Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2005

Thesis Director

Anne Zahlan

Thesis Committee Member

Unknown

Thesis Committee Member

Unknown

Abstract

Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet consists of four novels dealing with the waning of British imperial control of India: The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1972), and A Division of the Spoils (1976). This thesis analyzes the Quartet as historical fiction, defined according to the criteria laid out by Georg Lukacs in The Historical Novel (1937). The characters that populate Scott's Quartet live in an age of historical transition: they are shaped by reverberations from World War II as well as the more immediate struggle for Indian independence. As drawn by their creator, they are true children of their age.

The Raj Quartet chronicles the formation of two anti-British military forces whose members were drawn from Indian soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans and the Japanese during World War II. Though militarily insignificant, these forces, and the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army in particular, heralded the end of British imperial control of India. Scott's account of the INA exposes the failure of the feudalistic underpinnings of the British army in India. The paternalism summed up in the term man-bap, "mother and father," he exposes as anachronistic and patronizing. As this thesis demonstrates, Scott attributes Britain's loss of power in great measure to the declining "loyalty" of Indian soldiers. The Indian National Army serves in the Quartet as a representation of this failure of allegiance to the colonial power.

Paul Scott clearly conveys in the Quartet his conviction that the Raj's end had to do with the loss of respect for Britain on the part of the Indians. His narrative interpretation of the INA not only illustrates the decline of man-bap but also and more broadly raises the issues of loyalty and treachery, suspicion and trust within the colonial context. With reference to Hayden White's theories of historical narrative, this thesis argues that Scott shaped The Raj Quartet as a tragedy in which ideals shatter, heroes fall, and a society is torn apart in bloody strife.

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