The Jewel in the Crown: Paul Scott's Technical Integrity

[Last Island]

Paul Scott is famous for his brilliant craftsmanship in the narration of events and description of places. His technical devices are so sublime, unsurpassable and matchless. That is why not only a learned reader enjoys his narratives but they also provide an insight to a common reader to understand every writing. The descriptions of places like gardens are so overwhelming and alluring that the reader feels spellbound.

Scott’s “The Jewel in the Crown” indeed shows his brilliant craftsmanship in the narration of events and description of places. We really enjoy his description of the two houses on which the plot of the novel is based. Of course, at first the history of the Macgregor house and the history of the Bibighar seem straightforward, admitting only one interpretation. The original building where the Macgregor House now stands was created in the late eighteenth century by an Indian prince. He had conceived a passion for a singer of classical music and had built her a house where he could visit her in the morning and the evening so that she could sing to him. When the singer died the prince also died of a broken heart, and the house fall into decay. The prince’s son, who despised his father for his unconsciousness attachment to the singer, left the house in ruins and built another house, the Bibighar, nearby. Here he kept his courtesans until his misgovernment of the state resulted in its annexation by the British Government. After this the ruined house of the singer was rebuilt by a Scottish merchant called Macgregor, and the Bibighar was burnt to the ground because Macgregor said:

“It had been an abomination.”

Paul Scott’s technical integrity reappears in a different shape when sister Ludmila tells a different version of the Macgregor story. She believes that the merchant burnt down Bibighar not because it was an abomination but because he had fallen in love with an Indian girl and had lost her to a boy whose skin was the same color as her own. There are two versions of this story. She explains the first saying that when Macgregor discovered the Indian girl and her lover in the Bibighar, he destroyed it in a fit of jealous rage. The second says that he went to Calcutta to marry an English woman having prepared the Bibighar for his Indian mistress to live in. When he returned and found that she had eloped with her lover, he burnt the Bibighar to the ground. In some renderings of this version, the Indian lovers perished in the flames, and may be the ghosts who are rumoured to haunt the present-day gardens. According to these versions the ghost of Janet Macgregor does not visit the Macgregor House to look for her dead child, but to warn that the house is not a good place for people with white skins to live in.

We get a glimpse of Paul Scott’s brilliant craftsmanship in the depiction of Mr. Chaudhuri’s command over English language. Miss Crane was glad to observe that Mr. Chaudhuri’s English was excellent, typically Indian in its inflexion and rhythm but fluent as spoken and crisply correct when written. He also taught it very well. He made Mr. Narayan, his counterpart in Chillianwallah Bazaar School, by comparison, look and round like comedian.

After Mr. Chaudhuri’s extremely horrifying murder at the hands of the rioters on the Tanpoor – Mayapore Road, Miss Crane got herself cut off from all worldly links. The depiction of her seclusion policy giver us another perception of Paul Scott’s technical integrity. We come to know that when Miss Crane regained her health after her medical treatment in the hospital, Lady Chatterjee invited her in her own Macgregor House but she never came. So Lady Chatterjee called Miss Crane one or twice and tells us:

“Miss Crane virtues were still less obvious to me than her failures. She still gave me the impression she
though pigeons were to be taught the benefits of giving themselves up and cats the advantages of restraint.”

Lady Chatterjee says:

“To me, Miss Crane has always been a Crane – a bird with long legs and elongated
neck trying to fly its way out of danger too slowly like in slow motion at the movies.”

Scott’s brilliant craftsmanship in the depiction of the racial discrimination policy of the British imperialists against the Indians appears from Lady Chatterjee’s account about her own mistreatment at the British General Hospital. As she says:

“If I had been just Mrs. Chatterjee, the whole thing would have been a joke to them.”

Scott has nowhere in his novel favoured Gandhi but we feel indebted to his technical integrity in acknowledging the selfless services of our Quaid-e-Azam when only once in the entire novel, he says:

“Mr. Muhammad Ali Jinnah has at last simplified the communal problem by demanding a separate
state for Muslims if the Hindu-dominated Congress succeeds in getting rid of the British.”

The same tone of Scott’s brilliant craftsmanship reappears in the pro-Indian remarks of Robin White (DC):

“The Indians are normally the politest men and women in the world which is probably why at a pinch they
can be among the most hysterical and blood-thirsty … we did nothing really to integrate communities except
by building railways between one and the other to carry their wealth more quickly into our own pockets.”

He further says:

“Being human, the longer the Indians were denied freedom, the more they wanted to be freed on their
own terms, and the more they wanted to be free on their own terms, the more we … also being human …
insisted that they must initially acquire freedom on our own terms. The longer this conflict continued,
the more abstruse the terms of likely agreement became on either side. It was then a question of the
greater morality outlasting and overweighing the lesser which was why, of course, ‘in the end the Indian won.”

Miss Daphne’s criticism against her own white men for ignoring their own reduction of Indian women and for not ignoring the voluntary surrender of white women before Indian men is another specimen of Scott’s technical integrity in the elaboration of the fallacy of the most fundamental law of all – that although a white man could make love to a black girl, the black man and white girl association was still taboo from the mouth of Miss Daphne.

Scott’s brilliant craftsmanship is also observable from his depiction of the sensual preservation of all the white women visiting the Mayapore Club banned for any Indian man or woman of any status. Scott tells us that:

“The white nurses were usually picked up by young officers coming from their barracks round about 5:30. There wasn’t
any serious attachment going. Just boys and girls getting together and may be sleeping together if it could be fixed.”

Finally Paul Scott’s brilliant craftsmanship in drawing so many male or female character sketches in the novel without favouring or disfavouing anybody.