The Pageant of Empire: Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet and Related Versions of Imperialism in the Anglo-Indian Novel

Abstract

<p>Although Paul Scott is a successor to other Anglo-Indian novelists, his literary reputation is unjustly -overshadowed, particularly by E.M. Forster's. Scott's epic novel, The Raj Ouartet and its sequel, Staying on, provide a pointed indictment of the human costs of British imperialism from a British point-of-view, both employing and undermining the standard themes and conventions of the Anglo-Indian novel. A complex and repeated series of images and symbols diagnoses the pathological state of the Raj at its moment of collapse. Scott's Anglo-India is trapped In a mythical Edwardian era of imperial certainty, rather than in the contemporary political reality of Indians· insistence on their right to self-rule.</p> <p>The current weakness of the Raj is that it is riven from within; the novel explores such issues as race and class, and points to the conflicts between, and paradoxes of, liberal and conservative imperial policies and ideologies. The Anglo-Indians· circumscribed sense of place, their attitudes to language, and their limited view of history expose the ultimate destructiveness of imperialism for those subjected to it.</p> <p>Scott's achievement notwithstanding, the uncritical and apolit1cal academ1c study of h1s novels and other novels about lnd1a overshadows the literary achievements of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi writers writing in English, permits continued ignorance and devaluing of the vast diversity of literature's in Indian languages, and continues to perpetuate the damagingly false images and attitudes about India which sustained the imperial venture in the first place.</p>