The Jewel in the Crown

Set in 1942, English author Paul Scott’s historical novel The Jewel in the Crown (1966) follows a young Englishwoman who moves to India during the waning years of British rule. The first of Scott's four-volume series, The Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown was later adapted into a 1984 miniseries on ITV. More recently, the New York Times cited the book in a 2017 article, "The Novels Explaining Britain's Path from the Raj to Brexit."

Daphne Manners, a young woman living in London during World War II, describes herself as "galumphing," as if to suggest that she is plain or unattractive. For a time, she works as an ambulance driver during the German Blitz bombing campaign in 1940 and 1941, but a heart condition forces her to abandon such stressful work at her doctor's orders. When German airstrikes kill both her parents and her brother, she moves to British-ruled India to live with her closest living relative, her great-aunt Lady Ethel Manners. Ethel lives in Rawalpindi in what is now the Punjab region of Pakistan. In order for Daphne to meet more young people her age, Ethel sends her niece to the Mayapore region of West Bengal, 130 kilometers north of Calcutta, to stay with Lady Chatterjee, a proud noblewoman.

During her stay, Daphne finds herself attracted to Hari Kumar, a journalist at the Mayapore Gazette. Though born in India, Hari was brought up in England where he attended Chillingborough, the same exclusive school where Daphne's brother went. But when Hari's father, a successful businessman, goes bankrupt and commits suicide, Hari is forced to return to India. There, he finds himself an outcast in both Indian and English societies in a town that, like much of India at this time, is segregated along racial lines, Daphne's relationship with Hari is extremely controversial. For her part, Daphne is disgusted by the racist attitudes held by most English people toward Indians.



One night, Daphne and Hari meet in a secluded park known as the Bibighar Gardens. There, they make love for the first time but are interrupted by a group of angry Indian men. The men beat and tie up Hari, and rape Daphne multiple times. Daphne refuses to report the rape, knowing that the local police superintendent, Ronald Merrick, will assume Hari is among the men responsible. She swears Hari to secrecy in an effort to protect him. Merrick is extremely bigoted toward Indians, partly because, as a man born into a lower-class family, he is viewed as inferior in England. In India, however, he relishes the fact that he sits atop the social hierarchy by virtue of his birthplace and skin color.

Despite Daphne and Hari's silence about the rape, Merrick hears about it and arrests Hari along with some of the men responsible. To Merrick, Hari represents everything he hates: an Indian educated in a top English school. Merrick's animosity only grows when he meets Daphne and becomes infatuated with her. Merrick's subsequent interrogation of Hari devolves into a sadistic game involving sexual humiliation.

Daphne, meanwhile, does everything in her power to free Hari, even if that means letting the real rapists go free. First, she claims that she was blindfolded and therefore cannot identify her assailants. When that doesn't satisfy Merrick, she says that she could feel that the attackers' penises were circumcised, indicating to her that they were Muslim peasants, not young Hindus like the men in custody. Because Daphne swore him to secrecy over the attack, Hari refuses to speak in his own defense, despite the fact that Daphne's reason for the secrecy oath was Hari's protection. Eventually, the case is dropped when Daphne threatens to testify that Englishmen raped her. This leads to Daphne being ostracized by the English community in Mayapore and later, as news of the case spreads throughout the country, the entirety of British India.



Forced to drop the rape charges, Merrick instead charges Hari with an obscure wartime law prohibiting anti-imperial revolutionary activities. Hari is sent to prison, and Daphne becomes pregnant. She hopes the child is Hari's, but it could belong to any of the men who raped her. She returns to Ethel's home and goes into labor. Tragically, she dies during childbirth, a consequence of the same heart condition a doctor diagnosed her with in England. To Ethel's eyes, the baby Pavarti bears a striking physical resemblance to Hari.

The Jewel in the Crown is a dispiriting novel that lays bare the stark racial and class divisions in British India.