The book does an excellent job of depicting how Indians and the British looked at each other at the time of Partition. Nevertheless, from the very beginning you know pretty much who did what and even why. The book discusses the same events over and over again showing how the different characters saw these same events. It is interesting to see how the views diverge, however it IS repetitive.

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I realised how much easier it was to talk to another English woman, even if you disagreed with everything she said. People of the same nationality use a kind of shorthand in conversation, don’t they? You spend less effort to express more It is clear that the human relationships are portrayed only to demonstrate a far larger political concern. In fact, just as in E.M. Forster’s earlier masterpiece, “A Passage to India”, the characters can be seen as a metaphor for the entire novel. In many ways, The Jewel in the Crown seems like its natural successor, even to its mirroring the Adela/Aziz affair. Paul Scott infused this novel with lush, beautifully written scenes that gives the reader a real feel for a lost time and place. "There is no breeze but the stillness of the leaves and branches is unnatural. As well as these areas of radiance the switches have turned on great inky pools of darkness. Sometimes the men and women you talk to, moving from group to group on the lawn, present themselves in silhouette; although the turn of a head may reveal a glint in a liquidly transparent eye and the movement of an arm the skeletal structure of a hand holding a glass that contains light and liquid in equal measure. In the darkness too, strangely static and as strangely suddenly galvanized, are the fireflies of the ends of cigarettes." It is surprising that such a book can hold the attention, since there is no attempt at mystery or tension, but merely a carefully balanced and largely neutral account, giving equal weight to all points of view, and showing how misrepresentations, partisan beliefs, ambitions and resentments influenced the events portrayed. For of course although this is a time capsule, a snippet of time, the human condition itself is timeless.Really a beautiful book; really tough one thoough. Incredibly written: UN-english like: almost no dialogues, long long sentences (12/15/20 lines without a fullstop!), more hypotaxis than parataxis. It says "This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened. There are the action, the people, and the place, all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs.". But it's much more than this. It's the articulated telling of the socalled "partition", but seen from different point of view. Looking into several different aspects, language included! Highly recomended Scott creates a vivid and believable picture of the society, culture and politics that led to this moment in time, but he never forgets to put people at the heart of it. While some sections are focused very much on the political situation and, as a result, might be rather dry for readers who are less interested in that aspect, these are broken up by the often intensely intimate stories of the characters, many of whom become unforgettable. Since I’m fascinated by the British Empire, and India especially, I found the political stuff just as engrossing as the personal. Superbly written, intelligent at the political level and deeply moving at the personal – a wonderful novel. But the magnetism of India for 1960s and 70s youth, was nothing to do with Colonialism, but rather the reverse. Nobody was interested any more in the names of the Empire builders, now long gone, whose statues were beginning to be an embarrassment in cities and towns. They were the old fogies, sometimes a source of great hilarity and ridicule. Yet still, there was this quartet of literary novels by Paul Scott, set in the dying days of the British Raj in India. It seemed an extraordinary theme to have chosen in trendy 1966. The last days of the British Raj in India as the Second World War leads inevitably towards independence. And in its amazing approach to style. Look at the second sentence of my quote above; it is deliberately involuted writing, whose phrases curl in and around each other in a manner both dense and rich. I quoted that first sentence because it is such a clear summary of the book: the rape, the context of events, and the setting: the fictional town of Mayapore in British-ruled India in 1942. But as I read on, I find that it is the second, more difficult, sentence that is the more significant. For that is what Scott achieves, to paint a complex, many-faceted portrait of "the continuum of human affairs," out of which the story emerges almost by accident, in passing glimpses in a rear-view mirror.

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because we were thinking in a foreign language that we had never properly considered in relation to our own. [...]English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next. At least, this is so when it is written, and the English have usually confided their noblest aspirations and intentions to paper. Written, it looks like a way of gaining time and winning confidence. [...] On the college teaching staff there was a preponderance of Englishmen. At the Government Higher School, most of the instruction, although in English, had been in the hands of Indians. He had always understood exactly On the college teaching staff there was a preponderance of Englishmen. At the Government Higher School, most of the instruction, although in English, had been in the hands of Indians. He had always understood exactly And in the last section we learn Daphne’s own story in her own words – not just the story of her rape, but of her life, of the choices she made and of her reasons for making them.

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began... joint venture with Leonine Holding, The Walt Disney Company, Bauer Media Group and Hubert Burda Media. But in fact it’s the story of two rapes – the rape perpetrated on Daphne Manners, a white girl who made the fatal mistake of falling in love with an Indian man, and the rape perpetrated by the British Empire on the culture, society and people of India. Written at the height of the breast-beating anti-Colonial guilt experienced in Britain following the gradual letting go of their empire, Scott shows no mercy in his dissection of the evils committed, not so much by individual Brits, though there’s some of that, but by the imposition of one dominant culture over another. The “jewel” in the title is India herself, in the crown of the British Empire. The metaphor conveys paternalism, with Indian people a subject race, who are ruled by the British Raj. The Queen is Victoria, but metaphorically she is the Raj too. There is love in this paternalistic relationship, but in the end it is thwarted.

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The worst aspects of our colonialism will just evaporate into history as imperial mystique, foolish glorification of a severely practical and greedy policy." - Lady Ethel Manners For me, the British Raj is an extended metaphor [and] I don’t think a writer chooses his metaphors. They choose him.” What the book does best is perfectly describe how the Indians and British viewed each other, the feelings that prevailed in the 30s and 40s when Partition occurred. You actually get very little history, but you do get the atmosphere of the times. Under the direction of Wartels, [4] Alan Mirken, [11] Joseph Reiner [12] and others, Crown Books became one of the Outlet Book Company's lead imprints for original publishing which included such landmark fiction and non-fiction as Judith Krantz's Princess Daisy, Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear and Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex in its early high-profile years. a b Pryor, Elizabeth Scott (1986). "Crown Publishers". In Dzwonkoski, Peter (ed.). American literary publishing houses, 1900-1980. Dictionary of literary biography. Vol.46. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Company. pp. 101–102. ISBN 0-8103-1724-9.This was recommended to me by a friend in the real world (hats off to AC in Islington) and I have to say I am extremely grateful. ‘The Jewel in the Crown’ is an excellent novel, which manages to bring together well drawn characters, a beautiful setting, a crime story and an examination of a disintegrating society. But we've got far beyond that stage of colonial simplicity. We've created a blundering judicial robot. We can't stop it working... We created it to prove how fair, how civilised we are. But it is a white robot and it can't distinguish between love and rape. In 2008, the Doubleday Business/Currency, Doubleday Religion, and WaterBrook Multnomah divisions were moved from Doubleday to Crown when Doubleday was merged with Knopf. [17] Doubleday Religion was replaced with the Catholic imprint Image in 2011. [18] The anonymous singer, of course, runs off with her dark-skinned lover, a story that repeats itself in the more recent story of Daphne and Hari/Harry. Finally, to the right and just below Hari/Harry is Parvati in her singing posture, with two attendants approaching bearing a palanquin. She sings: