the Fieldings at home in England 'Indian independence was something that would automatically happen' after winning the war against 'Turtonism in general.' But it didn't. The Raj Quartet shows how the inevitable conflict between 'the two great senses of public duty' that India presented made its independence into the site for 'the death and interment of liberal humanism,' the place where that absolute conviction came up against the inadequacy of its own good intentions in the form of the communal massacres and continuing legacies of the partition between India and Pakistan.
No plot summary of the Quartet's two thousand pages could do jus-644- tice to the complexity of its narrative procedures, its manifold layering of one character's point of view upon another's, its awareness of the fictiveness of historical interpretation, or its intricately Faulknerian sense of the way in which the past is never really past. What we must stress here is the way it provides the synthesis in the dialectic that Kipling and Forster began. Scott's predecessors abstracted their novels from history, but their own historical positions forced them to choose sides, to stand either firmly for or against imperialism, to emphasize just one of those two great duties. But writing after the end of empire, Scott can try to define what it meant, rather than simply document an attitude toward it. That allows the Quartet, more than any other English novel, to show how imperialism's illusion of permanence was both built and maintained. It also means that Scott can offer a compelling account of the imperial endgame, as his characters search for ways to pull out and yet maintain order, finding as they do that historical necessity develops out of the contingencies of the moment.
The central relation in the novel is that between Hari Kumar and the policeman Ronald Merrick. Brought to England as a baby and educated there in the hopes that he would return to India as a colonial administrator, Hari is one of Macaulay's brown-skinned Englishmen. But when his father's suicide leaves him broke and alone before he has finished his schooling, the only home Hari can find is with an aunt in the Indian city of Mayapore. And there he discovers that white people no longer notice him. Hari sees his own Englishness as a matter of class, of education, of a code of behavior that supersedes and is not bound by color. But it is easier for the white English to reject Hari than to face the challenge he presents. They can treat him as if he were English in England, but to hear his public school accent in India is to suspect that their own Englishness may be socially constructed and not essential. For few of them are honest enough to admit to the racism on which the Raj depends. They insist instead on the inseparability of culture and color: their own identities are intrinsic, but Hari's is acquired, for they see him not as English, but as someone trying to pass himself off as English.
Scott sets Hari against the policeman Merrick, who believes in the white man's right to rule, but without accepting the fictions through which the British attempt to 'hide [their] prejudices and continue to live with them'-'Devotion. Sacrifice. Self-denial… The whole impossible nonsensical dream' of the Raj's civilizing mission. The -645- lower-middle-class Merrick knows he doesn't have the same «background» as the imperial servants with whom he lives. And he knows, therefore, that his privileges, and theirs too, depend not on those enabling fictions of duty and devotion but on race. He believes instead in what he calls 'the situation'-a ritualized enactment of the contempt of the strong for the weak on which imperialism depends. For Merrick, as Hari recalls in describing an interrogation at the policeman's hands, the liberals 'who pretended to admire Indian intellectuals' are as contemptuous of that 'black reflection of their own white ideals' as the 'upper-class reactionaries' are of the soldiers and servants whose much praised 'bravery and loyalty' marks their inferior status. Merrick's «situation» gives the lie to any idea of 'the Law' as an originating force of empire. It would be as damning as anything in Fanon if only he didn't use it as a way to justify his own brutality. But while Merrick himself connects that dark clarity about the nature of power to what he calls his «humble» origins, Scott suggests that it is more closely linked to the policeman's sexuality. During a part of his interrogation, Hari says, Merrick' had his hand between my legs.' And Merrick finishes his questions by wiping blood across Hari's genitals.
Critical attention has recently turned toward the interrelation of gender and race, and in particular to the constantly shifting, firmly drawn and yet perpetually blurred lines of difference that characterize what Suleri describes as 'the marked homoeroticism of the narratives of colonial encounter.' Daphne Manners in the tetralogy's first volume, The Jewel in the Crown (1966), writes that the British have unsexed India, made it into a 'nation of eunuchs.' Merrick is a deeply closeted homosexual, as was Scott himself, and early in the novel's action he pursues Hari through a form of triangulated desire-by proposing to Daphne, whose interest in Hari he has noted. When she is raped he immediately has Hari arrested, and his actions are above all an expression of sexual contempt for a man who because he has been conquered is no longer a man. And yet that paradoxically makes him available as an object of desire, at one with an India whom the conqueror sees in feminine terms, a woman to be grasped in what Scott calls an 'imperial embrace'-at once raped and told that she's loved.
To Sarah Layton in The Day of the Scorpion (1968) Merrick is the empire's 'dark side… You reveal something that is sad about us, as if out here we had built a mansion without doors and windows, with no way in and no way out… And one day we shall lie exposed… ' Yet -646- for Scott it is not homosexuality but rather its repression that figures as unnatural. Indeed the Quartet as a whole suggests the near impossibility of maintaining a healthily honest sexuality of any kind in a world where 'the situation'-infinitely more powerful than Forster's 'officialism'-has the power to blight all human relations. Merrick's actions with Hari go no further than that bloody smear of his hand. Late in the novel, however, he will start to dress in Pathan clothing, as if he were Kipling's Strickland, for a series of liasons with Indian boys. It is as if he can only step from the closet by first becoming the racial other; and it will lead to his death. The closet crumbles, until he lies 'exposed,' no longer sheltered in 'that mansion without doors or windows' in which one tries both to hide the truth and to hide from it too; whether that truth be one of private desire or of the very foundations of British rule.
An image from The Jewel in the Crown sums up Scott's sense of the way those foundations have crumbled, 'the sight of old Miss Crane sitting in the pouring rain by the roadside holding the hand of a dead Indian.' She is a superintendent of mission schools and the dead man is one of her teachers. He has died because as they drove toward a line of rioters during the Quit India demonstrations of 1942, she couldn't bring herself to trust his instructions to speed up and crash through-couldn't accept that an Indian might know more about how to act in an emergency than she does. Instead she stops, trusting to the heaven's command of the Raj to see them safely home. She is spared, the teacher is not. He's beaten to death because he's with her, an Englishwoman; because the British can no longer protect those whom it is their selfappointed mission to protect. Miss Crane cannot protect her subordinate because her very presence makes him vulnerable in the first place. The imperial mission cancels itself out. Not only can the British no longer preserve the order they take as a justification for their rule; they are themselves responsible for its destruction.
If one of the central concerns of British fiction about India is suggested by the ambiguous title of Suleri's Rhetoric of English India, then the dominant issue in the British novel of Africa is that figured by Abdul JanMohamed's Manichean Aesthetics. Suleri charts the rhetoric that links English writing about India to Indians writing in English; she maps the border of identity crossed first by Kim and later by such cultural hybrids as Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha in
For colonialist writers Africa, far more than India, stands as a place onto which Western fears and desires can be projected. It is 'primitive.' Where India has ancient cities, in Africa one finds only natives wailing in the bush, so that in Heart of Darkness the continent becomes a metaphor for man's original state even as it also provides one for the darkness of the human heart. Going upriver is for Marlow a journey in two directions at once, both back and in. And Africa's emptiness has another consequence: it puts the whole continent up for grabs, as if it were all an enormous, unmapped Kafiristan. But Kipling's story remains nervous about imperial plunder. Its African counterpart does not. Published in 1885- the very year of the Berlin Conference-H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines suggests that Africa, being empty, is of course outside any 'Law.' Its treasures are there for the taking-for Africans, being Africans, cannot possibly have a legitimate claim to them. But unlike Dravot and Carnehan, Haggard's adventurers don't want a kingdom to rule. They merely want to take their loot back to England-and they succeed where Kipling's fail. Orwell wrote that Kipling never realized that the 'box wallah,' the merchant, calls the tune of empire; and the fiction of the Raj remained that of an administrative class. But in Africanist novels, from King Solomon's Mines down to Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), one is always aware of imperialism's original
