooses not to acknowledge his Indian friend on the maidan’
[2] As mentioned previously, this very crucial perception is rarely highlighted in assessments of Scott’s work. An even more extraordinary example of the sort of misreading I have noted occurs in the critique of Janis Tedesco and Janet Popham – ‘Scott obviously admires the character of Robin White…He did not feel racially superior to his subjects, only responsible for them, a trait which lent an air of inner confidence to himself and his position (51, n 5). However it should be noted that Tedesco, in her later Haswell incarnation, recognizes (117-8) that ‘In contrast to Daphne, who faces such danger, White is unwilling to correct the injustices of the Raj community even while he embraces the tenet of equality….unlike Edwina, he never seems to own up to his limitations’